Franken Leaves "Err America" to the Bagholders

This today from the Washington Times:

Air America Radio was rescued from bankruptcy yesterday, but still faces the impending loss of Al Franken, its most popular talker.

How tragic. How poignant. The left's most prominent on-air bloviator, who first won some measure of fame years ago as a writer and occasional star on the early, drug-crazed stanzas of Saturday Night Live, is taking a hike now that the ill-fated antidote to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Mark Levin, and others has been sold to the usual suspects, a family pair of rich New York socialists:

The liberal network will be sold to Stephen Green, a Manhattan real estate investment mogul with heavy Democratic ties, including his brother Mark Green, who ran for mayor against Michael R. Bloomberg in 2001. The sale of the network -- deemed a "personal investment" by the two brothers -- will be completed in mid-February for an undisclosed sum.

The problem the Greens are going to have with Err America is the same problem this echt network has always had: no listeners. Or at least not enough to get advertising rates high enough to support the network's relentless diet of nonstop lies and Marxist propaganda:

The network's weekly audience has been stuck at just under 2 million since the beginning -- about one-tenth the number of listeners who tune in each week to conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh.

WashTimes reporter Jennifer Harper quotes an industry source who tells us why this is:

"The current idea in radio is that you have to think outside the box, and find other ways to get content across," said Joe Howard, editor of Radio Ink, an industry publication. "With Air America, you have to wonder if there is enough audience for it to thrive, or if the network is a niche product."

Yeah, and you have to also wonder whether it's thinking "outside the box" at all, given that the three major networks, all the cable networks except Fox, 98% of American daily newspapers, the bulk of the professoriat, and all movie stars—except for Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Bo Derek, maybe Ah-nold, and about 2 others—are preening leftists, mainly because it attracts adoring press, mirabile dictu. (And the lefties were joined today, sad to say, by our favorite young chanteuse, Norah Jones, whose publicists must be seeking brisker CD sales.)

This, actually, highlights the nature of Err America's difficulties. Conservatives need talk radio and the conservative blogosphere to get information that's not tainted with anti-U.S. Marxist propaganda. The left has no such needs. With their near-total control of TV, the film industry, the publishing industry, the newspaper industry, Broadway theater, academia, "educational" radio and NPR, and the bulk of the judiciary, and most Democrats, lefties can bathe themselves 24/7 in the kind of reliable, cheap, self-congratulatory sloganeering and propaganda that puffs them up and makes them feel smug and superior to other Americans who lack their, ah, obvious lack of intelligence and insight.

Ergo, why listen Err America's re-treads and gasbags? There's simply no need for this network and never was. You can only recycle propaganda so many times before it becomes tiresome even to the leftists. This, and nothing else, is why the Err America Idiotarians have failed at talk radio and will fail again. It's like trying to open up your own coffee-house on a block that already has four Starbucks. Your shop will be bankrupt before it opens its doors. You lose.

The Times speculates than Franken may make a run for the Honorable Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman's seat in the upcoming Year of the Hillary. We hope he does. His utter defeat will make for great entertainment, assuming Minnesotans are not dumb enough to vote for him. (Which, come to think of it, given the election's likely coverage in the dreaded Strib, the Midwest's answer to Pravda, we can't be sure of, you betcha.)

But back to Err America. The WashTimes story closes with some apparently unintentional lefty hilarity:

"Air America at best will be another content company with a name tarnished by bad-management bankruptcy. And the prospective rescuers have no experience in radio," Mr. [Sheldon] Drobny [Air America's founder] wrote at the online Huffington Post yesterday, later concluding, "Relying on mega-millionaire liberals to put ego aside for the common good is almost impossible."

Uh, yeah. Preening and posturing is what it's all about, dude, which we're glad you finally noticed. (And BTW, we at HazZzMat have yet to meet a non-mega-millionaire liberal.)

We wish the Greens the best of luck on their doomed endeavor. But, as Sheldon Drobny might observe, they, like most knee-jerk leftists, undoubtedly possess more dollars than sense.