Kopel: Air America: the good and the bad

Rocky Mountain News ^ | May 22, 2004 | Dave Kopel

[Caipirabob]

Imagine all the fun he'd have with an airport metal-detector...

[Fred Hayek]

I think he's mistaking Dave Kopel with Ted Koppel.

[E Rocc]

They have to have the whole station, lest the people hear an alternative viewpoint.

The next logical step would be to strap people into chairs to force them to listen.

Easy there, we don't want the libs saying we're advocating torture over here. >:0

-Eric

[pepsionice]

I vote we put the Al Franken show on NPR...and perhaps it might kill off NPR too.

[Valin]

FYI
Minneapolis - WMNN 1330 is an AM all-news station, part of Mn. public radio.

And now the bad news (if you're an "Air America" fan)

MINNESOTA PUBLIC RADIO AGREES TO SELL WMNN 1330 AM TO CATHOLIC NETWORK; GREENSPRING SELLS THE MNN RADIO NETWORKS TO SAGA COMMUNICATIONS

(St. Paul, Minn.) — Minnesota Public Radio announced today that it has agreed to sell WMNN 1330 AM, an all-news radio station in Minneapolis, to Advance Acquisition, Inc. — a subsidiary holding company of Starboard Media Foundation, Inc., a Wisconsin company that distributes Catholic radio programming under the brand name Relevant Radio.™

The purchase price is $6.75 million. The sale must be approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), a process expected to take about 100 days, before it is final.

Separately, Minnesota Public Radio's for-profit affiliate, Greenspring Company, announced that it had sold The MNN Radio Networks (MNN) — which currently operates WMNN 1330 AM — to Saga Communications, Inc., a broadcast company based in Michigan. The purchase price is $3.25 million.

Bill Kling, president of both Minnesota Public Radio and Greenspring, noted that these properties had provided a revenue stream for more than 25 years to support MPR. "These sales will allow us to convert this revenue stream into a permanent asset, helping to assure MPR's financial health far into the future," he added.

"This will help Minnesota Public Radio achieve its goal of setting the next standard in public service," Kling added. "It will enable us to focus our attention on the nonprofit mission of Minnesota Public Radio and to assure continued operating revenue for MPR. We will secure our financial standing as we adapt to technological change; strengthen our arts and culture coverage; introduce a new model of journalism that taps the expertise of our audience; and expand our programming and disseminate it in new ways, for example over the Internet."

Details of the two sales follow.

WMNN 1330 AM

Minnesota Public Radio has owned the 1330 AM frequency since 1979. It was originally part of MPR's public radio service, broadcasting news and information programming. In 1995 — after establishing KNOW 91.1 FM as a news and information station and KSJN 95.5 as a classical music station — Minnesota Public Radio leased 1330 AM to The MNN Radio Networks (MNN).

MNN — a for-profit company that operates a regional network providing news, farm, sports, weather, and lifestyle programming to commercial radio stations — has operated the station since then as an "all-news all the time" station with the call sign WMNN.

Minnesota Public Radio's Board of Trustees decided to sell 1330 AM in an effort to maximize the company's resources to support its priorities for the future. The sale was agreed after Starboard Media Foundation, Inc. (through Advance Acquisition, Inc.) contacted Minnesota Public Radio. MPR completed a due-diligence examination of the buyer and determined that it was qualified to own the station.
http://access.minnesota.publicradio.org/press_releases/releases/20040123_mnnsale.html

I understand Air America will be going off the air here at the end of the month.

[Valin]

I've listened to several episodes of Franken's show, and, lo, it is bad!

With Katherine Lanpher I'm not suprised. She's a real piece of work.

[garbanzo]

For someone with such a smug sense of intellectual superiority, Rhodes is remarkably ignorant.

This is the fundamental description of the modern liberal. We've all seen the trolls on here display the same basic theme - a barely literate screech filled with total moral self-satisfaction. It's sad to see people think that they are such smart people and be so laughingly ignorant of any basic facts.

[DUMBGRUNT]

Why They Hate Him [Bush]
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1131194/posts

Very good read, thanks.

[gcruse]

That comparison is absolute garbage.

Amen.  Equating Hannity to Medved is like equating Patton to Goebbels.
And compared to the foregoing, Franken is Comical Ali.

[KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle]

For someone with such a smug sense of intellectual superiority, Rhodes is remarkably ignorant.

There is never anything genuinely "remarkable" about any given liberal's ignorance. :)

[DoughtyOne]

Thank you for mentioning this. Obviously I had the guy mistaken for someone else.

[VisualizeSmallerGovernment]

one thing that really bugged me (and them) during middle and high school was that everything had to be a group project.

I absolutely detest group projects myself. However, I think they're usually due to laziness on the part of the teacher rather than some sort of collectivist idealism. They only have to grade 6 projects instead of 5. Plus, most of the time while the project is running, it's "break off into your groups and discuss everything while I read the paper."

It's sort of like when the teacher has you pass the test to your neighbor and grade it. Less work for them.

