Published on Wednesday, March 31, 2004 by the New York TimesJacques Steinberg
Lady Olivia was on the phone from Washington.
And Sam Seder, a nighttime host on Air America Radio, the fledgling liberal talk-radio network, had a question about the clientele of his guest, who identified herself as a dominatrix.
"More Republicans or more Democrats?" Mr. Seder asked.
"Seventy-30," Lady Olivia said.
Mr. Seder's broad grin suggested that that was precisely the answer he had hoped for. Sitting in a windowless studio 41 floors above Midtown Manhattan during a rehearsal on Thursday for the program, "The Majority Report," he shuffled through a sheaf of testimonials downloaded from Lady Olivia's Web site, operated under a different name. He soon inquired about the identities of those Republicans, displaying a particular interest in learning more about "Jon from Washington," who had written, "I enjoyed the corporal punishment more than I thought I would."
"Does his last name," Mr. Seder asked, "rhyme with Chriscroft?"
The exchange yielded no information about the attorney general of the United States. (Lady Olivia's response was little more than a coy laugh.) But it did provide some clues to how Air America, which makes its debut at noon today on five stations with Al Franken, the comedian and political satirist, at the microphone, intends to challenge the hegemony of conservatives on commercial talk radio.
 Janeane Garofalo will be a co-host on Air America Radio, a new liberal network.(NYT Photo/Michael Nagle) |
"When people begin to say that," he added, "we will have arrived."
Beyond the satiric, sometimes sophomoric humor displayed during the dress rehearsal for "The Majority Report," which Mr. Seder shares with the comedian Janeane Garofalo, Air America plans to offer a mixture of issue-oriented interviews (with conservatives, as well as liberals), commentary, listener phone calls and news reports, delivered straight, at regular intervals.
But this liberal radio network faces numerous obstacles in capturing a substantial audience, in particular finding a critical mass of stations that will broadcast its voices. The network has already fallen behind in its initial goal, announced last year, of owning five stations by the time it went on the air. As of today it owns none.
Instead Air America has bought programming time on stations with moderately strong signals, but previously low ratings: WLIB-AM in New York, WNTD-AM in Chicago, KBLA-AM in Los Angeles, KCAA-AM in Riverside and San Bernadino, Calif., and KPOJ-AM in Portland, Ore. A San Francisco station is expected to be announced in early April.
By contrast Rush Limbaugh, whom Air America has identified as a chief competitor, is heard on more than 600 stations, including WABC in New York. Sean Hannity, another conservative talk-show host, has a similar reach.
Air America, which has raised more than $20 million, has grand plans for buying stations, or at least all of the broadcast time on stations, in more than a dozen cities by year's end. Many are in Ohio, Florida and other states considered battlegrounds in the presidential election. But since the media ownership rules were eased in the mid-1990's, much of the broadcast spectrum is owned by a handful of companies. Few stations are for sale, and few station owners will give over all of their broadcast day to untested programming.
Then there is the question in radio and conservative circles whether liberals can be entertaining enough for talk radio.
"Sometimes they just sound so grim," said Neal Boortz, a libertarian whose Atlanta-based program is syndicated to more than 180 stations. "My god, the foreboding."
Mr. Sinton said Air America needed to be wary of that tendency.
"The problem with really wonkish policy discussion is that it does not attract or hold a mass audience," he said.
As a result the network's 17-hour weekday lineup has as much if not more in common with "Saturday Night Live" than with National Public Radio. For example, its midmorning show, which begins tomorrow at 9, will have as its hosts Lizz Winstead, a comedian and a creator of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, and Chuck D, the frontman for the rap group Public Enemy.
They will be followed at noon by Mr. Franken, the "Saturday Night Live" alumnus who has evolved into a satirist, and whose co-host is Katherine Lanpher from Minnesota Public Radio. Martin Kaplan, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, will be the host of a one-hour show about the news media in the early evening.
He will be followed, from 8 to 11 p.m., by Ms. Garofalo, whose main experience in radio was playing the role of a talk-show host for pet owners in the 1996 film "The Truth About Cats and Dogs," and by Mr. Seder, who has worked as a comedian, screenwriter and filmmaker.
There were times on Thursday during the three-hour run-through, which was recorded with the expectation of using portions of it on actual shows, that Ms. Garofalo, 39, and Mr. Seder, 37, sounded — surprisingly — not unlike their right-leaning competition.
In an interview with Craig Crawford, a columnist for Congressional Quarterly, the two hosts spent several minutes clobbering the news media, a favorite target of Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Hannity.
"It seems the journalists have really put themselves in the center of the story in a partisan political way," Ms. Garofalo said, speaking of what she called a new form of participatory journalism. Moments later Mr. Seder observed, "Really, most reporters are whores."
And yet the content of most of the program sounded nothing like the fare provided by Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Hannity. Those two popular hosts can usually be counted on to defend President Bush — Mr. Hannity's Web site declares that he is "fed up with all the Bush-bashing" — and whose favorite punching bags include the president's presumed Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry. ("Kerry injured changing positions," Mr. Limbaugh's Web site declared.)
Among others, Ms. Garofalo and Mr. Seder poked fun at Mr. Bush's former spokesman Ari Fleischer ("Is he not shoveling coal in hell now?" Mr. Seder asked); Karl Rove, the president's senior adviser and political strategist (said by Ms. Garofalo to be pursuing "the elusive 18-25 Klan demo"); and Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. Seder said he felt sure that he could see Mr. Cheney's hand moving Mr. Bush's mouth on "Meet the Press" earlier this year.)
Ms. Garofalo said that "The Majority Report," its name inspired by a reference to Al Gore's presidential victory in the popular vote in the 2000 election, would also feature substantive interviews. Among the invited guests, she said, are Ben Cohen (the activist founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream), Dr. Joyce Riley (an advocate of Persian Gulf war veterans) and Howard Dean. (Ms. Garofalo was in the audience on the night of the Iowa caucus, before he gave what she described as his "so-called `I have a scream' speech.")
"It's not like we're here to say we're going to be as nasty as right-wingers," Ms. Garofalo said in an interview. "On the left, traditionally, you've got a nicer type of person. You've got a person who is more willing to engage in conversations that have context and nuance, who tend to have more educable minds."
Whether all of these elements can be brought together to make great radio remains an open question. Kipper McGee, the program director of WDBO-AM (580) in Orlando, Fla., which is owned by Cox Communications and carries Mr. Hannity's syndicated program, said that Air America could count on listeners from all bands of the political spectrum, at least early on.
"The old adage, `Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,' sometimes it's true with the remote control or the radio tuner," said Mr. McGee, who has worked in radio for three decades. "In the final analysis, though, whether they survive depends on how good the shows are."
