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marthaabernathy's blog

The Death of Air America, Green960, and Progressive Talk

Posted February 23, 2010 - 13:19 by marthaabernathy

With rumors swirling around that San Francisco's Green960 is headed towards a format change and Air America is now defunct, is this proof that progressive talk radio is dead? In the conventional sense, it's been dead a long time. Progressive talk has never had the mass appeal in the same way that right wing talk has. Part of the problem that Air America had was that it wasn't home grown grass roots radio. It didn't grow out of demand, it grew out of a business-political venture/idea. Stations around the country like Green960 and Madison, Wisconsin's WXXM "The Mic" were both born out of Clear Channel's move to to capitalize on the early success of progressive talk (especially given the fact that their early experiment, KPOJ, went from the bottom of the Portland market to the close to the top in less than a year).

Climate Change and the Search for Truth

Posted December 9, 2009 - 14:27 by marthaabernathy

(Recently on a progressive e-list I'm on a person pointed to the work done by Science and Public Policy Institute and suggested that we "learn the truth" about climate change. The following is my response to him that I posted to the group and my blog)

When someone claims to hold "the truth" to a question I tend to want to believe them.  In my own life I want truth more than anything, so my nature is to want to believe what people say In third grade Ricky Crawford told me that his father worked for NASA and that his father had told him secretly that aliens from Pluto were attacking and would be here in three days. For three days I cried a lot, hid a lot, and waited for news to break that the aliens were attacking. When I realized that I'd been tricked,  I trusted other people a lot less.

Listening to LFTLC on KRXA540

Posted December 8, 2009 - 10:16 by marthaabernathy

As a frequent vistor to to the live blog, I know one of the biggest problems for people was listening to the stream if they were not listening on their conventional radio. The flash player used was tricky and took a certain setup for it to work. Since the move over to KRXA 540, there's a lot more choice on how to listen to LFTLC.