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October 24, 2006

The Buffalo News

Air America foundering in turbulence

by Jeff Simon

Exhibit A is a book. Namely "Air America -- the Playbook" (Rodale, 255 pages, $26.95). Its self-conscious subtitle is "What a Bunch of Left-Wing Media Types Have to Say about a World Gone Right."

It's not very funny, though heaven knows it often tries to be. It's not very interesting either; it seldom even tries.

And there, in a 250-page nutshell, you have the sad failure of Air America, which just filed for bankruptcy protection.

Given the current political realities of America -- with Bush's poll numbers scraping the cellar floor, Bush-bashing books selling like the proverbial hotcakes, the Iraq occupation almost as loathed as the Vietnam war and Democrats poised to win back one house of congress, possibly even both -- it's astounding that left-wing radio should have such a hard time of it.

But it is. And maybe it deserves to.

That's what happens when you are terminally wonky, self-congratulatory, and, yes, more than a little boring. Air America's Buffalo affiliate, WHLD-FM (1270), won't even carry the full two-hour show of one of Air America's genuine stars, dinnertime talker Rachel Maddow. She is a phenomenally bright and sane woman who gives Tucker Carlson's MSNBC shows their moments of unabashed warmth, wit, intelligence and -- no small thing -- common sense. (Her bio in the back of "Air America" tells us she got a doctorate in politics at Oxford, a public policy degree from Stanford and was "the first openly gay American to win a Rhodes Scholarship.")

There is probably no job in media America, therefore, for which she is not hopelessly overqualified. And that fact continually seems to strike her funny -- as well it should, bless her.

What Maddow gives us in her few moments with Carlson is a kind of ultra-smart older sister whose jabbering smart-aleck brother isn't ever going to fool her -- or lose her indulgent affection, either. It's a good act they have together. Unfortunately, in Buffalo, WHLD halves her show.

We know, in Buffalo, that left-wing radio needn't be tedious. The new "Left Chanel" WKBW -- and particularly Stephanie Miller -- tells us that.

But the biggest trouble with Air America, it seems to me, can be summed up in two words: Jon Stewart.

Not only does Air America have difficulty winning over left-leaning listeners away from National Public Radio affiliates all over the country, it simply can't begin to compete with what Jon Stewart has done on cable TV.

He is the perfect political star to emerge in the era of a president who can't pronounce the word "nuclear." He is wickedly funny, shamelessly smart and just as incensed at the craven failures of American media as he is at the worldwide and perhaps epochal mess that Bush and Co. have made.

And that's what's fascinating about the Bush administration and its media critics.

The cataclysmic failures of George W. Bush are, weirdly, non-political. Partisanship and political name-calling don't really apply. Just as anyone might have predicted when he ran for office in 2000, his hopeless lack of discernible presidential stature finally caught up with him (and, heaven help us, the rest of us, too). We are now all in the position of hoping the world doesn't implode before the American political system can, in an orderly way, rectify its error.

The ultimate George Bush joke isn't Air America's or Miller's or even Jon Stewart's, it's what David Letterman does almost nightly in a segment called "Great Moments From Presidential Speeches." We see and hear Franklin Delano Roosevelt's truism about the fear of fear, John F. Kennedy's telling us to ask not what our country can do for us. And then we see Bush caught in some hopelessly public evidence of bumpkinhood.

Sometimes in those snippets, he seems so cruelly incompetent that Letterman has to do a saver line, like "that's happened to me," lest he appear to be comically picking the wings off flies.

Up against such non-political but devastating opposition, the stridently overt politics of Air America didn't really stand a chance.

e-mail: jsimon@buffnews.com