AAR Provides Exclusive Broadcast Coverage of MoveOn Event

Air America Radio dropped its blockbuster announcement yesterday that Sam Seder will be soon be replaced by veteran talker Lionel and the blogosphere went crazy. Lengthy discussion strings appeared on well known liberal talk radio blogs like Air America Place, The Morning Seditionist, and Seder’s Majority Report Radio and the reviews were decidedly negative.

The respected Liberal Talk Radio blog detailed several of these comments this morning. Our favorite was one, posted by crestwo, that we found on the Morning Seditionist blog:

If Mark Green had signed the Beatles in ‘62, he’d have turned McCartney into an Elvis-style hip-wriggling lead singer, and the rest of them into a backup band, with George playing standup base.

If Mark Green had been the producer of “Animal House” he’d have written in a central role for Barbara Streisand, with a ten-minute interlude for one of her brain-rotting songs, smack in the middle, right after the horse drops dead.

However, the enthusiasm for the Lionel announcement was not shared by the mainstream media, even the mainstream radio media. Only a handful of local newspapers picked up the story. Even the usually attentive David Hinckley, radio columnist for the New York Daily News, didn’t give the story very much ink. Hinckley picked up the hot Imus story and buried the Lionel item in the bottom of his column today.

However, there is another story which is involves AAR which is generating tons of news. It is barely being discussed on any of the aforementioned blogs, and it is not even being heavily promoted by AAR itself (AAR finally posted a link to a feed on its webpage today.)

We are of course referring to tonight’s “virtual town hall” which was hosted by MoveOn.org and carried live by AAR.

Dozens of newspapers are carrying an AP story about the show, and it has also been featured in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Washington Post. In fact, if you go to Google News, and key in "Air America" you would have to scroll past several pages, with articles about the MoveOn event, to find the few articles on Lionel’s new show.

AAR’s exclusive coverage of MoveOn’s “virtual town hall” is a real coup and should have been better promoted. Seven Democratic candidates are taking part in the event that has been billed “as the largest and most ambitious experiment yet in harnessing the power of Internet technology to reshape participatory democracy.”

Calling in by telephone, candidates Joseph Biden , Hillary Clinton , Christopher Dodd , John Edwards , Dennis Kucinich , Barack Obama , and Bill Richardson will each answer several questions about Iraq. The liberal activist group, which is hosting the event, asked members to vote on which questions to ask from among 6,800 queries proposed by members for the forum.

About 10,000 MoveOn members are expected to gather in about 950 living rooms around the country to listen to the event, which began at 7 PM. EST. The group will conduct a straw poll afterward among its 3.2 million members about which candidate gave the strongest answers.

AAR is carrying a stream of event, which you can listen tonight accessing the feed at the AAR website and will re-broadcast it tomorrow night from 8pm to 10pm on all of its affiliated stations. It will be interesting to see which stations carry town hall meeting and which opt for alternative program.

"It's politics 2.0," said Adam Ruben , the political director of MoveOn. "I think it shows how the Internet is changing the way campaigns are run. It's a way of democratizing the subjects of political debate, rather than the terms of the debate being set only by the campaigns and the media."

There have been online debates for statewide elections before, but specialists in technology and politics said they know of no previous event of such a national scope. In addition, most previous online debates have allowed candidates.