Air Partisan

American Demographics, Feb 1, 2004

Byline: MARK DE LA VINA

Talk may be cheap, but talking to listeners all around the country isn't. Which is why Progress Media Inc., a new radio broadcast company, plans to sink hundreds of millions of dollars this year to build a national liberal talk radio show to take on such popular conservative rivals as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly.

The timing couldn't be more auspicious. Progress Media expects to go on the air in March with Central Air network on five AM stations in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia and Boston, just as the 2004 presidential race starts to get down and dirty. Central Air will provide around-the-clock talk shows with a liberal political bent. It will be the first of its kind, as no politically partisan network, conservative or liberal, has even been launched.

But if talk radio is considered the bastion of right-wing commentators who lash out against "feminazis," "red-diaper doper babies" and "leftopathics," who's going to tune in to listen to a bunch of whiney and liberal extremists? "The short answer is, as strange as this may sound, the 51 percent of Americans who did not vote for the current president," says Walsh, Progress Media's CEO, who is the Democratic National Committee's former chief technology adviser and a former AOL executive.

To face off against Limbaugh and other airwave provocateurs, Progress Media plans to sign high profile political comedians like Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo as commentators. Franken, a Saturday Night Live alum, has already sparred with O'Reilly, who also has a TV show on News Corp.'s Fox News. In his best seller, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right (Dutton, 2003), Franken has a chapter focusing on O'Reilly, titled, "Lying, Splotchy Bully." O'Reilly was so outraged that Franken's book included his photo that he reportedly persuaded News Corp. to sue for trademark infringement of "fair and balanced." The lawsuit was dismissed.

Walsh says Central Air will try to target what he calls a "double-humped camel" of demographic groups. On one end, the network will aim for 18- to 25-year-olds, that highly desirable, tech-savvy demographic that gathers information via multiple formats. The other hump would aim for an older, more affluent demographic, listeners who are 40 to 55 and have a taste for humor perhaps edgier than what's offered by National Public Radio. Currently, talk radio listeners are mainly white men over the age of 35, many of whom consider themselves conservative - but not all. A full 11 percent of talk show listeners say they're either "liberal" or "ultra liberal" and 21 percent say they're "fiscal conservative/social liberal," according to a study done by Talkers, a talk radio trade magazine in Springfield, Mass.

Walsh says he hopes Central Air's programming will tap in to people's feelings of disenfranchisement and disillusion that are being stoked by the sluggish economy and the war in Iraq. The company also aims to attract women listeners - a demographic that has traditionally been less served in the format - through female commentators or with content that appeals specifically to them.

Although Progress Media will target listeners it identifies as liberals, a more fundamental component of its success will depend on whether it can entertain an audience, says Walter Sabo, a radio consultant in New York. "People listen to Rush Limbaugh because he's funny and he's entertaining,'' he says. "That's the only reason. William F. Buckley is a better conservative than Rush, but no one would listen to him, because he's not entertaining."

Indeed, Limbaugh's show had some of its highest ratings when he returned to the airwaves after a five-week hiatus, following a stay in a rehab clinic for his addiction to painkillers. Limbaugh's listeners didn't abandon the staunch supporter of law and order when he later told them that federal prosecutors in Florida where investigating him on allegations of money laundering.

To attract a younger audience, Progress Media will be Webcentric, featuring Webstreaming on its site (www.centralairmedia.com). Listeners will be able to download "the MP3 of an Al Franken broadcast and listen while driving home from college," says Walsh. The content of the show will also reflect the tastes of a younger demographic. "We believe in our sense of humor, which will be similar to - but we hope a lot more biting - than Jon Stewart's sense of humor on [Comedy Central's] The Daily Show," Walsh says. "That sense of humor appeals to a more youthful audience because, in a good way, it makes fun of sort of the totems of society that has really disaffected youthful voters."

Progress Media has enlisted a former Harvard Lampoon editor Martin Kaplan, now an associate dean at University of Southern California of the Annenberg School for Communications, to host a show about the news media. Other hirees include Lizz Winstead, one of the creators of The Daily Show, who will be in charge of entertainment programming; Shelly Lewis, a news producer who has worked at CNN and on ABC's American Morning, to head news programming; and former Chicago radio executive Dave Logan as executive vice president of programming and operations.