NY is the nations largest liberal media market and they need to pay others to carry their BS?
"NY is the nations largest liberal media market and they need to pay others to carry their BS?"
The New York metro area is also the nation's largest Conservative radio market. It is where Rush, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and Bob Grant all made big names for themselves.
Rush, Sean and Mark all were NY radio regulars before they went to National formats.
The usual deal for syndicated programing is to trade programming for air time. That is the syndicator reserved 5 minutes of commerical time per hour.. sells it and keeps all the money. The Station gets the remaining 11 minutes of commercial content to sell and it keeps all the money from its sales. Thus the station pays no cash for the programming it just pays 5 minutes of commerical content.
That is a good deal for the station, becuase to produce its own programming typically will cost more than the income from 5 minutes of air time.
And if the show is a hit.. like Rush and Hannity the 11 minutes of air time the station gets to sell will bring a lot more than 16 minutes of air time for programs the station could produce.
On the other hand the income from 5 minutes per hour going to the syndicator from hundreds of stations covers the cost of the programming hundreds of times over.
But for Air america there is a problem. The local station can't get any sponsors to support the show. In many markets Rush has a waiting list. But no one will buy time on Air America. On top of that the syndicator can't sell it's 5 minutes either. So the five minutes Air america would get to keep produces no reveue either.
That means Air America has to look to people like George Soros to pick up the bills.
What has happened is the station that is dropping Air America has come to the conclusion that it can make more money selling time for conventional shows in the conventional way than brokering time.