General Discussion

Just prior to the time that Air America made a stab at the concept of liberal radio, SCOTUS had made a decision that one company could own more than 2 broadcast radio stations in a market. This gave rise to the Clear Channel Corporation that bought up something like 1500 radio stations across the country. This included almost all of the 50,000 clear channel AM stations and in small market almost all of the stations in that market. Maybe you heard the story of dangerous weather in North Dakota one night. When the sheriff went to the local radio station (Bismark I think) to have them broadcast an alert he found out that the station was being run from Texas.

So Clear Channel owned about half of the US radio stations. Another company owned a third of the stations and another company had like 10%. I believe Air America started out to buy properties but there were very few available. That was one problem.

Remember that by then right wing radio had been established. Much of their programming was owned by the same corporation that owned all the stations under the Clear Channel corporation. I think it was called Premiere Radio. They owned Limbaugh and Hannity and many lesser lights like Michael Reagan. So they had the talent and the stations to put it on.

If some radio station wanted to run Premiere's shows like Limbaugh, they would get a real sweetheart deal from Premiere. The cost of the show to the station was $1 - but premiere got to sell most of the ad time. Shows were individual so they could take Reagan and skip Limbaugh. The local station got like 5 minutes an hour to sell locally - just enough to pay some bills. The shows filled a lot of empty air time. The local station didn't have to pay salesmen and could cut employees to the very bone.
So RW radio spread like wildfire.

When AAR came in they tried to sell radio stations a full day of programs as a package and the station had to sell the ad time. Hard for stations. In many case Clear Channel would give AAR one of their crappiest local radio stations just to fill air time. When CC had 7 stations in a market they had a lot of air time to fill, so much of AAR was on Clear Channel stations. In many cases CC decided to sell these stations and one day it was AAR then the next day Christian radio.

So the biggest problem AAR had was a lack of outlets plus a pretty bad business plan. What stations they were on were often low power dogs. I seem to recall that the one in LA only covered about 25% of LA.

Hard to find and poorly run was the biggest problem. Therefore it was hard to get listeners. In that respect much of what could have been their audience was already pretty faithful to NPR and weren't changing.

The business side grew into a disorganized mess and was going through lots of shakeups. And on the Clear Channel side they began shedding may of their real dog stations, so literally a station might be sold overnight and would go from AAR to Latino overnight. The one that I listened to did just that in the Quad Cities.

I worked with a group trying to secure some outlets in the midwest and we could get little support for our project. We would speak with influential folks and they would give us a glazed look.

So I think the biggest factor was bad business practices, really tough competition especially NPR which led to dwindling listening audiences especially as CC started shedding stations.

I forgot to mention that some local groups would rent time on local stations to run AAR but the rent was a killer. I think Phoenix was successful at doing that for a year or two but it got overwhelming after a while.

Right wingers love to cite AARs failure as the left being disorganized, uncommitted etc.