Kicked off the dial: the new liberal radio empire has pissed off more than just Rush Limbaugh by leasing time on ethnic radio stations.

Air America Radio, the new liberal network, might be bent on destroying the right wing's dominance of talk shows, but it has perhaps a more troubling problem: securing spots on the airwaves for broadcasting. With media ownership increasingly in the hands of a few conglomerates, and claims that its own finances are not secure, Air America Radio has struggled to find radio stations that want to lease their airtime for up to 18 hours a day. So, the liberal network has begun turning to ethnic and community radio stations, which are often cash poor but based in big cities with access to large pools of listeners.

By the time it premiered on April 1, Air America Radio had leased time from three ethnic radio stations in three major cities. One station in Chicago, WNTD-950 AM, and another in Los Angeles, KBLA-1580 AM, terminated their regularly broadcasted Spanish-language programming. In New York City, Al Franken's rants came booming from WLIB-1190 AM, a prominent black radio station, where black sales employees and talk show hosts had been fired.

From the outset, Progress Media, the group of investors that owns Air America Radio, reportedly refused to let stations pick and choose from its nine shows. Instead, those familiar with the negotiations say, the company required that ethnic and community stations broadcast the nine shows in full. That, of course, drastically reduced the coverage stations could give to their local and ethnic programs. As this story went to print, some of the stations that signed on later with the network were reportedly able to pick and choose the shows they want to air.

But a station like WLIB, which signed on early with the network, is locked into a two-year commitment to broadcast Air America Radio 18 hours a day. It's just one example, activists allege, of the troubling way the new liberal media is treating people of color.

Liberation Turns to Liberals

WLIB, once a mildly successful jazz station, came under black ownership in the 1970s, when activists picketed the station and petitioned to make bidding for its purchase available to African American entrepreneurs. Percy Sutton, Malcolm X's former attorney and then Manhattan borough president, put together the Inner City Broadcasting Corporation (ICBC), a group of black investors that bought WLIB in 1972. Demands from community organizers led to the station's first talk shows featuring the late Betty Shabazz, wife of Malcolm X, and Carlos Russell, the noted former college professor who taught some of the black and Latino students who founded the Young Lords Party.

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Over the years, the station developed a reputation for reformatting its programming--from radical politics to Afrocentric cultural programming and then to health issues and Caribbean culture--but always with an emphasis on transmitting shows about people of African descent. By the early '90s, WLIB, along with black radio programs from other stations, formed part of an unaffiliated but vocal advocacy radio network in New York that highlighted black community health concerns, cultural awareness and political activities. Many even claimed that WLIB was responsible for getting out the vote for David Dinkins in 1989 as he ran to become New York City's first black mayor.

Ad revenues, though, always remained a sore point. Black radio and community stations often generate low Arbitron ratings, which advertisers use to determine where to place their ads and their money. When Progress Media came calling, it promised stations that if they would lease time to Air America Radio, their stations would be able to do better than break even and actually get out of the red. By the time the liberal radio went live with its mantra of "leaking the truth," WLIB's salespeople had been fired and hosts had been given notice. But management at ICBC, which still owns WLIB and its sister station, WBLS-107.5 FM, insisted that WLIB wasn't being sold. Its airtime was simply being leased. Instead of broadcasting black talk radio or Caribbean American news, ICBC had partnered with Air America to wage war every day between 6 a.m. and midnight against the nation's right wing radio pundits, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

The truth seemed to be that ICBC had sold out. Kernie L. Anderson, ICBC's vice-president, bluntly told the local CaribNews newspaper that, "WLIB is gone. As of March 31, WLIB will be an affiliate to this [Air America] network. Within the context of network broadcasting and inasmuch as it is a progressive network, I am sure there will be more information of relevance to the Caribbean community on this network than on many other general-market networks. But I don't foresee a situation in which the network is going to devote as much time to the Caribbean as [WLIB did]. It's going to be a general-market approach."

