Can You Play, 'Far Far Away?' Air America invades Black Talk-Radio

By: Chris Stevenson

Some African Americans who own their own radio stations continue to not know to do with themselves. Many station formats border too much on extremes, there's either too much rap or too much religion and too little dialogue. First there was a purging of local news staffs, now some stations that have the right dialogue are under invasion, from the likes of Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and Lizz Winstead.

It's not just Air America alone that is guilty, many felt the White liberal program wouldn't last after the presidential election, but here they are, still showing signs of life roughly a month later. The major life support systems that power conservative talk radio; Clear Channel, TRN (Talk Radio Network), or Salem Broadcasting wasn't about to sign them on. This left various local AM outlets open to integrating Air America into their airwaves. Funded heavily by liberal investor George Soros, Air America's first target was none other than New York's famed former Black activist driven radio station AM1190 WLIB; "The Voice of Radio Revolution." This was on 3/31/04, the strange thing about the merger was it was done under some protest, but Air America went to WLIB under the pretext of "African Americans had just stopped listening to WLIB." Of course this doesn't mean people are listening to WLIB now.

Personally I don't mind the existence of Air America, right wing talk radio is a dominent force that even it's fleet of manipulative talk show hosts can't deny. And I certainly have no problem with Air America taking over White conservative outlets as they did with Rochester's WROC, my concern is targeting Black stations like WLIB, and later Philadelphia's WHAT (AM 1340), this is quite a different ballgame, Black talk stations have lesser known line-ups of good mostly-local informative hosts familiar only to mostly-Black listeners. Infiltrating Black radio can only put some Black talk show hosts out of work, while Ann Tripp, Mark Riley, Dahved Levy, Carlos Russell, and news director Wayne Gilman remain, the only entity at 1190 that seems to have suffered was it's prime music format. According to the Columnist/editor of the popular African American website The Black World Today, Herb Boyd, WLIB simply was not the radio force it once was anyway, and they had began mostly playing Carribean music: "The talk radio component of that switched over to late night hours, that's where you can find Carlos Russell... WLIB was hemmoraging, they were bleeding, they were losing money each and every year. They been losing money for the last 20 years, that's what Percy Sutton told me, they were not getting the advertising dollars." Pierre (Percy) Sutton is the Chairman of Inner City Broadcasting Corporation which owns WLIB, they partnered with Progress Media to bring Air America to the airwaves under a 2 year contract.

Twenty years puts them back to the old days of broadcasting from the Appollo Theater amidst the city's racially heated incidents and issues, Tawanna Brawley, Howard Beach, Police Brutality. WLIB was the most dominant voice of Black resistence in a city of northern blue-collar White hate, where many Whites actually believed that Black response was the real hate. Those were 'LIB's Gary Byrd years, when personalities such as Imhotep Gary Byrd, Alton Maddox, and Felipe Luciano raged against the machine, and New York at large had it in for them back then. Boyd went on to tell me that when Byrd left, that left a big void at the station. But WLIB is now in mid-town Manhattan and Byrd is now with WBAI (FM 99.5). Before when ratings were down, the station had an internal restructure, times have changed, the lure of the White corporate dollar is a power that few Blacks care to fight, even if you are a NY civil rights veteran and former attorney for Malcolm X as Sutton was. White America's fixation with the independant goings on of Black companies and firms for the specific purpose to merge and water-down their agenda is once again served, only this time in the personage of several fed-up White comedians.

"I don't know how Air America is going to broaden the reaches of 'LIB," said one anonymous source to reporter Karen Juanita Carillo of SACOBSERVER.COM. "As far as I've heard, they've got a couple of Whites who just really want to go after Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and all the others. You can't convince me that that's going to be something good for Black and Hispanic people," But therein lies Al Franken's greatest talk radio credential; he really really wants to go after so-and-so the conservative talk show host, but to paraphrase the words of his most famous Saturday Night Live character Stuart Smally; is he "good enough, smart enough, andgosh-darn-it," do African Americans like him?

Walt Cooper, the new program director for WHAT recently had this to say, "of course with any change where you go to a satilite situation or whatever, where before it was formerly live, things are gonna change, and it could be some folks ending up not staying on. A lot of folks lost jobs for example, behind the "Tom Joyner Show"... it's going to take another ratings period or two I would say, to really see the impact of Air America from an Arbitron standpoint, depending on how much you believe Arbitron and that's a whole 'nother discussion." ICBC also owns Philly's WHAT (along with 13 more stations across the country), having taken on Air America back in August (what?). A nasty sub-plot to WHAT's ratings was violent storm that hit the Philadelphia area last December, this all but destroyed the old tower, and they were broadcasting on a reduced signal for 6 months. They have since installed a new tower, and ground system, but are scrambling to make up for lost listenership, and revenue.

"We have heard from word of mouth that people Black and White are warming up to the Air America piece," said Cooper in the 11/23 interview, "some of it depends on which host you are talking about, we don't carry the whole schedule from Air America, we just take Al Franken and Randi Rhodes, but a lot of Black folks love Randi Rhodes, she connectes very well with Black folks in a way that's not patronizing, she get's it. This is a blond girl-I don't know if her eyes are blue or green-she spent a lot of years in local radio in Florida, and came to New York, and then came onboard for the whole Air America piece... she's an actual radio person," chuckled Cooper. "But with Al Franken, some folks like him, some ain't feelin' him, I mean you can tell where he's coming from, and politically it's like 'yeah well Ok I agree with that, but he doesn't have that connect. Remember his background, he's a comedy writer, he came out of SNL, listening to his program sometimes, a lot of it sounds like SNL skits." It would be sheer irony that the very survival of Air America may depend on whether or not the man who wanted it the most, should even stay on the air, but that's the situation Franken could eventually find himself in. He is simply not a radio guy.

WHAT has new faces for more reasons than just Air America, Cooper for example signed on a couple months after the takeover, and the station now has the syndicated "Bev Smith Show" during it's live time slot of 6-10pm Monday-Friday. Other WHAT hosts are still on-albiet time shift changes. Philly legend Mary Mason has the morning 6-9 time-slot, Thera Martin-Connelly is on from 9-12pm, Reggie Bryant runs after Smith, 10-1am. Franken and Rhodes are back-to-back noon to 7pm. "I know Chuck D is on Air America too, and there's a local 'LIB guy-he's the only one that survived the changeover-Mark Riley," adds Cooper. Gone from WHAT as a direct cause of Air America's link is Karen Warrington, Todd Smith, and producer Torry Smith. "The theme of 'The Voice of the African Community,' they don't use that any more," said another departed WHAT talk host; former NFL defensive back Johnny Sample.

Sample-a 14-year-veteran of WHAT-is the only talk jock whose recent move was unrelated to Air America, but he told me that a good portion of the audience didn't like his ouster or the takeover: "They don't want 'em to talk you know, they told the people that's still on the air not to talk about the situation, they didn't want the on-air people who are still there to discuss why we were let go, but if you listen to the station on a regular basis, they [the listeners] know whats going on. Black media is the worst culprit of all this kind of stuff because they feel they have to knuckle under in order to survive." While the jury is still out regarding Air America's connection to Black radio, it's important to realize that the all-important element of Black talk radio, is that it traditionally has fought the Limbaughs, Savages, and O'Reillys just by existing. They don't have to talk about them, simply being a voice and urging dialogue within the inner city is a problem for consevatives by default. Black radio need only to promote their shows as Whites do.

• Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion and www.TheBrownWatch.com . Pointblank can be read at www.voiceoffreedom .com. email comments to Stevenson at pointblankdta@yahoo.com