Michelle Malkin has a round—up of ratings data for Air America, a year into its life. the signs are not terribly encouraging. In most of its major cities, it has a found a niche audience of roughly one—third or less of the leading conservative talk radio station in the market. In fact, the data are even worse, given the fact that most major cities have at least two conservative talk stations.

Nobody seems to want to point out that Air America's biggest handicap, aside from the lameness of its programming, is that it faces subsidized competition from NPR talk shows, which don't cause the audience to suffer through annoying commercials. To admit this would be to concede that NPR is left wing, and that government subsidies are a bad thing.

Thomas Lifson  3 02 05