Sorry, Len

Well, I'm afraid it's bad news for Air America fans here in the Mid-South. It seems that WMQM will not be carrying their programming after all.

If you go to Air America.com, you can see that they still list WMQM as "Coming Soon!" But I made a call to station manager David Brown and got the real story. He noted that the Commercial Appeal had also covered this story about three Saturdays ago, but let's be honest...how many of you read the Saturday CA?

Brown said that he had been contacted about 2 months ago by someone from AirAmerica. They had all of a five minute conversation and Brown never agreed to anything. Next thing he knows, it's been announced at Air America. He's tried to get them to pull the station's call letters from the list, but so far AA hasn't done anything.

Mr. Brown wasn't opposed to carrying the programming, but he didn't have the daytime space to run the minimum 6 hours required. If anything, he would have run it after midnight, but that was unacceptable to AA. Brown mentioned he's received about 50 calls from various folks wanting to know when AA is coming.

He did mention two rumors he's heard. One is that another station here in Memphis may pick it up. He felt that there was enough of a potential market for the network to succeed. Brown also said he'd heard that Al Franken's contract only runs through December. Depending on the national elections, and his own success or (so-far) failure, I don't think it's impossible that Franken may decide to just cut and run.

So, sorry all you Memphis libs and Dems. Better luck next time.