From Buckley to Fox News to Air America
Popular Government, without popular information . . . is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both.
—James Madison
If you tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
—Unknown
Rhetoric is the principal thing. It precedes all thoughtful action.
—William F. Buckley Jr.
It’s late October 1979 and I’ve been invited to go on Larry King’s coast-to-coast radio show at midnight for three hours to talk about our third edition of Who Runs Congress? I know only what everyone does about King—he’s an everyman who’s curious, respectful, has no known ideology . . . and a very big audience much coveted by authors.
I pull my motorcycle into an Arlington, Virginia, suburban complex of large glass buildings overlooking brightly lit parking areas with zero cars or people at this time of night. I go to the assigned, unmarked door at 11:30, enter the code I’ve been given, then hear nothing. OK, I’m early. Ten minutes later, I hit the code again; again nada. At ten of twelve, a bit more anxious, I buzz up but still hear and see nothing and nobody. Then, approaching panic—“Did they cancel? Is it the wrong night?”—I buzz at 11:58 . . . and the door opens.
I take an elevator to the twelfth floor, am greeted by exactly no one, and shout out Larry’s name. I hear his familiar, gravelly Brooklyn voice sand-papered by years in the Miami market. “Over here, Mark.” I walk into a red-carpeted room where he sits like some wizardy Willy Wonka but instead of a Chocolate Factory there’s a huge console of blinking lights and knobs. He waves me in, gives a quick hello, shushes me as he almost immediately announces into a mic, “Hello, America, this is Larry King of Mutual Broadcasting. I’m with Mark Green, Nader’s right-hand man and author of a new edition of Who Runs Congress?, the huge best-seller that tells us what’s wrong with Washington and what you can do about it.” He invites me to briefly summarize the book, asks for callers, takes a quick break, and then it’s three hours of “Hello, Tulsa, you’re on with Mark Green . . . Hello, San Diego, you’re on with Mark Green . . . Hello, Chicago . . .”
Now, I’ve done a fair amount of ad hoc radio and TV in the Seventies on various books and causes. But nothing has proven as vivid as the sense on King’s show that I’m talking to the entire country one by one, each voice a different accent and attitude—this being well before the now-instantaneous interactivity of Twitter, Facebook, et al.—when King’s giant control board is, in effect, the smartphones in our hands.
For years following, Larry has me periodically on his radio and TV programs and asks me to sit in for him on his CNN Larry King Live show on Super Tuesday, 1988, when I quiz a young-looking Al Gore on why he couldn’t win outside his southern base. But that night in northern Virginia, I drive home at 3 a.m. along completely empty highways taking with me not a lifetime supply of chocolate but a lifelong ardor for this electronic platform.
Everyone quotes Shakespeare’s “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” but in fact what revolutionaries and generals first do is seize broadcast stations because everyone—monarchs, presidents, even dictators—needs to win hearts and minds. When 100 disgruntled people protested Romania’s communist leader Ceausescu, they died . . . but when 100,000 took to the streets, he did. As Thomas Jefferson famously put it, “If I had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”
By the late 1970s, I also somehow come to the attention of Warren Steibel, the producer of Bill Buckley’s Firing Line since its inception in 1966. It’s the leading public affairs television show of the era starring the leading conservative of the era—a program and person who together become second only to Ronald Reagan in influencing the Left-Right tug-of-war over that half century. “Would you be interested in coming on in the role of Examiner for the last 15 minutes of a couple of shows we’re taping next month?” He explains that they pay $750 per, which is a lot of money then to a Naderite, and adds that “although I’m a liberal, the show of course is guided by Bill’s orientation and smarts but he’s fair to all.” That turns out to be true since the program, despite involving battles, “is like a Monty Python parody—everyone is so polite and genteel,” according to Buckley biographer Sam Tanenhaus. The host does indeed combine personal civility, humor, big words, and a razor-sharp intelligence—or as he later tells me, “I’m quick but not deep.”
Eager to match up against the country’s leading conservative debater, I agree to these two shows. That begins a couple-decade run of nearly 100 shows either as examiner or guest, including his very last one in 1999 in the program’s record-setting thirty-third year as a talk show with one host.
Buckley was born to privilege and then defended it robustly for a lifetime.
The scion and namesake of an oil tycoon, William Francis Buckley Jr. had personal tutors and education in Europe along with his nine siblings. As a five-year-old, he petitioned his parents to get his father’s middle name of “Frank” instead of the “sissy name” of Francis, but the young Buckley did pick up Senior’s sarcastic dismissals of other opinions that didn’t conform to the two major elements of their lives—Catholicism and Conservatism. If Nader was the son of Nathra and Winsted, Connecticut, Bill was the son of William and Sharon, Connecticut.
He admitted about his prep school days, “I could not understand; it seemed to me that anyone who was not an isolationist or a Catholic was simply stupid.” In early 1940s England, this won him few friends. It was only at Yale that Buckley gained any sense of proportion and semi-tolerance. The school both challenged his reactionary views and taught him how to defend them. And it was at Yale that he sharpened his sparring style, eventually becoming the debate team’s captain and making friends despite his brusque manner, which friends understood as efficiency rather than rudeness.
His scathing 1951 assault, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom, won him national attention, if not critical acclaim, at just 25. Critics mostly panned his unsubtle argument that the Ivy League university had become a haven of godless collectivists that scorned traditional American values. But he gained admirers of his ilk and a big share of a marketplace that lacked many—indeed any—other entertaining conservatives.
A few years later, Buckley released McCarthy and His Enemies, a defense of the red-baiter—a personal friend of his—as an unsung patriot whose honor was wrongly maligned. Then in 1955, with support from donors and his father, Buckley founded National Review, a magazine of conservative thought that sought to inspire an intellectual counter-revolution. But when the National Review defended segregation—concluding that Caucasians were “for the time being . . . the advanced race”—it expanded his renown though not his reputation. (He later recanted.)
In 1965, the year of LBJ’s Great Society, Buckley ran a quixotic yet highly publicized campaign for New York City mayor. When the press queried, “What would he do if he won?” he quipped, “demand a recount.” More enduringly, the next year Buckley created Firing Line. There’s been nothing quite like it before or since. For a full hour, he had an in-depth conversation with one major figure usually on one topic, such as programs on race relations with James Baldwin, capital punishment with Norman Mailer, welfare with Daniel Patrick Moynihan, arms control with Edward Teller, and economics with Milton Friedman.
