Air America 2.0 Begins Today

By Mark Green, Huffington Post. Posted March 6, 2007.

Today my family formally purchases and takes over Air America Radio. Why? Because if progressive values were a stock, now is the time to buy.

That hasn't always been true, as the cycle of politics demonstrates. In recent decades, politics seems to have been governed by physics -- for every action, there's an opposite and equal reaction.

William F. Buckley Jr. started The National Review in the 1950s to rebut what he saw as the dominance of liberalism in the academy and opinion journals like The Nation and The New Republic. From 1970-72, Public Citizen, Common Cause and the NRDC were all created in reaction to Nixon's depredations. Similarly, People For the American Way grew out of the rise of the Religious Right under Reagan in the mid-80s.

New progressive think tanks over the past 10 years, most recently and prominently the Center for American Progress, were created to counter AEI and Heritage. And, of course, the Huffington Post and Air America were born in reaction to the electronic propaganda of Drudge and Limbaugh et. al.

Air America was a large, smart idea to counter the near-monopoly on talk radio by the far right. But like most start-ups, the business plan collided with reality. Six CEOs over its first three years -- and various missteps and misspending -- sent it into Chapter 11.

It's now ready to go from The Perils of Pauline to The Little Engine that Could. How? First, by focusing on the radio fundamentals of making a strong line-up even stronger; second, by connecting to other progressive membership organizations to be mutually fortifying; and third, by being a multi-media content company involving other distribution platforms -- Internet, blogging, audio and video streaming, mobile, social networks, and more. It's time to think outside the (radio) box.

The twin goals are to make it profitable and influential. One without the other won't work. If it's not a business, it'll go out of business.

But it'll be a business with a sharp point of view. The era of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand liberalism is over -- or as Robert Frost once wrote, "a liberal man is too broad-minded to take his own side in a quarrel." For all those who worry about messianic misleaders governing on a right wing and a prayer, Air America 2.0 will be an answer. For all those fearful of plutocracy and theocracy, the pro-democracy hosts of AAR's programs will be an answer. If the conservative media continue to spout propaganda and call it news, there's now the alternative of truth, justice and the Air American way.

It's no longer enough just to hope that The New York Times will cover a rally or press release. The relatively new combination of The HuffingtonPost, AlterNet, Moveon, Center for American Progress and Campaign for America's Future, The Nation and The American Prospect, DailyKos and TalkingPointsMemo -- and so many labor unions -- means that Air America will be part of a larger progressive infrastructure heard by a widening audience. For if we can't grow and prosper now -- given the 110th Congress, given the unmitigated disaster that's Iraq, given a slew of top-quality presidential aspirants -- when will we?

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