The network offers an alternative to conservative talk that has dominated the airwaves.

NEW YORK (AP) – Is it a radio business, or is it politics?

The two seem inextricably entwined for the leaders of Air America Radio, the liberal talk radio network that launched on five stations around the country Wednesday.

As a startup media business, they need to draw in listeners fast. Air America Radio is betting that a menu of left-leaning political commentary, current affairs talk and satire will resonate with those opposed to the Bush administration.

Al Franken, who is headlining the network with a daily three-hour talk show, has made no secret of his intention to use his platform to influence the election in November.

“We are flaming swords of justice,” Franken told a cheering crowd at a party to launch the network Tuesday night. “Bush is going down, he is going down, he is going down. And we’re going to help him.”

Franken’s show went live at noon on Wednesday with co-host Katherine Lanpher, a longtime host of a public radio show in Minnesota. At the opening, Franken joked that they were broadcasting from a bunker 3,500 feet below Vice President Dick Cheney’s own secret bunker.

In fact, Franken will be broadcasting his show, dubbed “The O’Franken Factor” in his latest jab at Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, from the slightly shabby studios of New York City station WLIB, on the 41st floor of an office tower a few blocks from the Empire State Building.

The studio, where the show has had just a week to settle in before launching, has the feel of a scrappy political campaign that’s just getting under way.

“I don’t think of it as a business, but I know it has to make money to be sustaining,” Franken said in an interview, perching his feet up on the desk after a rehearsal session for the show. “A lot of it is mission.”

The sense of mission is felt just as strongly several floors down, where the makeshift offices of Air America Radio are marked with handwritten sheets of paper taped on the wall, including those for CEO Mark Walsh, where the phones have yet to be hooked up.

Walsh, a former America Online executive and adviser to the Democratic National Committee, said liberal politics would be a “teaser … a loss leader in the window” for the radio network, which is also being broadcast in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Ore.

“The right has dominated the airwaves for a decade, and we blew it. First they did radio, then they did TV, and movies are next,” he said.

However, the idea that liberal commentators have been shut out of radio has been greeted with skepticism in the talk radio industry, where the left-leaning commentator for Fox News Alan Colmes has a large audience.

Michael Harrison, the editor and publisher of Talkers magazine, the leading trade publication for the talk radio business, is leery of Air America Radio’s tactic of using liberal politics to draw in viewers.

“Of all the elements that go into this, the least important element is that they’re liberal,” Harrison said. “They’ve got to be entertaining, fascinating, captivating and compelling – and then they have to find a way to make money with it.”

What’s more, Harrison said the company was setting expectations too high by promising to take on Bush as well as Rush Limbaugh, who has built up a massive national audience over the past two decades.

“Radio doesn’t work that fast, it doesn’t have that power to do it that quickly,” Harrison said.

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