Right wing talk radio was immensely successful; in America.  Left Wing talk radio was a bust. Why is that?

Air America launched in 2004. It was intended to be the Left’s answer to right wing talk radio. Rush Limbaugh mocked this group as being about him. They thought they could pluck some liberal, put him on the air and instantly he would have a platform on 600 radio stations in the country like him. Air America was built over night. Limbaugh had built his network over years from a small radio platform. As Justin Ling said on his CBC podcast series, “Air America tried to go full national right out of the gates.”

Air America assembled a line-up of liberal comics. Many of them were funny but none had experience in radio. They bombed! Al Franken had been a star on Saturday Night Live and he was smart and understood politics, but as Ling said, “On air Franken can’t match the ‘us’ against ‘them’ outrage of rightwing talk radio.”

Franken just could not operate in a binary universe like Limbaugh could where it was a matter of pure evil against pure good. Talk radio was the home of bombast, not nuance or careful thinking or argument. To right wing radio the truth is clear and the enemies are simple and stick out like rotten cabbage. And right-wing radio knew we are at war with the liberals. Leave the nuance in the bag. Liberals like Franken could not understand this. Who of us can?

Bill O’Reilly said “this whole liberal network thing is just plain stupid. NPR fills that prescription and they do it very well. These pinheads backing the venture will lose millions of dollars because the propaganda network is simply tedious and tedious doesn’t sell.”  He was right!