I am terminably confused by the suggestion from the new boss-man at Air America, implanted in their hosts (or at least the two that I heard yesterday — a handful of minutes of Thom Hartmann and an hour of Rachel Maddow) — that they have “relaunched” as “Air America 2.0”.

This is a joke, right?  For some reason they inserted an interview between Mark Green, he of — who the hell knows what fame, but he bought Air America for the pittance that it cost to get it out of bankruptcy — and Eliot Spitzer.  An indelibly pointless and not terribly interesting interview.  For her part, Rachel Maddow interviewed Barak Obama.  This seems to be a forced influx of “big names” to be interviewed for the “relaunch”– in the most pointless meandering manner possible, selling the candidates for what is, I guess, Democratic Party Radio.

In reality this will fade away and it will be status quo.  Pointless and bland interviews with the Democratic presidential front-runners are nothing new, and if it weren’t pointed out that this is something somehow altogether different, I would not have noticed.  Except for that weird Mark Green interview tih Eliot Spitzer.  I scratch my head at that one.  Is that the new innovation that Mark Green has cooked up for this network — interpersing himself into the line-up in bursts and spurts?  Is that what makes a “relaunch”?  Otherwise, I don’t quite get it.  They’ve altered their schedule a little, but they’ve done that a few times before, and probably will have to do so again sometime sooner or later.
In terms of the business decisions with the alterations to the schedule:   Not only has Lionel not gained many fresh affiliates, he lost roughly a half dozen that carried Seder on delay. The only station he seems to have been added to is WINZ in Miami, on delay from 6-9P ET. Lots of stations still list him on their website schedules for his former show, but it is unknown if they are still running his new Air America show in those time slots.  Actually, I have come to think that this was a bad decision by both Air America and Lionel, but it appears to — at the moment — be worse for Lionel than I thought, who I had at least seen a slight upshot for in terms of some added exposure.  It always struck me as simple desperation on the part of Air America’s new management.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 8:26 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.