Wizblog

AS on Air America

Andrew Sullivan reviews Al Franken and Air America, the new liberal talk radio programming. What's missing? Ideas, for starters...

...the other missing ingredient for liberal media is intellectual firepower. On this, the left has actually gone soft. In academia, left-liberalism is so entrenched its advocates' debating skills have gone rusty. When you've been talking to yourself for decades and imposing speech codes on everyone else, your ability to argue coherently - let alone entertainingly - inevitably wanes. And when you look at the political parties today, it's only the Republicans who are really still fighting over ideas. Only conservatives are battling each other over fiscal policy, or on abortion, or on gay marriage. The Democrats are only arguing over how to get back into power. Internal debates are almost non-existent. Remember the Democratic primaries? Zzzzz. Compared to the the rifts between supporters of free trade and of restricting immigration, between the libertarians and the Christian right, between the foreign policy realists and neoconservatives, the debates among the Democrats are beyond tedious. So they tend to go only on the attack against the president and anything to do with him, without much intellectual fiber in reserve.

UPDATE 4/14: Drudge Report carries this story on a little problem Air America had today:

STATION OWNER CLAIMS: AIR AMERICA 'BOUNCES CHECK'; LIBERAL RADIO NET TAKEN OFF IN LOS ANGELES, CHICAGO AFTER ONLY TWO WEEKS
Wed Apr 14 2004 16:18:43 ET

After just two weeks on the air, Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network featuring Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, appears to have encountered serious cash-flow problems.

The CHICAGO TRIBUNE is developing a story, insiders tell DRUDGE, on how the network was pulled off the air this morning in Chicago and Los Angeles, the network's second- and third-largest markets, because, the owner of both stations said, the network bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million! A charge the network strongly denies.

A Chicago source familiar with the situation said a Multicultural representative showed up at WNTD's offices Wednesday morning, kicked out Air America's lone staffer overseeing the network's feed to the station from New York, switched over to a Spanish-language feed, and changed the locks on the doors...

Air America filed a complaint Wednesday in New York state Supreme Court charging Multicultural with breaching their contract and seeking an injunction to force Multicultural to restore the Air America broadcast on both stations.

Developing...