During this period, he not only ran the National Review but also authored some 50 books—spy novels, autobiographies, books on music and sailing—and wrote 5,000 newspaper columns and articles. All of which laid the foundation of the conservative movement that would realign American politics.
Can you think of the Buckley of today? Neither can I.
The drill is always the same. I arrive at the Midtown studio at 120 East 35th Street a half hour early to start reviewing my notes while in the makeup chair. Bill breezes into makeup ten minutes before taping, always “pleasantly disheveled” in the description of Gary Wills, with his treasured clipboard and pen in hand to play with his opening statement and possible questions on one sheet of paper. We’d briefly review the show’s subject, sometimes chat about the news of the day, then quickly walk onto the set where I’d meet the guest and say hi to an audience of a couple dozen Catholic high school students sitting on pillows.
Opening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, he introduces me always with some affectionate put-down, such as “Mark Green is an ardent and learned liberal wittily and informatively engaged in furthering the cause of the Devil.” Then he interviews the guest, during which time I’m listening carefully since I have to play off something either of them say and not open myself to a put-down so erudite that I don’t understand it. In my 15 minutes, I try to question unexamined premises, omitted counter-arguments, and slippery factoids while we periodically tease each other in the jocular way that respectful rivals do. So when he refers to my political losses and alleged socialist views, I volley back calling him “Mr. 13 percent” for his mayoral total and wonder whether his dictionary ended in 1850.
We’re not friends but stay friendly, using each other as avatars of the opposition. He occasionally asks me to lunch to probe my take on issues, as a museum curator might examine a rare specimen. He invites me to a dinner at his elegant East Side mansion in the late ’90s where I’m on the menu as 25 staff of the National Review quiz me for an hour on the upcoming national election and liberalism. In return, he accepts my invitation to be one of the four bold-faced names that year who sit for dinner and exchange with the major donors to the Democracy Project. But in what I can only describe as being “punked” by a performance artist, that evening he merely reads word for word from a forthcoming New York Times magazine article he’d written about his descent to the Titanic. The audience and I are understandably perplexed and disappointed.
But having reviewed hundreds of pages of our on-air conversations, I now can’t find a cross word between us, despite his iconic Cheshire Cat grin that makes him always seem on the edge of eating his prey. Guest Ed Koch, however, is pretty contemptuous (no surprise there) and nuclear physicist (and Dr. Strangelove model) Edward Teller condescending (ditto). Three shows stand out in my memory.
First, in 1993 we do a program entitled “Resolved: Political Correctness Is a Menace and a Bore” with Buckley, Robert Bork, and Ira Glasser for the affirmative and Cornell West, Leon Botstein, and me for the negative. In an exchange still relevant, I figure out that PC is whatever is popular that your team disagrees with, though the Right has weaponized this tactic far more effectively.
The second was on March 30, 1981. After completing a taping, we look up on the overhead monitors to see that President Reagan, Bill’s close ally and friend, has been shot. Everyone freezes. Bill only says, “I wonder what was bugging that guy” as he hurries away to get updated.
Finally, there’s his 1,504th and last show on December 14, 1999. (“We lasted so long,” Steibel explains to me, “because we made sure to be hosted by a South Carolina PBS station proud of the association, not a big-city station, which would consider us out of fashion some year.)” For this finale, he faces a panel comprising his successor Rich Lowry, fellow travelers Bill Kristol and Rick Brookhiser, and his three surviving Examiners—Jeff Greenfield, Michael Kinsley, and me (Al Lowenstein having died nearly two decades before). As we are getting seated before a special, invited audience, I think two things: no women or minorities around; and, while some ungenerous critics impute to him a genteel anti-Semitism, all four Examiners over the life of the show are indeed Jewish, which probably traces to his regard for a group producing worthy intellectual adversaries.
On this two-hour special, we watch as clips are shown of some of his most intriguing panelists—including Nixon, Reagan, Ali, Woody Allen, Bill Kunstler, Ken Galbraith, Mother Teresa, and Allen Ginsberg chanting an unhurried version of his Hare Krishna. We toss around the subject matter of the media in America, with all of us lauding the length and depth of Firing Line and Bill lamenting the medium’s shortening of thought. He notes that while he used to get 15 to 17 minutes on the Today show, “now you’ve got to call a meeting of the Board if you go longer than 7 minutes.” We speculate about how much briefer talk shows and public conversation could go, not then anticipating Twitter, Vine, or emojis. He asks me in particular if I “learned anything after nearly 100 appearances and what you might do now that you are going to be mayor of New York,” and then seeks our general thoughts about the political divide in the country.
Kinsley: Many people are hypocrites. They want change but are [against] any particular change that upsets them.
Green: There is a schizophrenia. Ideologically the country is fairly conservative—big government is bad, keep our taxes low—congratulations, Bill, 33 years later. But then operationally people immediately turn around and say provide seniors with low-cost or free prescription drugs and have regulations so HMOs don’t require my wife to leave a maternity ward after 48 hours. There is this clash between theory and operations.
Buckley: I think that is unquestionably true. It has been pointed out that the American people are against the welfare state but they want welfare for themselves, and that is a problem of insufficient knowledge.
Green: McGovern once said he knew he had lost in 1972 when he was in the supermarket and spoke to someone who denounced big government as they paid for their food with food stamps. He said to himself, “I’m gone.”
Then it’s time for Buckley to be gone. As this debonair polymath—author, publisher, sailor, harpsichordist, TV personality—comes to his closing remarks, it is touching and surprising to see tears well up in his eyes. He thanks Steibel because “without him nothing would have worked. So there it is, ladies and gentlemen. I wish you Godspeed . . . Please bear in mind all I have recommended in the last 30 years, tell your children and neighbors all those good things, say your prayers, stay healthy, and thanks for sticking with Firing Line all this time.”
But, unfortunately, that does not turn out to be the last word.
Later that same day, Bill tapes a Nightline also about his final show and television career. Ted Koppel surprises him by airing the famous ABC clip from the poisonous Buckley-Vidal debate at the 1968 Republican Convention when Vidal calls him a “crypto-Nazi” and Bill, rising from his seat with eyes bulging, snarls, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” As I watch Buckley that night on Nightline watching the tape, he seems stunned. After that show, reports Tanenhaus, who’s in the audience, “he made a beeline to me and said ‘I thought that tape had been destroyed.’” He is obviously distressed since “it was the one time [on air] that he had lost his cool. He regretted it for a very long time.”
I last see him at a cocktail party reception for him in early 2007 at George Plimpton’s home. “How you doing, Bill?” I ask. “Decomposing” is all he says. He died February 27, 2008, at age 82.
