Reply #7: And here's the answer...Sam Seder [View All]

[whometense]

Or part of the answer, anyway. Since the Boston signal at night is so weak, I've never really heard his show.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/08/23/failure_is_an_option/

...Franken was Air America's marquee name. Most listeners had never heard of Seder, whose ``Majority Report" was promoted this week to the midmorning slot -- 9 a.m. to noon -- on more than 70 stations across the country, including New York and Los Angeles. (Inexplicably, Air America's Boston affiliate broadcasts the show from 1-4 a.m.)

Seder attracted his audience with inane riffs on the news, chats with prominent bloggers, and interviews with upstart Democratic candidates, including Ned Lamont, whom Seder had on long before his campaign against Lieberman was taken seriously.

``When Sam started, he was kind of an asterisk," says Markos Moulitsas Zuniga , creator of the popular Daily Kos website. ``But he's in capital letters now. He's good at finding life's absurdities, and politics is a target-rich environment."

The secret to Seder's success is his preparation. He arrives at his office -- a cramped space with bookshelves lined with works by Noam Chomsky, Stanley Greenberg, and Bob Hope -- several hours early to scour the Web for stories. He and his producer then prioritize the day's news, leading with the items likeliest to outrage conservatives -- or, as Seder calls them, ``the forces of anti democracy."

``Sam works his butt off and does his homework," says Franken. ``The guy's the future of the network."

That is, if it has a future. Air America Radio has not caught on as some predicted, and in many markets, including Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, its signal is weak. A number of network executives have left in recent months, and Jon Sinton, Air America's head of programming and affiliates, did not return repeated phone calls for this story...