[VisualizeSmallerGovernment]

The collapse may be sufficiently simple as to not warrant a comprehensive analysis: Large amounts of low-quality supply in the face of little or no demand.

Almost every spectacular business failure can be summed up as "not enough people would buy your stuff for more than it cost to produce." But the details are often fascinating.

[VisualizeSmallerGovernment]

I'm surprised you don't see lefties complaining more. Perhaps they aren't listening.

I don't think they are. I think they bought Franken's books because of the titles - Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies & The Lying Lyers of the Right (or whatever). You could display the book on your shelf and make a "statement".

I don't think anyone actually read Al Franken's book (except maybe a couple of conservatives who wanted to debunk it). For the most part, it's a 300 page bumper sticker for the coffee table.

They tried to recreate the magic by giving their shows cutesy names, but the problem is- just because a show has a cutesy name it doesn't mean you have to listen to it 3 hours a day.

[arthurus]

The busines lesson is that if you are truly leftist in your outlook and want to build a buainess, hire some conservatives toset it up and run it. Of course, in the case of Liberal Radio, the conservatives would say -hey, no way! or, I want a year's salary up front in cash or bank draft.

[arthurus]

I have never heard a talk show with 2 co-hosts that I could stand to listen to. They always end up- or start off, even- talking to each other and it degenerates to inside stuff that makes me say,"huh?"

[TenthAmendmentChampion]

However, the need to maintain a veneer of impartiality usually prevents direct ideological instruction.

Since when! They only think they hide their bias.

[finnman69]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1133399/posts

Did anyone else hear Randi Rhodes comparing President Bush to Fredo Corleone, and openly calling for his father or brother to take him on a "fishing" trip and blow his brains out?

http://www.cynicalnation.com/archives/2004_05.html#000122

RR "They are the Corelones."

Caller "Now we're down to Fredo."

RR "Well,I gotta find, well right, we have the Fredo of the Family is the President of the United States so....why doesn't his father take him, or his brother, one of them, take him out for a little uhhh fishing...."

Caller: "Yes...that's a rowboat"

RR: "You know"

RR:"..Yeah...let em say some Hail Mary's he loves God so much...

Caller: "I bet that Bush does have a little dingy."

RR:"..Yeah take him out, and you know Hail Mary full of grace God is with you....PKKEEWWWWW!(gunshot noise) Works for me.

Caller: "Absolutely, thanks"

RR: "Thank you."

[Aquinasfan]

Well, it is true that all of those news outlets (and much of the news staffs at both The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News) tilt left. However, the need to maintain a veneer of impartiality usually prevents direct ideological instruction. Freed from the pretense of impartiality...

Telling.

On the radio, hyperbole and invective usually succeed only if they're funny - as they sometimes are on Franken and Limbaugh. With Rhodes, however, all you get is the same kind of flat pronouncements you could hear from a seventh-grader in Boulder: George Bush is "deaf, dumb and blind" and "stupid" and "an idiot" and people who vote for Bush are "morons" and "pathological."

She's giving her leftist audience what they want. They're smug and ignorant and they want to be confirmed in their smug ignorance.

[Aquinasfan]

one thing that really bugged me (and them) during middle and high school was that everything had to be a group project.

Here's the answer. Read it and weep.

Dewey’s Experimentalism10 represented a new faith which was swallowed whole in Watson’s behaviorism. According to Childs, the unavowed aim of the triumphant psychology was "to abolish thinking, at least for the many; for if thinking were possible the few could do it for the rest." For Dewey as for the behaviorists, the notion of purpose was peculiarly suspect since the concept of conditioning seemed to obsolete the more romantic term. A psychological science born of physics was sufficient to explain everything. The only utopia behaviorism allowed was one in which the gathering of facts, statistical processing, and action based on research was allowed.

It is tempting to bash (or worship) Dewey for high crimes (or high saintliness), depending on one’s politics, but a greater insight into the larger social process at work can be gained by considering him as an emblem of a new class of hired gun in America, the university intellectual whose prominence comes from a supposed independence and purity of motives but who simultaneously exists (most often unwittingly) as protégé, mouthpiece, and disguise for more powerful wills than his own. Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski are prime examples of the type in our own day.

Dewey was determined his experimental subjects would be brought to actively participate in the ongoing experiments, not necessarily with their knowledge. All education was aimed at directing the responses of children. Orwell is really satirizing Deweyists and Fabians in his post-WWII dystopian nightmare, 1984, when Winston Smith’s execution is delayed until he can be brought to denounce the people he loves and to transfer his love to Big Brother. In Dewey’s world this is only bringing Smith into active participation. That it is in his own degradation is final proof that private purposes have been surrendered and the conditioning is complete.

"[We] reject completely the hypothesis of choice. We consider the traditional doctrine of ‘free-will’ to be both intellectually untenable and practically undesirable," is the way Childs translates Dewey. The new systems theorists, experimentalists, and behaviorists are all Wundt’s children in regarding human life as a mechanical phenomenon.11 But they are polemicists, too. Notice Childs’ hint that even if free will were intellectually tenable, it would only cause trouble.

The Underground History of American Education
John Taylor Gatto