Comments on: Ed Schultz Slaps Around Air America

By: happyjack

happyjack — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 00:03:34 +0000

The reason he is promoting Press and Miller is that they are distributed by the same syndicator (Jones) that he is. Having said that, he is soooo right. AA had a golden opportunity and screwed it up royally. I do hope Franken beats that tool Norm Coleman.

By: chuck

chuck — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 05:13:14 +0000

Oliver you can’t possibly be serious in saying that womens’ issues are a local and not national matter. Likewise misplaced priorities in education or Latin American issues or globalization. Furthermore I’ve been listening to radio about 3 times longer than you’ve been alive. Talk radio is not about entertainment unless it is intended to be entertaining. If it is intended to be informative then that is a different matter. AAR might have been able to sell individual shows and maybe not. As I have stated many times before and here, the producers of the shows were pure crap. If something happened in Washington the first show of the day would talk it to death and make all the points to be made. Then the next show would do the same thing and drill it to death also. All day and night until you got to Malloy and then you would at least get some different takes. Day after day the same shit all day and night. AAR became conservative radio with a different view. You had hosts with little to no radio experience and little to no historical/political background talking about issues that they couldn’t give a context to other than the immediate moment.

By: Oliver Willis

Oliver Willis — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 04:01:46 +0000

I’ve got nothing against Hartmann, from what I know though I’ve never heard him, he’s an actual radio person which gives him a leg up on most of the other AA talent (other than Randi Rhodes who I used to listen to in high school when she was on local southern Florida radio).

By: David Conrad

David Conrad — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 03:43:30 +0000

Channel 167 on XM is the Air America channel. That’s how XM bills it. If they want to air Ed Schultz, they can put him on any of their 100+ other channels. If they air him on the Air America channel, bumping an Air America show (The Thom Hartmann Show) to do so, then it’s false advertising to call it the Air America channel.

Thom Hartmann is 10 times the broadcaster Ed Schultz is, and 1000 times the progressive he is.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 22:47:34 +0000

chuck: those are simply not issues for a national political talk show, a local one maybe but not a national one. Talk radio is, first and foremost, an entertainment medium and not just a place for comedians to do gags and rants. AA’s biggest mistake was not selling individual shows but a whole slate of programming.

By: Edgewater Joe

Edgewater Joe — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 19:03:37 +0000

If AAR is out of bankruptcy (and their new owner, Mark Green’s brother, seems to have more money than a couple of Gods I know), they now have a stable of people to market properly. Jones already does - Schultz is Top Ten, and here in Chicago he, Press, and Miller are on (although they’re going to run Randi live and Thom Hartmann after her - hooray!) - so now the march is for affiliates and stations.

THAT is where I wish more work could be done. Between the domination of AM stations by Clear Channel and religious-based broadcasters (virtually all of them hard-right-wing) and the October memo that surfaced about an advertiser blacklist for AAR, there seems little question that progressive talk has more than a few unfair, perhaps criminal, hurdles to jump. Alternative distributions like podcasts, satellite radio and streaming may be the way to go - and if AAR/Jones/Nova M can do it, that may be the key to real growth and survival.

The product is there. The listeners are out there, I’m convinced. It’s just getting them together.

By: chuck

chuck — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 17:02:51 +0000

Janeane was great in many respects if people actually caught her before AAR stopped paying people. She was the only one in my many years of listening to talk radio that took topics such as propaganda and broke them down so you could see the mechanics of how and why it works. This is highly useful. She also covered Latin America extensively and globalization. Tom Hartman is one of the only others I’ve heard even begin to touch on these issues. Janeane also touched on womens’ issues which are never gone into by the male talking heads on liberal radio. They think talking about abortion rights and briefly about health care is all that’s needed to cover women’s issues. Oliver you need to expand your horizons and realize that just hearing the same old same old hammered over and over by host after host is what made AAR unlistenable. Janeane, Randy and others may eventually write about AAR but it failed to take advantage of the opportunity to do great grass roots work for womens issues and they suffer for it. The chance was there to talk about why our high schools in cities are increasing funding for football and basketball programs while cutting funding and access for computer related programs and IT as an example. Bush and Cheny suck but that’s not all there is in the world that’s important and vital to peoples’ lives.