Crossfire, Wiseguys, Hardball
Buckley would no doubt be mortified should his television legacy turn out to be not the leisurely, substantive Firing Line but instead that Buckley-Vidal exchange. According to at least the 2015 documentary Best of Enemies, that mud fight launches an era where hosts and guests bully, talk over, and growl at each other. An SNL parody of a then-popular 60 Minutes segment—of Dan Aykroyd barking “Jane, you ignorant slut” at Jane Curtain—becomes the epitome of the genre.
Both traditions become part of my electronic experience. On the one hand, for much of the past 30 years, I end up as a regular panelist on programs that sometimes reflect the frisson of the Buckley-Vidal exchanges of 1968. Yet my own weekly Both Sides Now radio show starting in 2011 embraces the motto, “We exchange ideas, not insults . . . we sharpen differences or try to bridge them.” Among our stable of conservatives is the same Rich Lowry, Bill’s brilliant successor and co-participant on the last Firing Line.
Shortly after I start doing Firing Line, I get a call from Randy Douthit, one of the original producers of CNN at its start in 1980. He’s seen me with Buckley and asks if I’d come on its new half-hour, weekday evening show Crossfire. I’m impressed that anyone would try a cable channel with news 24 hours a day and that they could do a 30-minute live news debate every night.
Two nights later, I’m driving far up Wisconsin Avenue NW to a shabby TV studio that was CNN’s first one in D.C. After the briefest of orientations, I find it all doable so long as I stay poised and listen to guests intently even as co-host Pat Buchanan periodically interrupts me with something so reactionary that Molly Ivins would later famously say it sounded better in the original German.
The first guest is a former historian and second-term Republican congressman from Georgia, who easily parries my questions about President Reagan’s economic ideas and stays unflappable and fluent throughout. Guy has a future, I think to myself of Newt Gingrich.
I sit in a dozen times a year when regular host Tom Braden—a former CIA operative and author of a book that became Eight Is Enough on TV—couldn’t. I’m Mark Green on the Left . . . and I’m Pat Buchanan on the Right. Welcome to Crossfire. The pace is very different from Firing Line, with interruptions encouraged and speed essential because Pat is very quick-thinking and -talking. Ideologically, like Buckley, he too sees himself as an über-Catholic and conservative. But having been Nixon’s hatchet man and a natural brawler—he was the author of the term “Silent Majority” and urged Nixon to burn the Watergate tapes—he displays little of Bill’s suave persona. But he proves valuable training for later TV interviews and campaign debates, although a habit of sassy, curt replies can be off-putting to some voters and politicians.
I also periodically go on with columnist Robert Novak, a true Washington institution who is called “the Prince of Darkness” for his menacing, scowling, literally spitting manner on TV. But unlike Pat, who is nasty on and off air, Bob is a mensch when the red light is off—we maintain a friendly relationship for the rest of his life.
It’s through Crossfire that I meet with many of the leading politicians on both sides of the aisle over the next two decades. Strangest is Rev. Pat Robertson during the 1988 presidential race. After I show a fair amount of skepticism on air about his prospects, he stares at me during a break and says, “Son, I am going to be president of the United States.” And funniest is when SNL’s Al Franken and I do a bit at the 1988 Democratic Convention in Atlanta when we imitate a Crossfire segment where I spew liberal stuff, but, instead of fighting back as the supposed right-wing blowhard, he simply says, “Hmm, you’re right . . . hey, good point,” and figuratively lies down. It gets a good response, except from Ed (no relation to Ted) Turner, the channel’s CEO, who tells us to cut it out because we’re making fun of its franchise.
I’m rotating again as the regular liberal substitute with Kinsley—among the best essayists/editors of my generation. But he’s more in the H. L. Mencken tradition of being a skeptic of everything rather than a robust progressive debater.
Which brings me to a major “sliding doors” moment in 1989. CNN has fired Braden because he really couldn’t keep up with Pat. On Thanksgiving Day, I take a call from Douthit who asks, “Would you like to be the permanent host ‘on the Left’?” I express my surprise and delight but explain that would require either that I move my family back to Washington or I become a resident of NYC-Amtrak-D.C. “Can I think about it for a day?” “Sure.”
But that evening he calls back. “Um, sorry Mark. I have to withdraw the offer. Pat simply won’t go on with you every night. We’ll be asking Kinsley and I’m sure he’ll say yes.” I’m stunned, both flattered and angry. Does Buchanan, who’s hired talent, have that kind of line-up leverage? Turns out he does. Two days later, I decide to fly down uninvited to Atlanta to make Ed Turner explain the decision. Now he’s the surprised one. He politely sees me and implies that while Pat does not have the right, he has the power, as the show’s top dog, to in effect choose the person he goes up against nightly.
The choice of a replacement for Braden becomes a mini-controversy, with, for example, the leading liberal media watchdog group, FAIR—Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting—weighing in. FAIR’s long been critical of how one-sided talk TV and radio are and is particularly upset that a political moderate like Kinsley—who had recently lauded Margaret Thatcher in a Time essay—is the choice. Jeff Cohen of FAIR later elaborates his view in an article and book: “Progressive leaders (and Crossfire producers) preferred Green, a Democratic activist and author of books critical of corporate power. [They believe] that Green—more combative and partisan than Kinsley—was feared by Buchanan because of his tough and uncompromising debating style . . . CNN sources said that Mr. Green was rejected because of Mr. Buchanan’s personal contempt for him.”
Though I occasionally come back on as Kinsley’s substitute, never discussing the episode with Buchanan, I stay in NYC to keep on track to run and win and lose for political office. Pat stays on Crossfire until he leaves to run for president in 1992 and 1996, and ends up as the house conservative on MSNBC until his views on a less Caucasian America become untenable. The show goes through various iterations—with folks like James Carville, Geraldine Ferraro, Bill Press, and Mary Matalin rotating on and off. Then, in October 2004, Jon Stewart in effect TKOs the show when he says on the program that calling Crossfire a debate show “is like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition . . . It’s hurting America. Here is what I wanted to tell you guys: Stop. You have a responsibility to the public discourse and you fail miserably.” CNN president Jonathan Klein cancels the program three months later, saying that he wants to move the network away from “head-butting debate shows.”
It returns for a final try in late 2013 but is pulled for good a year later. I ask CNN president head Jeff Zucker what happened. “It was a good try but an old formula. The audience had moved on.”
