Thinking Meat

Turkey flies a few feet, lands with thud

I'm not very pleased with Air America driving itself off a cliff in LA and Chicago, but I guess it's fitting, given the sheer incompetence and lack of professionalism from the top down. Like their wannabe-"revolutionary" predecessors, they thought they could wing it all with good intentions and lots of righteous anger. Turns out this radio thing isn't as easy as they thought. Which is too bad, in a way, because every minute of babble on Air America was essentially free advertising for those ideologically opposed to them -- provided, of course, anyone other than their most rabid fans (whom they couldn't affect anyway) wanted to listen to their incoherent mumblings. But if you could get past that, it was strangely soothing: you turn it on, realize they are still making Limbaugh and Hannity sound like Churchill and JFK rolled into one, and be glad that the likes of George Soros are spending so much moolah just to have their own ideas discredited.

But anyway, back to the lack of professionalism and the simple ability to not walk into walls. Much has already been said on the immature tone and ultra-low-grade alleged humor of AAR's so-called Sludge Report, which parodies the original rumor by Drudge. I won't even comment on the moronic puns on "Liu" -- suffice it to say that had this been done by, say, Limbaugh, AAR would be beside itself with anger for such mockery of an Asian name. Or the "metaphor" of threatening the man's life -- hey, I'm sure someone found this funny, and maybe the orderlies let them listen to the radio just long enough to keep them still for their daily injection of anti-psychotics. Instead, I'll focus on topics much more mundane:

Insiders tell SLUDGE, that the reason the network was pulled off the air this morning in Chicago and Los Angeles, the network's second- and third-largest markets, was because, the owner of both stations, Arthur Liu of Multicultural Broadcasting, said, the network bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million!

The run-on sentence, tortured grammar and the exclamation point clearly means it’s true!!

I agree that the prose isn't the greatest (not that Air America should criticize...). But would someone point out to me how the sentence was a run-on? It's certainly complex, and has a whole sentence buried inside it as a clause, but I don't see a run-on. In the end, the sentence has exactly one subject (Insiders) and one verb (tell). Neither is what they tell a run on: stripped of the sources and background, it's that the network was pulled off the air because it bounced a check. So even in this clearly embellished quote of Drudge, the grammar is pretty good, even if the prose isn't. As for my claim of "embellished," here's what the earliest version of the story from the Drudge archive actually says:

The CHICAGO TRIBUNE is developing a story, insiders tell DRUDGE, on how the network was pulled off the air this morning in Chicago and Los Angeles, the network's second- and third-largest markets, because, the owner of both stations said, the network bounced a check and owes him more than $1 million! A charge the network strongly denies.

Perfectly lucid, provided your reading level is somewhere north of the 5th grade. Also, credit is given to the Chicago Tribune, which Air America conveniently skips.

I'd call the whole exercise sophomoric, but fear an inadvertent insult to the many 10th-graders who do much better work.

Update: Fear not, they are back, sort of.