Air America Radio filed for bankruptcy today when negotiations with a creditor broke down. It has apparently been losing money for some time. This is normal for a startup, but AAR apparently has not been able to get up off the ground financially, despite good demographics and a listener base of 4 million. Since it does not have a zillionaire backer like Rupert Murdoch, there was no one who was able to pour a billion dollars into the network to start it up and then run it at a loss for many years until things shaped up. Instead, it is a small startup, having the same problems as other small startups. Is it a matter of delivering the goods for advertisers, or simply selling the concept of liberal talk radio to advertisers who simply buy into the right-wing pitch that it just won’t work? Are the demographics as good as they have been painted generally, or was that a selective reading? (So far, there has been no unbiased analysis either way.) Or is it simply the stigma of an unproven startup without much backing? If only the right-wing conspiracy theorists were right and George Soros would pour the money into AAR that Murdoch did into Fox, then the story would be different. Instead, there are struggles–but, at least for the time being, AAR is still on the air. It might continue to struggle and then die out, or it might shape up and do better, perhaps after the social pendulum continues to swing back towards liberalism.

Until then, one can be sure that there will be a tremendous amount of crowing and celebrating among conservatives over this development; I predict that the same people who cower and stay away from commenting when news is bad for Republicans, will come out in force, doing Google searches for blog posts on AAR so they can come in and gloat, ignoring how long it took people like Limbaugh or networks like Fox to pick up steam…