One afternoon preparing for Crossfire in 1994, I take a call from journalist Chris Matthews suggesting that he had the energy, knowledge, and chops to be a good substitute panelist “on the left” as well. I’m convinced and pass along his idea . . . which proves to be not just self-serving but also true. His popular book Hardball and increasing TV appearances lead to his own show of the same name on MSNBC that I periodically appear on over the next decade.
One program I’m on stands out because it goes viral. He’s quizzing a Kevin James (not the actor but head of some libertarian group) on President Bush’s 2008 comment that Senator Barack Obama is an “appeaser” for suggesting that we talk to our enemies. James keeps bombastically and robotically equating Obama with British PM Neville Chamberlain, who negotiated badly with the Nazis in 1938. Then, 19 times over an agonizing three-plus minutes, Chris keeps asking James what Chamberlain did. But it becomes quickly clear that he has no idea.
For all this time, I see on the monitor that I’m on a split screen. So I limit myself to an amused look, knowing not to interrupt with my two cents because Chris is both destroying this guy and loving it. When James finally admits “I don’t know,” Chris triumphantly announces, “You don’t know, thank you . . . Well, let’s go to Mark Green, who knows something about history. Mark?” Feeling embarrassed for this guy, I say, “Kevin—when you’re in a hole, stop digging.” At over 600,000 hits, this becomes one of the most viewed Hardball clips ever.
Last, I appear every Tuesday evening for eight years on NY1’s program Wiseguys with Koch and D’Amato. When asked in 2002 why I’m joining the show, I explain it’s for diversity: “I’m the young guy with hair” . . . not to mention that Ed’s more openly conservative stances as he ages make him largely indistinguishable from his close friend D’Amato.
When the program realized that it needed a more Democratic voice, they initially considered Mario Cuomo. Ed, who’s had a tense relationship with Mario after their races against each other in 1977 for mayor and 1982 for governor, says, “It’s fine with me if Al’s OK with it.” But D’Amato refuses, then grudgingly agrees to me. I enjoy the show, which attracts a sizable and influential audience and is hosted by the provocative Dominick Carter. When either of them attacks me, which is often, I know to stay poised and never return the ad hominem attacks that are a hallmark of Ed’s debating style—I can only lose if I lose my temper responding to a three-term, now-80-something former mayor. And I love the 2-on-1 lineup, telling the many people who wonder about it, “It’s only fair.”
Foxy
During the spring of 2011, Harold Camping, an octogenarian preacher and Christian broadcaster, grabbed headlines for pinpointing a precise date for the Rapture—May 21, 2011. His followers quit their jobs and donated their savings to spread the word on thousands of billboards, while some even retreated into the mountains to await The Day. But when it passed and the Earth remained intact, a humbled Camping threw in the towel and announced that he would no longer be in the business of prophecy.
This is not a story that worries Fox Cable News. For while Camping finally acknowledged that the truth has consequences, the cable channel has rewritten Love Story’s famous Seventies axiom, “Fox means never having to say you’re sorry.”
I watch a lot of Fox’s prime-time lineup for my nationally syndicated radio show Both Sides Now. My experience is that this “news” channel couldn’t care less about its flood of false predictions and provable distortions night after night, month after month, year after . . . This is not a shocking revelation since its top star, Bill O’Reilly, is caught lying about his coverage of the Falklands War by David Corn and suffers no penalty since it’s seen as, well, routine. And when Benghazi, Lois Lerner, Fast and Furious, the Obamacare website, and the tape about Planned Parenthood fall well short of being “Obama’s Watergate,” they just either triple-down (1,100 segments on Benghazi) or move on to the next Breaking News! without breaking a sweat. What about this old tape of Rev. Wright’s worst sermons (implying that Obama heard and approved of them)! What about this (outlier) of a poll showing him again plummeting (apparently toward zero based on all their prior outlier polls)!
As for “low-information/low education” viewers holding Fox accountable, they are understandably bewildered by a blizzard of professionally crafted graphics, snark, hyperbole, lies, and rehearsed indignation. Nor is their audience very motivated to fact-check something since they’re only too happy to hear validation of their biases. I knew climate change was a hoax! One 2003 poll showed that 50 percent more Fox viewers thought that the United States had found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq than NBC, CNN, or ABC viewers.
Two of my Fox experiences back this up. O’Reilly apparently thinks that he can trap this liberal Jew with the question of whether I’m as much against allowing a menorah in a public square as a crèche. “Of course,” I answer since both violate the First Amendment’s church-state separation. But since that answer doesn’t advance his “narrative,” the next night O’Reilly laments on air something like “while Mark Green seems like a good guy, he was wrong to oppose a nativity scene yet allow a Menorah.” I e-mail his producer to ask for a retraction since that is only 180 degrees off what I said and believe. He writes back, “Well, you and Bill have a different interpretation of what you said.” Like misinterpreting a “yes” as a “no”?
A month after the Newtown shootings, producers at both O’Reilly and Hannity call within minutes of each other to ask me to come on that night because I’d written that if Megan’s Law requires sex offenders to publicly register their addresses, why not homes with registered firearms since pedophiles and guns can both do harm? I go on Hannity armed for his familiar tactics. First comes the loaded rhetorical question: “Mark, do you really think sex offenders and gun owners are the same?” I decide to go with candor, plus ask one of my own: “Of course not, since one person has engaged in illegal conduct and the other possesses a lawful weapon. But since either can result in great harm, like in Sandy Hook, wouldn’t you want to know as a parent if your child is living next door to an Adam Lanza with access to a gun?”
He wouldn’t answer my hypothetical as I had his, instead opting for personalization and falsehood. “Mark, do you own or have you ever used a gun?” “No, but what does that have to do with the policy we’re discussing? I’ve never gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel but I know it’s dangerous.” Then he wonders if I know that George Washington once said that gun ownership was not just a right, but something akin to a sacrament. “Rifles and pistols are equally indispensable . . . They deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.” I admit that I didn’t know the general said that, perhaps because he hadn’t. (The editor of the Papers of George Washington project at the University of Virginia has called that quote “either a complete fabrication or a case of misattribution.”)
But should something become too factually untenable even for them—i.e., Romney didn’t win the election, Shirley Sherrod wasn’t a “racist”—the channel can always retreat behind its impregnable wall of being “Fair and Balanced.” To prove their balance, Fox will put on some little-known “Democratic Strategist” who then imitates a local pick-up squad in the Fifties playing the Harlem Globetrotters while O’Reilly and Hannity say something outrageous and then ask Karl Rove, Sarah Palin, or John Bolton if they agree. “Bill, you’re right . . .”
