The cost of being Air America

Posted on November 3, 2006 by Lessig

Josh Silver has a very disturbing post on The Huffington Post about this memo. If you click through, you’ll see a memo from ABC listing companies that want their ads pulled from any station that carries Air America content.

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7 Responses to The cost of being Air America

  1. varmac says:
    November 3, 2006 at 7:04 am

    I am not sure why you think his post is disturbing? I agree it is but I am not sure why you think so..

  2. rodander says:
    November 3, 2006 at 7:31 am

    Given the Air America ratings, sounds like some advertisers found better things to do with their money.

    OTOH, sounds like you think advertisers ought to be required to run ads on radio networks that they otherwise don’t want to. To further free speech, of course.

  3. John Dowdell says:
    November 3, 2006 at 7:36 am

    Didn’t that “Air America” campaign go bankrupt, after being prosecuted from stealing money from a Brooklyn youth fund? Are they _still_ on air, despite their own “corporate malfeasance”?

    And this guy’s complaining because advertisers don’t wish to associate with Randi Rhodes’ vitriol and the rest of their shtick? Is he advocating *forced* association…!?

  4. lessig says:
    November 3, 2006 at 8:04 am

    be careful not to make the state-ist jump: from “I don’t like this” to “therefore there must be regulation of this.”

    So no, I certainly wouldn’t argue that anyone should be forced to associate with anyone.

    My post instead is precisely as it is titled: here is the cost of this sort of speech. Of course, one can have different theories about what kind of speech this is (bad vs. controversial).

  5. Eric says:
    November 3, 2006 at 9:20 am

    Despite what the post says, if you turn the dial over to Limbaugh and Hannity, they don’t exactly have top national advertisers either. For the most part it’s a lot of direct to consumer marketers. There are a few, as I recall… but they also have the ratings to justify it.

    For the most part I think it is fair to say that the big national brands keep away from attaching themselves to material that will alienate half the population and possibly prompt a boycott.

    Besides, Air America was a really stupid idea and it’s no surprise it failed (and I’m someone who’s ideologically aligned with them). They entered the market at a time when terrestrial radio (including Limbaugh and Hannity) has been losing listeners left and right. They entered a medium where the only thing shrinking faster than the audience is the ad dollars available for it.

    Now – if they’d gone and set up a podcast network and marketed themselves online, odds are they’d be growing right now instead of bankrupt.

  6. rodander says:
    November 3, 2006 at 10:12 am

    Thanks for clarifying, lessig. I’m glad of your answer, as I was worried that your “disturbing” comment was leaning toward a statist solution.

    Speech indeed does have costs. The right to speak is not the right to speak while being immune from reaction to that speech. Each of us (advertisers included) can judge for ourselves whether we find someone’s speech “bad”, and we can vote with our pocketbooks accordingly. The Dixie Chicks found that out once, and apparently are finding it out again with the weak results of their movie whining about people’s judgment of their previous speech.

  7. Rick Prelinger says:
    November 5, 2006 at 7:32 am

    Upon reading the memo last week, I saw that REI (my favorite outdoor/camping goods supplier) was on the list. I wrote the Board, as it is a cooperative, complaining, and received a reply that the list was incorrect, and that they do indeed buy time on Air America. I cannot verify this, but I’m not 100% sure that list is correct.

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