By: mdhåtter

mdhåtter — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 03:39:58 +0000

Rhandi Rhodes will find work instantly. She’s their star, as i see it.

By: mrstrailerco

mrstrailerco — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 01:53:43 +0000

I have to disagree with you here Oliver. I was in the car running errands when Ed went off yesterday. I hung in there until he spit. I’ve liked him in the past, but I’m done now. I had been listening to Sam earlier, and I NEVER heard him say anything negative about Ed. He was advocating for his brand - something Ed says they need to do more of. I’ve never heard anyone on AAR talk trash about Ed. Well, maybe Randi, sort of. And what’s this shit about only being as good as the ads you sell? I’m having a craptacular month at my store, does that mean I’m worthless? And about Al running for the Senate - I’ve been impressed with how hard he’s tried to keep that out of his show. And no general manager would take Al’s show because he wouldn’t commit to being with his show forever?

Ed made a calculated move when he took his show to the noon time slot earlier this year. He anticipated that Al was going to run and tried to get a head start on grabbing that time slot - fine. I don’t have any problem with that, but don’t be ragging on the choices other people make.

Just one more thing. Ed makes a big damn deal about how good his business model is and how crappy AAR’s is. Leaving aside the financials, Ed markets a SHOW. AAR is a network, much harder to find a space. And just how is it AAR fault that they were put on a blacklist of advertisers? Bottom line - I don’t need this shit from him. I could listen to Limbaugh or slant-head for this crap.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 01:31:02 +0000

As much as I want AA to prosper, I wouldn’t call their lineup stable or in any sort of growth mode (I’m not wild about Press or Miller either).

By: Edgewater Joe

Edgewater Joe — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 00:48:52 +0000

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I find Schultzzzzz to be as dull as dishwater, and his fellow Jones Radio mates Bill Press (dull) and Stephanie Miller (note: the valley girl thing died with thin neckties) — while AAR, for all their mismanagement, now has a stable of left-of-left-of-center talkers who don’t toe either the Bush line or the Democratic Party line (whereas Jones, I understand, gets part of their funding from the Dems).

The point is, Schultzzzz wouldn’t be here without AAR, and now we’ve got two networks talking liberalism (with a third, Nova M, also on the way), and we can now get the flavor of liberal talk that we all want.

Heck, maybe a Schultz/AAR radio war would be just the ticket to drive listenership up for BOTH groups — kind of get people curious about what the hubbub is all about.

Then we could all be happy.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:58:31 +0000

I can’t listen to streaming media due to the firewall here at work, but I can’t wait to get home and hear it.

I, too, have been extremely disappointed with the performance of Air America. There have been snippets of truly good work but the overall results have been poor. I love comedy as much as the next guy, and a little of it in the right places can go a long way toward making it enjoyable. But, overall, their selection of program hosts sucks. While I may not agree with some of what Big Eddie says, I believe he has the right idea on how to apply radio in a liberal format. He has developed a lot of credibility in the mainstream, and that is important. When he keeps his massive ego out of the way, he can hit it out the park on a regular basis.

But Air America seemed to load up on the types of personalities that mainstream Americans would label as “fringe types” and man does that freeze you out from even a remote possibility that Joe Six Pack will even consider giving a listen. Right-wing talk radio beat them to death over this, and deservedly so in many cases. I like the idea of Air America, but I think they have made and continue to make some major boneheaded decisions that will almost insure their continued poor performance.

How sad. I had such high hopes that it would be something credible.

By: dan from austin

dan from austin — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 21:51:29 +0000

I think Ed is okay, but this angry rant is way over the top to me. It makes him look pretty damn bad.