I was surprised and amused when Roger Ailes himself, the founder of Fox, said to me at a social event—Peter Johnson Jr.’s Christmas party in 2003—“Mark, we really are fair and balanced.” I thought to myself, Wow! He’s so on message, so shamelessly assuming that saying makes it so, that he’s trying to persuade me. “Roger, really? You must know I don’t buy the slogan.” But I’m almost awed by someone who seems to believe that repetition creates reality.
So why not just accept that a cable channel reaching only 3 million average prime-time viewers in a country of 320 million is the price we pay for a First Amendment? Because Fox matters. A lot. For at least two reasons.
First, the conservative movement started going off the rails in the mid-1990s with the explosion of right-wing talk radio and Fox. That’s when Murdoch and Ailes revved up their perpetual-motion machine of grievance and fury at liberals, minorities, and “elites.” Journalist Jen Senko wondered how her friendly, popular, non-partisan Democratic father began turning into a snarling winger hating “the radical left” late that decade. She made a documentary called The Brainwashing of My Dad, which traced his transformation to long daily commutes to and from work when he would only listen to the vivid, vicious polemics of Bob Grant, Mark Levin, and Limbaugh, without any contrary voice, something Senko concluded was happening to millions of dads, uncles, aunts, etc. Her film concluded that talk radio involves one person talking almost as if to one other person, creating an intimate bond where “the thinking is done for you.” There’s no scientifically provable cause-and-effect here one way or the other, only that is was when the center in America started disappearing and the Republican Party began to have a fringe at the top.
Second, it’s now why the GOP can’t readily repair itself. Like an abusive spouse you can’t live with or without, Fox both provides national Republicans with a bridge to their base yet at the same time deepens the extremism that undermines a party trying to win the presidency. It’s why minutes on Fox are regarded by Republican presidential contenders as the surest way to talk to the basest of the base. It’s why grown-ups who know better, like Mitt Romney and John Boehner in 2012, would say only that they take President Obama “at his word” that he was an American citizen.
It’s hard to overstate Fox’s outsized influence on American politics and on the ongoing progressive-conservative clash. Consider what happened that fraught election night of November 2, 2000. George W. Bush’s first cousin, John Ellis, manned Fox’s decision desk, checking in frequently throughout the day with his cousins and the Florida governor, Jeb Bush. It fell to Ellis to make the calls of the states for Fox. Fox initially called Florida for Al Gore, then retracted that and, at Ellis’s direction, at 2 a.m. called Florida for his cousin. Ellis excitedly told his staff, “Jebbie says we got it!” He later gushed to a reporter, “It was just the three of us guys handing the phone back and forth—me with the numbers, one of them a governor, the other the president-elect. Now, that was cool.” Declaring Bush the winner led Gore to concede in a phone call to the governor but, when the vote tightened, Gore retracted his concession and appeared to be a sore loser for the duration of the recount.
Dismissing criticism of bias, Fox defenders usually simply repeat that “MSNBC is the liberal Fox.” Upon hearing this on one Both Sides Now program, the normally unflappable Arianna Huffington loses it: “But they just make stuff up!” To be sure, MSNBC is liberal and Fox conservative, which can affect their choice of whom to host prime-time and what to emphasize. But Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnell, and Chris Matthews would rather stab themselves in the eye than repeat something on air they know to be false, plus each of them relishes opportunities for serious conservatives to come on to debate, not to be patsies. Nor does MSNBC, as Fox does, in effect e-mail political talking points most mornings to its talent and staff. And Phil Griffin of MSNBC is not a former political operative like Ailes—the man who gave us “the New Nixon” and the Willie Horton ad.
A more credible critique comes from Frank Rich who, in an insightful New York magazine article, argues why liberals over-respond to Fox, given its parlous numbers nationally (albeit far more than MSNBC and CNN though far less than NPR). Rich is right to observe that, since Fox’s debut, the GOP has lost the presidential popular vote four of five times, in part because their eventual nominee was yanked to the right before trying to “Etch-A-Sketch” himself in the general election. And speaking of different audiences, while O’Reilly’s favorability numbers are nationally underwater, he’s popular enough with his crowd to reign as the number-one cable talk show and to make best-sellers out of such tripe as Killing Who-ever.
In sum, Fox is far better at inflaming its base than electing presidents. Best understanding Fox’s role as the modern incarnation of Neil Postman’s classic Amusing Ourselves to Death, David Frum calls it the “conservative entertainment complex.”
The Crash of Air America
I’m watching a Jets game in mid-December 2006 with my brother. “So what are you doing now?” Steve asks to catch up shortly after my loss to Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic attorney general primary.
“Well, I’m settling back into the Democracy Project and sitting in for a couple weeks as the host of my friend David Bender’s Air America radio show. I’ve been a frequent guest and think it’ll be fun.”
“How’s Air America going?”
“Not great. It’s just filed for Chapter 11 reorganization because its costs outran its model and they’re looking for a buyer to try to turn it around.”
“Maybe I’ll buy it.”
Whoa! What? “Steve, you know bricks-and-mortar real estate, not a talent-driven media firm. Are you kidding?”
Turns out he isn’t. Having taken S. L. Green Realty Corp. from a one-room office in the Franklin Building at the corner of 58th and Madison in 1981 into the largest owner of commercial buildings in Manhattan with a market cap of $12 billion, he’s apparently looking for a next thing and, to cite Google, “feeling lucky.” Three months and a lot of due diligence later, he signs a letter of intent to buy Air America out of bankruptcy for $4.25 million—to which Rush Limbaugh scoffs, “$4.25 million? I have that in my checking account”—and installs me as its president.
It was bad enough that by the early 2000s right-wing talk radio controlled 90 percent of all radio talk; that probably 90 percent of media property owners were wealthy Republicans; and that Fox’s Fleet Street graphics and propaganda were dominating cable TV. Yet at the same time, conservatives were winning the argument that The Media was dominated by the Left. This conclusion might be true if Stephen Colbert was being literal when he famously joked that “reality has a liberal bias.” Otherwise, it required this herculean suspension of disbelief, best described in Eric Alterman’s influential book, What Liberal Media?: that Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News were media also-rans; that NBC/ABC/CBS/NPR were left-wing equivalents of Beck/Savage/Levin (have they ever actually listened to Brian Lehrer, Leonard Lopate, and Terry Gross?); and that the Sunday shows don’t over-book Republican officials (“Get me McCain!”).