Neither WLIB nor AIR America formally responded to the protests. In the black community, the news of WLIB's leasing its daytime slots to Air America Radio hit hard. Veteran public broadcaster Adam Clayton Powell III noted in a television interview that, "When I was growing up, the call letters W-L-I-B stood for LIBeration. Now W-L-I-B will stand for LIBeral. There is a difference."

While it never generated much revenue, WLIB was a mainstay for events like the annual West Indian Day Parade and African Street Festival, which advertised on WLIB, said Brooklyn Councilman Kendall B. Stewart. "The least that the management could have done was to inform the community and its leadership about its change in programming so that we could consider our options," he said.

WLIB's Kernie L. Anderson has encouraged local merchants to gear their advertising to the station's overnight programming hours, or to the audiences who listen to the station's sister station, WBLS 107.5 FM. "We're still soliciting advertising from the community," Anderson said. "It may not be to the extent that we used to at WLIB, but we do encourage it."

Anderson said that because they lease days to Air America, the Progress Media network makes its own decisions about which advertisers it wants to work with. Repeated calls to Air America Radio were not returned.

"I guess the issue would be, to what extent would Air America want advertising for those events," Anderson said. "But that's a relationship--a decision--to be made by Air America."

Rating Black Radio

The April 1 launch of Air America Radio over WLIB's frequencies was met with a protest march and rally at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem by the Coalition of Artists and Activists, a group initially formed to help actor and activist Danny Glover when he took a public stand against the Bush-led war on Iraq and almost lost contracts as a spokesperson. The Coalition includes local community members and celebrities like Sonia Sanchez, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

"The real issue is that WLIB was vulnerable to this takeover because WLIB was poor," said Bob Law, a radio talk show host and a Coalition spokesperson. "There is a collusion between the ratings companies and the advertising industry to devalue black radio in the same way society devalues black people. It's designed to keep black people poor."

Arbitron monitors a station's listenership and then rates the numbers of people who are listening to different stations. Advertisers use those numbers to negotiate paying for ads. WLIB's ratings (some 350,000 listeners in the first quarter of 2004) and the ratings for African American-owned media in general don't match nationwide statistics about black buying power. At their rally, Coalition members distributed a fact sheet alleging that while black consumers spend an annual $22.9 billion on clothing, black radio does not receive ad revenue from major clothing chains like Macy's, Sears and The Gap: "Black radio reaches these multi-billion dollar consumers, but the ad industry refuses to acknowledge that fact, and it can count on Arbitron, the ratings company, to report that black radio in general has few listeners and black talk radio is said to have none at all."

On April 1, Coalition members signed a number of New York City-area African Americans to serve as plaintiffs in a class action lawsuit against Arbitron. Roger Wareham, the attorney researching the case, notes, "There tends to be a multiple spin affect in terms of what happens to stations that are predominately African American. You tend to wind up with stations going belly-up."

The Coalition also pushed for a community boycott of the new network's leased time on WLIB to force the network to come to terms with having displaced a vital black community station. The group's boycott was aimed at the 6 a.m.-to-midnight broadcasts of Air America Radio over WLIB, a period during which the liberal network features a lineup of 13 white and three African American on-air hosts.

"Air America should have come into New York City in a manner much more sensitive to the community they were displacing," Law argued. "Their programming should have been more reflective of what America is now. America is no longer mostly white: they should have included in the mix more voices of black people--voices the people would have confidence in."

The Coalition had at first wanted to push the network to add more African American voices to its programming format. But as members realized that they would, in essence, be giving free programming advice to Air America (and possibly hurting the ratings of black stations in other markets across the nation), they decided to let the new network rethink its programming choices on its own. Law says they are now prioritizing the re-hiring of WLIB's black radio sales people.

Rap star Chuck D, who is both an on-air host for the new network and a member of the Coalition, set up a meeting in late April between both parties. During the meeting, according to Law, an attorney for Progress Media agreed that Air America Radio came into the WLIB situation without paying heed to the community that already utilized and needed its airwaves. The outcome is still uncertain whether the black sales staff will be rehired, and it's unclear if the radio shows will feature liberal quips from more people of color.

Karen Juanita Carrillo is a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based freelance writer and photographer.