Air Partisan

American Demographics, Feb 1, 2004

Several national advertisers have already signed up to run commercials on Central Air, Sinton says, adding that they're more drawn to the potential audience than they are to the network's politics. "Advertisers are pretty smart and they can tell that there is a lot of buzz around this project and they're excited by the prospects," he says. "Down the road, it'll be more a function of ratings."

Progress Media has enough capital to fund Central Air until it becomes a profitable business, Sinton says, adding that that may take as long as three years. In the meantime, the company plans to buy more stations to add to its network. But, at some point, he says, Progress Media will expand by syndicating its shows to other stations. "It's impossible to own stations in every single market," he says. "The gap is always filled with affiliates."

Michael Harrison, editor of Talkers magazine, questions the basic premise on which Progress Media is building its future: that such well-known conservatives as Limbaugh, Hannity and Michael Savage dominate talk radio. Right-wing talk radio, he says, is just one slice of the bigger radio pie. Its stratified makeup also includes urban talk radio and sports talk radio. Harrison believes that a liberal network can exist, but it ideally would develop organically.

"If there is an identified niche of people who say, 'Wow! This guy on the radio is talking to me,' that's what it comes down to,'' Harrison says. "That's how the conservatives did it over 15 years ago. They were angry people who felt outside of the loop."

In the 1950s, Barry Gray originated the format, blasting bigotry and the Red scare. But it wasn't until the '80s that conservative talk radio hosts helped fuel its popularity. In 1983, Sabo says, there were 59 talk show stations in the U.S.; today there are more than 1,200. While talk radio's market share hasn't grown over the past five years, according to Arbitron, it is stable.

Harrison doesn't think there's room for more liberal talk shows. "There are liberals in talk radio,'' he adds. "It's not that they don't exist and it's not that liberalism isn't expressed on the radio in general."

Harrison's right. Limbaugh may have the highest name recognition of talk radio personalities, but his show isn't the top syndicated one. In fact, quite a few less politically strident ones are more popular. As of October 2002, NPR's All Things Considered aired on 1,200 stations, Paul Harvey's show was on 1,152, NPR's Morning Edition was on 1,075, NPR's Car Talk was on 651 and Limbaugh's was on 600, according to Kagan's research.

Although many talk show hosts are not conservative and NPR offers liberal programming, the time is right for a 24-hour liberal talk network, Walsh says. "There is an underserved audience that doesn't have any meaningful national voice echoing anything they believe in," he says. "All they hear are Rush's dittoheads echoing the opposite of what they believe.

"I'm not suggesting we'll have one person in front of a mic screaming to our dittoheads, which I think is a recipe for disaster," Walsh says. "People on the liberal slide are best entertained by comedy that skewers what's going on as opposed to pontificating and shouting about it. I think we have entertaining programming that will hit those people where they sit as a reasonable alternative."