For one example, Joe Scarborough goes on a rant around Halloween 2015—on MSNBC no less—repeating and repeating to guest Mark Halperin that “nearly all the anchors and Sunday hosts are liberals—even Cronkite was a liberal.” He spits out the word like communist. Then I realize that, even if his definition of liberal is a bit elastic—Huntley and Brinkley? Scott Palley?—he’s missing the point, viz. that while everyone in the media has private beliefs, the question is whether they tilt the news that way. I doubt even Scarborough thinks that liberal Cronkite did. The true test of a good reporter, anchor—or scholar—is not whether they’re liberal or conservative but whether they’re intelligent, open-minded, science-based, factual. With those salient criteria, no wonder that most reporters and professors vote for, say, Kerry over Bush. That’s not prejudice, just the marketplace that conservatives usually embrace choosing who writes and teaches.
Yet by “working the refs,” in Alterman’s useful phrase, a Brent Bozell and Bernard Goldberg create entire careers portraying their audience as victims. GOP presidential contenders win points and applause whenever they ridicule a question as coming from “the liberal mainstream media.”
In this context, I’m eager to join the fray as president of Air America.
After President Reagan’s FCC ends the Fairness Doctrine in 1986, there are no rules requiring balance for a federal licensee using the public airwaves. So the private sector model of ads, ratings—and program directors at Clear Channel, Sinclair Broadcasting, and Salem Broadcasting—then could determine what Americans learn from a platform that 250 million listen to at some point in the year. That’s not far off from allowing GE to own I-95 and then permitting it to profile all Muslims or Mexicans driving from NYC to D.C.
In early 2003 wealthy Chicago Democrats Sheldon and Anita Drobney start talking with radio entrepreneur Jonathan Sinton about putting together a liberal network to challenge the near-monopoly on the Right. Although the Drobneys lack the deep pockets and temperament needed for such a huge enterprise, the idea, at least on paper, has political and perhaps commercial appeal, especially approaching the 2004 election year. It organically grows into a consortium of funders, talent, celebrities, and some radio hands who in mid-March announce with fanfare to a downtown Manhattan audience of 400—I’m among them—the plan to start Air America Radio later that month. Yoko Ono and Tim Robbins are there; so are the earliest talent—Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Marc Maron, Janeane Garafalo, Randi Rhodes, Mark Riley, Laura Flanders, and Sam Seder. CEO Mark Walsh, a digital entrepreneur and Internet advisor to the DNC, sends all into a frenzy when he announces, “We will stop the bile being shoved down the throats of radio listeners by the Right Wing!”
The plan is audacious: to create not a program but a network of 18 hours of programming a day to run on leased or owned stations around the country. And the publicity for the launch is enormous, alone worth millions of dollars, with the media relishing a promised fight within its own industry. Features appear in nearly all major publications and outlets, cresting with a favorable New York Times magazine cover story centered on Franken.
Then at noon, March 31, 2004, at the WLIB 1190 studios on the 14th floor at 34th and Park, it begins. “This is Al Franken speaking to you from 30,000 feet under Dick Cheney’s bunker and this is Air America Radio . . . We have watched the right wing take over the Congress, White House, and courts and, as insidiously, the airwaves. We need a great watchdog to track them and, until one comes along, I’ll have to do.” Michael Moore swings by for an interview, adding his cachet and cred.
It turns out that its first day is its best day.
An HBO documentary Left of the Dial depicts the swirl of high expectations, nervous talent, bustling staff, and money men reviewing their spreadsheets . . . and then the dawning of the sickening reality that the original funder, Evan Cohen, a slick-talking 30-something out of Guam, is a con artist who promised $30 million and misses by about 95 percent. When payroll checks start bouncing and the number-two and number-three stations in Chicago and LA drop the programming two weeks later, long faces replace the early ebullience. In an interview for this book, Walsh recalls a late-night meeting of investors, talent, and top managers right after the Drudge Report gleefully announces the bounced checks to staff and stations. He reports to the group that the company’s bank account, which is supposed to have $15 million in it, has double digits. As in $50. Franken cuts to the chase: “Does this mean we’re fucked?”
Looking back now, the Air America story really has three major elements: talent, ads, and money.
First, Air America certainly had the talent to survive and succeed:
Al Franken. A very thoughtful person despite his on-air goofy persona, Franken was a success at SNL, a best-selling author of books defrocking Limbaugh and O’Reilly, and a committed liberal when Sinton approaches him about joining the nascent network. Al is understandably skeptical about leaving his flourishing career for this leap of faith. (Ed Asner is approached about a show; “I’m an actor,” he replies.) Franken and his wife Franny spend several hours with, among others, David Bender, the original political director of Air America, as they review the potential and pitfalls as well as Franken’s long-term interest in a Minnesota Senate seat.
Once Al’s in, however, he’s all in. At the start, he is the face of the franchise, displaying the authentic humor and work ethic that have characterized his SNL, radio, writing, and Senate careers. In markets where he’s on a comparable signal, he equals or bests Limbaugh’s numbers. (Today, what’s funny is how studiously unfunny he is as a steadily rising influence in the Senate.)
Rachel Maddow was a bartender with enough self-confidence to think she could excel when a local radio station runs a contest to be a talk-show host. She enters, wins, learns on air, and becomes an early hire for Air America. Bouncing around between different shows and times, she starts on Unfiltered with Lizz Winstead (one of the founders of The Daily Show) and rap star Chuck D. Despite being insanely relegated for a time to the 5 to 6 a.m. slot, she becomes the shooting star at Air America and then at MSNBC because she’s a “brainful of joy,” according to Winstead.
When I become her “boss,” as she affectionately refers to me, I watch her unique “prep” before a show: starting religiously about five hours pre-air, she takes over a large area of office floor space to lay out multiple copies of her planned two-hour program—oddly, she prefers scripts that she writes to taking calls—and then barely looks up as she keeps rewriting and learning her material. When in 2008 she asks to be excused from the first hour of her daily radio show to be on a new MSNBC panel program headed by David Gregory called 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I can’t just let her out of her contractual obligation. But I also want to do everything feasible to accommodate this popular trooper. I meet with MSNBC’s Phil Griffin and 15 of our and their producers at their offices to figure out a simulcast of her on the panel’s first hour, which becomes the first hour of her show. (The show doesn’t last long at MSNBC, but she sure does.)
