Ring of fire

The Minneapolis Star Tribune has a puff piece on the ongoing meltdown at Hate Bush radio, a/k/a Air America: “A bumpy takeoff for Air America liberal radio network.” From the story, it sounds like the “network” is down to one station in a major market, leaving the extent of the “network” in small markets to the reader’s imagination.
The story plays up the network’s impact on the Internet (helpfully providing a link), where it has “as many as 80,000 listeners an hour,” also leaving to the reader’s imagination how few listeners it has on the low side. The audience on the low side would probably occur during “Ring of Fire” with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Mike Papantonio on Saturdays at 10:00 am eastern time.
Reality seems to break through at the end of the story:

Michael Harrison, editor of the talk radio magazine Talkers, was more blunt [about the network’s prospects]:
“The impression one gets from this whole thing is that it’s really more of a political campaign with contributers than it is a radio business with investors. That’s been the thing that’s made it seem so shaky to those inside the business. It doesn’t follow the pattern of a business; it’s more of a political movement. And radio is not a political machine. Radio is a medium.”

UPDATE: Thomas Lifson of the American Thinker deconstructs the Strib story and creates his own ring of fire in “Propagandists protecting their own.”

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