Geov Parrish, a Seattle Weekly columnist — in advance of Al Franken’s live show in Seattle on May 9 (it’s sold out) — interviewed Franken by phone, and found out how “Seattle money saved Air America”:
Geov Parrish: So I understand that your last visit to Seattle played a role in getting Air America off the ground, with Sen. Maria Cantwell introducing you to Rob Glaser of RealNetworks fame.
Al Franken: Kenan Block introduced me to Maria. I was in Seattle. I think Seattle is like Minneapolis. It’s essentially not that big a city, and people know each other. So Kenan [a public affairs consultant], who I know from his days as a producer at McNeil-Lehrer, is somebody I always see when I go to Seattle, and he wanted to introduce me to Maria. I met her, was delighted to, and she introduced me to Rob, who I was delighted to meet. We had dinner, and I sort of asked him to look at Air America and give me some advice on it. It was my clever way of luring him into it. I’m very clever. And extremely persuasive. …
I knew that Maria Cantwell, a former exec at RealNetworks (they make your Real Audio), used her fortune to help finance her 2000 defeat of Slade Gorton. But I didn’t know much about Glazer’s involvement in Air America, so I went looking …
In 2003, according to ShiningLight.us blog:
Then I found this tidbit: After chair Evan Cohen and vice-chair Rex Sorenson were ousted — their demise is chronicled in the HBO documentary, “Left of the Dial” — Progress Media was renamed Piquant LLC.
[T]he company was to be led by new CEO Doug Kreeger and Kelly as chairman of the board, drawing on his experience as a Shockley executive.RealNetworks CEO Rob Glazer [PHOTO] has since succeeded Kelly as chair, and Kelly now leads the finance committee.
And that’s all I found. Glazer stays behind the scenes, I gather. I’ll bet, though, that he sees Al next Monday in Seattle.
we have so many BooTribbers from Washington State and British Columbia? I think not.
Come on out sometime and try the BC Bud. (Just kidding.)
Say, the rest of the interview is fun: Here’s a smidgen more:
Al: So we get our labor statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He gets his from the Bureau of Rush’s Butt.
Parrish: What’s been the biggest frustration so far?
Franken: I Nexus myself to see press on me. And one of the biggest frustrations is being compared to Rush Limbaugh in a way that suggests that I do what Rush Limbaugh does, but just on the other side. That I’m a mirror image of him. It’s obviously written by people who don’t listen to my show. And most of it isn’t like a review of my show; it’s usually done in passing.
About two weeks after we were on the air, William Raspberry, who’s a pretty respected Washington Post columnist, wrote a piece on our show, and he said, “I haven’t listened to it yet, but if Al Franken is doing what I think he is doing, or going to do, then I think it’s dangerous.” Now I got really mad at him, but in retrospect, at least he said he hadn’t listened to the show in the column. It’s absolutely crazy.
We had a guy on today [Thursday, April 28], Brian Anderson, who’s written a book called South Park Conservatives, and it’s a conservative book on liberal bias and all this stuff, and he attacks Air America in it. We had him on the show today. And he ultimately had to admit that our show was not what he was saying we were, or not what he was saying Air America was, anyway, and that I don’t do what Rush does.