TELLING IT LIKE IT IS !

Air America Crashes, Burns — Will Anyone Besides Franken and Maddow Notice?

Posted by Dana Loesch Jan 21st 2010 at 5:01 pm in Air America, NPR, Talk Radio, liberal media, media bias

Air America announced today, with little fanfare, that it is ceasing operations and filing for bankruptcy, citing “tough economic times” as the reason. Quite honestly, I’m shocked that they didn’t blame Bush. Or global warming.

It’s not the economy, stupid.

Talk radio continues to thrive and do exceptionally well – in the conservative market. There is a reason for this, and it has nothing to do with unfairness but everything to do with the free market.

Mainstream media operates as little more than a mouthpiece for the current administration. Every nightly news anchor from Katie Couric to Brian Williams has an acknowledged bias – different from people like Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck who have admitted biases, whose programming operates not as news, but as op/ed. Newspapers more often than not also have a slant – this according to a Pew Research Center poll: Seventy-four percent said news organizations tend to favor one side in dealing with political and social issues. Eighteen percent said they deal fairly with all sides.

The accompanying headline for this poll? “Public Trust in US Media Eroding.”

Why is it eroding? Because people aren’t sheep; they recognize the bias – “objective” journalists refuse to acknowledge what the public knows anyway and continue to operate under the assumption that they’re delivering the straight story and when they aren’t, no one can tell.

So why would people want to listen to admittedly biased radio programming that is little more than an echo of what they hear on television or read in the paper? Liberal talk on the radio doesn’t perform well because it is not a sequestered to a niche – It’s everywhere in the media universe. Conservative talk radio. on the other hand, performs well because the radio is the only place, besides Fox News that people can go for right-sphere opinions.

Which is why, with the failure of Air America, expect the left to ratchet up its demand for a renewal of the Fairness Doctrine as a way for it to survive on the radio while the right demands nothing similar of the television and newspaper industries – the latter of which is currently requesting public financing or tax credits. NPR gets taxpayer dollars and still slants to the left, as evidenced by their recent “Learn to Speak Tea Bag” video.

Liberal radio performs poorly because its format already dominates other markets. And it will continue to perform poorly until the day comes when the rest of the media is at least balanced, if not fair.