How Air America lost teen spirit
One of my favorite maxims on marketing comes from advertising legend David Ogilvy: “You cannot bore people into buying your product; you can only interest them in buying it.”
The people who made Air America what it started out to be—Marc Maron, Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, Jim Earl, Brendan McDonald, Mike Malloy, Rachel Maddow—understood that.
The suits at the top, notably CEO Danny Goldberg, did not.
In 2003, Goldberg published a book called How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Two years later, while the paperback edition was fresh off the presses, he pulled the plug on Morning Sedition, which more than anything else on Air America had the intelligence, sharpness, and hilarity to grab young listeners (as well as the not so young).
It’s hard to recall just how exciting it was to discover Air America when it was first on the air—and especially Morning Sedition. Jenn and I turned it on when we were barely conscious, and even before our first cup of coffee we were laughing at Morning Remembrance, Future Marc, the Pitch of the Week, and all the other inspired insanity.
Danny Goldberg put an end to all that. In a guest post at the Down with Tyranny blog, he defends himself at length—but scroll down to see what Brendan McDonald and Jim Earl have to say. I’ll let Jim Earl have the last word:
Aside from applauding everything Brendan’s already written, I’d like to add these choice bits:
I wrote for Air America from the beginning, but ended up mostly performing and writing for Maron’s show—this, despite his atavistic predilection for pouring warm spittoon tailings into the break room coffee-maker every morning.
Aside from that, the most peculiar thing I ever witnessed at Air America, including the time Riley secretly married a breakfast roll in the basement, was how a liberal network whose concept was rooted in the goal that it not become a humorless copy of NPR, had now become a humorless copy of NPR. And that was Danny’s genius. No one could suck the happy out of a building faster than you could. And that’s what killed the best, most exciting shows at Air America: some guy who didn’t like or didn’t get jokes. You know—satire, parody, sarcasm. Things that can actually catch people’s attention in politics. Instead you opted to bore the crap out of radio audiences—much like you did to me half way through your blog. Radio audiences don’t like being bored, Danny. And if you hadn’t spent most of your job time recuperating at your Malibu beach house or bunkered in the corner office atop a pyramid of TaB, perhaps you would have discovered that.
