The bad news continues for Air America — it’s getting beaten up in cities where you’d think it would do well — unimportant markets such as Los Angeles and New York as well as liberal bastions Boston and Providence. First, LA:

The Rush Limbaugh Show, heard Monday through Friday on KFI-AM in Los Angeles from 9 a.m. - noon scored, among Persons 12+, a 4.4 share with 100,100 listeners tuning in, on average, every quarter hour. Among Adults 25-54, he has a 2.5 share with 35,900 of them tuning in, on average, every quarter hour.

Al Franken, who airs at the same time on KTLK-AM in Los Angeles, has a share of 1.2 with 28,400 listeners Persons 12+ tuning in, on average, every quarter hour. With Adults 25-54, he has a 0.8 share with a listening audience of 11,900, on average, every quarter hour.

Mr. Limbaugh’s audience of Persons 12+ is three and a half times the size of Mr. Franken’s audience. Among Adults 25-54, Mr. Limbaugh more than triples Mr. Franken’s audience. (link)

Franken’s show is generally Air America’s highest rated, so expect that other Air America shows are doing worse. You can see LA ratings for yourself at Radio & Records here.

And it’s not just Los Angeles. Brian Maloney at “The Radio Equalizer” has a post today about the Providence, RI, market, where Air America replaced a conservative talk format:

… it took only a year to kill Providence’s WHJJ-AM. … WHJJ-AM has seen its audience sliced in half since the change, going from a respectable 3.5 share last summer, to a miniscule 1.8. Most amazing: a distant Boston signal from WBZ-AM actually beat hometown WHJJ. That has to be a first.

and he points out that in Boston (yes, the Boston of Michael Dukakis and John Kerry), “Air America’s two local stations checked in with a combined 0.6, taking last place overall.”

Maloney was the person who first highlighted that in New York, Air America is underperforming the all-Carribean music station it replaced. BoreAmerica.com — dedicated to keeping an eye on Air America — says that that the new ratings are even worse.

For an explanation of Air America’s performance, listen to it — go to their main page and find the Al Franken / Howard Dean interview. You’ll hear Franken complain to Dean that the reason no one hears the Democrat’s ideas is that they’re “shut out of Congress” (about 6:00 in), and Dean counter that it’s also because “the media doesn’t do their job.” The actual lack of an agenda other than obstruction doesn’t figure into their analysis.

Dean also says that Republicans “want to turn social security over to Enron.” (Franken failed to tell Dean to update his sound bites to reference companies that are actually still in business).

The best clue to Air America’s ratings problems is that Franken only gets excited when the conversation turns to tidal power. Seriously. I guess there’s an audience for that, but it’s probably a very … uh … select one.

(H/t: SoCalPundit)

Technorati Tags: Los Angeles, media

This entry was posted on Friday, July 22nd, 2005 at 3:48 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.