Marc Maron. A comic genius with the potential to be the next Imus because of his creative, manic mind, we don’t get along well for most of our time together—he treats me like a “suit” . . . until a night that Deni and I catch his raw, painfully honest stand-up in the Village. He sees me, and after that I’m a human rather than merely management. In his years at Air America, however, he’s jerked around, moved around, fired, and rehired. But toward the end of my tenure, a coveted slot opens up from 3 to 6 drive-time. While several real talents compete for it, I push for him, but the new owner chooses a very capable lawyer/talk-show host, Ron Kuby, instead. Maron then exits for the final time. (He’s obviously gone on to enormous success with a popular podcast out of his garage, WTF with Marc Maron.)
These hosts and others have the skills to excel and compete on any station, except for the dual hurdles of “No Buy” lists and weak signals.
Commercial radio is driven by ads, yet the gatekeepers who place them—at companies and ad agencies—are largely older guys not much interested in outspoken progressive views. An ABC Radio Network memo of December 25, 2006, for example, is headlined (caps in original): “**for immediate attention** air america blackout” and explains that 100 ABC advertisers insist that “none of their commercials air during air america programming.” Among advertisers listed are Bank of America, ExxonMobil, FedEx, General Electric, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Walmart, and the U.S. Navy.
Ironically, six years later when Limbaugh calls student Sandra Fluke a “slut,” many corporate advertisers pull ads from all talk shows—right and left—out of concern over audience backlash. Revenue for talk radio, including Rush, falls significantly.
And the economics of distribution becomes a dead weight. Big signals in big cities cover a large area while stations with smaller signals reach fewer people and are “in the glove compartment,” according to an industry joke about where they appear on the dial. With owners like Murdoch buying big signals at the start and then sustaining losses while programs find their audience, Air America has no such deep pockets and long runways.
When Cohen is forced out, he sells the company to Piquant, an investment group led by the earnest Douglas Kreeger, part of the Durst real estate family. He and others raise enough to stop checks from bouncing, cover health insurance, and keep the hobbled entity going. This group in turn sells to technology investor Rob Glaser of Seattle, founder of RealNetworks, who keeps it solvent—with ACLU honcho and music impresario Danny Goldberg as its president—until it files for Chapter 11 in the fall of 2006.
Steve buys it to challenge himself in a new venue while I want to get back in the fight, albeit in the new arena of media management. The good news is that the staff and interested parties are relieved to see the network stay afloat with what appears to be a stable team—Steve financially and me programmatically. But the bad news is that we are neither billionaires nor radio professionals and what is needed, now in hindsight, is a tandem combining a Murdoch with patient capital (which isn’t Steve) and a radio magician like Mel Karmazin, who founded Sirius (which isn’t me).
The restart though—again—is fun and promising. We throw a launch party at my downtown loft for 150 industry leaders curious whether we could pull off this post–Chapter 11 rescue and to hear from President Clinton, who comes and speaks. He’s on message: “If anyone can make this work, it’s Steve and Mark . . . and it has to work. I can’t tell you how frustrating it was as president to know that large areas of the country would only learn about my policies from Limbaugh and his allies without hearing from our side.” Here’s my message that evening: “Our goal is to be profitable and influential, and it can’t be one without the other.”
I get Mayor Bloomberg to be the first guest on my weekend show 7 Days in America. He jokes, “Who would have thought we’d be here with you as the media guy and me as the politician?” We announce “Air America 2.0” when a dozen of the biggest progressive names are interviewed on air by our talent—like Senator Obama, both Clintons, Senator Kerry, Nader, Reich, Sorensen, etc. I spend quality time on talent, staff, media . . . but the bulk of my time is spent on reaching out to hundreds of potential investors, corporations, unions, and ad agencies in a largely futile search for gold.
We successfully shrink overhead from $13 million to $9 million annualized, as talent contracts are halved. But while Chapter 11 is designed to allow a person or firm time to restructure to survive, it also casts a pall that scares investors away. “Once bitten, twice shy” is how Sinton describes it in Left of the Dial. My time as Air America president begins to feel eerily like my time as Ramsey’s campaign manager in the summer of 1976, beginning with high hopes while the news only gets worse and worse.
Affiliates fall from 90 to 66, as our weekly affiliate reports would regularly show stations flipping to sports or Hispanic programming, the two hot spots of radio. When Franken departs as planned to run back in Minnesota, Randi Rhodes becomes our highest-rated host. That’s a problem. Although someone with real on-air skills, she’s also a very insecure and angry person who screams at staff, at me, at everyone. That can be tolerated in a business of driven prima donnas, but then two unusual things happen. One morning we’re informed by her agent that she’s been mugged in front of her residence and shoved to the ground, breaking her front teeth. Except it turns out that she was seen exiting a bar and falling down. She recovers and returns to air. Then late afternoon April 3, 2008, I’m sent an online video of Randi calling Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton “fucking whores” at an Air America–sponsored event for our station 960 AM in San Francisco.
My first reaction is disbelief, immediately followed by “looks like we’re gonna be losing our most popular talent.” Several days follow of back-and-forth between her and me, on Larry King Live, online, in the Huffington Post. She portrays herself as an Alfred Dreyfus being unjustly punished for her free speech; in my view, she has a right to say whatever she wants but not the right to a guaranteed job at a media company with standards—and while it may be hard to draw lines, surely she’s crossed them at 120 mph. She’s then suspended, refuses to apologize, jumps to another network, is later picked up by Premiere, and, with her affiliates dwindling, eventually departs radio altogether in mid-2014.
The “whore” controversy is transpiring just as Charlie Kireker, a wealthy, progressive businessman from Vermont and among the earliest investors, comes forward offering to buy the company at a steep discount from Steve, who jumps at the chance because of its financial descent. Charlie, on the other hand, has the dream of wedding his political values to a media platform. He too tries everything he can think of—including giving a show to the ill-suited Montel Williams—until January 21, 2010, when he and I walk into a room of very grim-faced staff to announce that he’s that day filing for Chapter 7. It’s over. It turns out to be a memorably bad week for progressives also watching Scott Brown win Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat and the Supreme Court announce the Citizens United decision. A conservative trifecta.
I’m constantly asked, why did Air America fail while right-wing talk succeeds? The simplest answer may be the most accurate: “It died stillborn,” in Senator Franken’s view, and never recovered from the death spiral that Evan Cohen sent it into.
Alan Colmes, a successful radio host and ex-occasional sidekick to Hannity, thinks that “because conservatives were so entrenched on heritage stations, the progressives on Air America were relegated to smaller, less powerful signals, underperforming signals that could not compete with their more established counterparts, certainly not without lots of promotion and time to develop, both of which were denied in most cases.”
Paul Farhi, the Washington Post’s media critic, says “there’s a liberal tendency toward inclusiveness and reflectiveness—both deadly qualities in a medium [described as] ‘The World Wrestling Federation of Ideas.’” Danny Goldberg gives credit to wealthy conservative investors “who understood that talk radio goes directly into the brain of passengers in cars, unlike even cable TV when a viewer might be getting a beer or dinner. So they spent heavily while a George Soros chose not to get involved.”
In my version of Fantasy Radio, if Evan Cohen had combined Charlie Kireker’s integrity and money with Mark Walsh’s digital smarts—who said at the launch that “Air America should not be radio with an Internet component but Internet streaming with a radio component”—and if there had been no “No Buy” lists, then Air America’s talent would likely have found their audience.
Instead, we’re left with two realities. The first is that progressives lost a rare opportunity to occupy a prized public space in an important medium. Failing means that it’ll probably be years before anyone else tries, although the evolution of radio might produce a different and far-lower-cost model, as happened with television—so rather than stations selling audiences to advertisers, they instead aggregate and distribute content edgier than NPR to mobile devices and online for fee-paying listeners. Or some version of a revived Fairness Doctrine might be enacted based on the analysis of media-watchers John Nichols and Robert McChensey, who surveyed the precipitous decline in working journalists in the digital age where ads follow algorithms: “Journalism is a classic ‘public good.’ Something society needs and people want but market forces are now incapable of generating in sufficient quality or quantity. The institution should be understood the way we understand universal public education, military defense, public health, and transportation infrastructure.”
The second reality is that the Air America experiment produced at least three spectacular legatees—Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, and Marc Maron—and surviving it are current liberal radio talents like Thom Hartmann, Ed Schultz, and Stephanie Miller. The continuing legacy of right-wing talk is that there are still vast swatches of the country that swallow their extremism whole. That creates an irrational, intemperate Republican base that in turn produces a Trump and sabotages governance. They reap market shares of 10 percent but not presidential elections requiring 50 percent plus one.
Be careful what you wish for.
Hurricane Huffington
An eager, poised, attractive woman comes up to me and Deni at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles explaining her “Counter-Convention” across the street to expand the debate beyond just whatever Gore is saying—would we come? We do, enjoy it, and that begins my ongoing relationship with Arianna Huffington, a force of nature best captured by comedian Tracey Ullman. Her impersonation of Arianna—multi-tasking, dictating, writing, calling, editing while getting ready for bed—is more Huffington than Huffington.
Bill Moyers thinks she’s one of the smartest people he ever met while a critic calls her the “most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus.”
Born in Greece in 1950, Arianna Stassinopoulos often spends her time as a child alone reading and has to be nudged by her parents to make friends. While a teen in Greece, she spots a photograph of Cambridge University in a magazine that set stars in her eyes. Arianna applies and, somewhat miraculously for a Hellenic no-name, talks and earns her way in. Once there, she brushes up against her peers’ classism. (She errs in front of her classmates by referring to horseback riding. “What other kind of riding would there be?” they laughed. “Donkey riding?”) She takes care not to present herself as the conservative she then was but instead as ideologically elastic, a habit that resurfaced and remained decades later.
Freshly out of school, her anti-feminist book The Female Woman is an enormous success, soon translated into 11 languages. In the coming years, she writes a slew more books, some on the need for politics to be injected with spirituality as well as two well-received biographies of Maria Callas and Picasso. While promoting her Callas tome, she lands and stays in New York and meets Michael Huffington, an oil and gas heir. Within a year, they marry and together begin plotting a political career that would, they hope, lead to the White House.
They get as far as a congressional seat in 1993, which brings her into Newt Gingrich’s orbit. Although then openly conservative, she urges fellow Republicans to fight poverty and bridge inequality as part of the “core of true conservatism.” But she becomes increasingly dismayed with their obsessive focus on slashing the budgets of programs for the poor. She begins building friendships with people to her left, like Franken. A decade and a half before Occupy Wall Street, Huffington writes about “two nations”—the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots.
After her husband’s narrow defeat in a 1994 Senate race against Diane Feinstein and their subsequent divorce, she starts to aim her barbs at the Right. What matters, she stresses, is not the Left-Right divide but the Rich-Poor one. The same woman who as a young conservative became the first female head of the Cambridge Union debating society decamps for Los Angeles and takes up liberal causes, making yet a new circle of friends.
What follows is a far-fetched, brief run for governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger in a 2003 special election.
That fall Deni and I are visiting our friends Katherine and Ken Lerer at their Utah ski home when Kenny asks what I’d think about a liberal version of the Drudge Report run by Arianna. “That’s a great, big idea—and she has the energy, brains, and contacts to pull it off, if anyone can.” Kenny then includes me in an original stable of several dozen bold-faced names who will write unpaid blogs to attract eyeballs and hires Arianna to be the content Zen Master as he figures out financing. After being called the Lerer-Huffington Post for a day, the modest Lerer takes his name off the masthead. Two years later, it expands to eight verticals and passes Drudge in uniques (separate monthly readers) with 6 million. By 2016, it has 90 verticals (Politics, Media, Parenting, Gay Voices, etc.), eight bureaus around the world (France, Australia, Greece, etc.), and over 100 million uniques. I now write a featured column every Monday based on the radio show that she and I create in 2011.
As Air America is going down, Arianna and I are at the Bedford, New York, wedding of the Lerers’ son Benjamin (later to go on to found Thrillist). I explain what’s happening to Air America since she, Ron Reagan, and I have a weekly program on it. “Instead of a program with three like-minded people which lacks tension,” I explain, as a couple hundred guests gyrate to “Dancing in the Streets,” “how about we start a free-standing weekend show with me as moderator, you as the liberal, and we find a non-crazy conservative woman as the conservative? We can call it Both Sides Now. With all talk radio being largely male, and hard-right or occasionally left, we’d stand out.”
She pauses, thinks for a moment, says, “Sounds great! Yes!” and extends her hand to shake on it. That both starts our show—we quickly settle on an enthusiastic Mary Matalin as the conservative—and tells me a lot about how super-smart entrepreneurs operate. Two years later, she has to bow out because of her staggering corporate responsibilities at the Huffington Post, especially after it’s bought by AOL for $315 million. In her place, we create rotating panels of some of the best political talkers anywhere on air—Shrum, Alter, Reagan, Corn, Joe Conason, Gara Lamarche; also, Matalin, Lowry, Frum, Ron Christie, Charles Cooke, and for a while Erick Erickson. It’s still on 200 stations five years later because it proves to be easier to air one interesting weekend program than an entire 24/7 network.