Hate Talk Radio Fading-- At Least In Terms Of Demos Advertisers Are Interested In

Two stories this week in Inside Radio demonstrate, once again, why Hate Talk Radio is doomed. In short, the format isn't reaching a demo and advertisers-- other than adult diaper makers, the NRA and the Republican Party-- want to reach. The key ad target demos don't want to hear bitter old white men screaming crazy, hateful conspiracy theories at them. Only very old, bitter white males listen to Hate Talk Radio (and Fox News). It's not a small number, but it isn't one legitimate advertisers care about reaching.

The chart (above) tells the story of why mainstream Hate Talk radio is doomed in the long run. The two overlapping age demographics, 18-34 and 25-54, are the ones of greatest interest to the greatest number of advertisers.

Arbitron's News/Talk category lumps all-news, Hate Talk,  liberal talk and NPR news/talk into a single category, instead of separating all-news from the others; and this catch-all category, which is not in the top five for the 18-34 demo, is tied for fourth place in 25-54-- where, one can safely assume, NPR, all news and sports-talk stations account for nearly all of that 6.1 percent.

That composite category is tops in all listeners age 6+. But remember, that  would include the 55-64 and 65+ demos, where Hate Talk finds the vast majority of its listeners.

The other demos, in the smallest breakouts, are 6-11, 12-17, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, and 45-54. Of these, only 45-54 has a significant number of Hate Talk listeners. And the format has been steadily sinking, not just in terms of profits, but also in terms of overall listenership.

For a format that usually posts its best ratings in fall and winter, a summertime news/talk ratings decline is as predictable as rising temperatures. But the extent of the format’s April-July slippage suggests something may be at play other than mere seasonal fluctuations. News/Talk has lost 10% of its audience in the past two years.

The format has dropped 9% since April alone among persons 6+ in the 45 non-embedded PPM markets, trending 9.6-9.2-8.9-8.7. Still, it continued to hang on to a narrow 6+ lead. But news/talk is in danger of slipping out of the top five in the 25-54 dollar demo, where it’s lost more than a share in the past three months and is now tied for fourth place with hot AC.

"News/talk’s lead over pop CHR and country has shrunk in each of the past two months, and for the first time since we began keeping our format records, it recorded two consecutive books below a 9 share," Arbitron media insights manager Tony Hereau says. While summer is historically the lowest time of the year for the format, its summer shares have declined about 10% since 2011. Hereau says Arbitron will be "keeping a close eye on the results as August and September approach," when the summer news doldrums usually end.

Curtain Coming Down For The Fat Man On Radio? Probably Not

While his show doesn't sound quite like an NPR station yet, almost 100 advertisers have pulled the plug on sponsoring Limbaugh since he went on his latest deranged tirade, part of his never-ending misogynistic hate speech. On Wednesday, Ad Age reported that of 69 spots on his 3 hour program, "more than half were public service announcements." And even one of the organizations getting free PSAs, the American Heart Association, says they want no part of Limbaugh. "It is our practice," says spokesperson Matthew Bannister, "to be a content-sensitive advertiser, and in light of the current controversy, we will be asking [Cumulus-owned] WABC to no longer utilize these unpaid PSAs."

Worse yet for Limbaugh-- and other hate talk radio misfits whose sole appeal is to grumpy, bigoted old men-- advertisers and radio executives are realizing that women buy a lot of stuff.

Clear Channel-owned Inside Radio has a (VERY) unscientific online survey that shows everything's coming up roses for Clear Channel's biggest and most drug-addicted star.

Cable TV talking heads and newspaper columnists have taken their shots at Rush Limbaugh all week long. But ask broadcasters for their take and you’ll get a much different response. More than a third (36%) thinks the controversy will blow over and advertisers will come back to Limbaugh’s show.

"When the dust settles, trust me, they’ll be back; they just don’t want to be in the middle of the storm," says one reader. Few poll respondents expect the pressure by Limbaugh’s critics to last. "A sustained effort to shut him down will lose momentum," one broadcaster predicts. It was the pullback by some advertisers that generated the vast majority of comments, most critical of their decision. "The advertisers are lily-livered chickens and are losing by leaving," was a pretty typical comment. One-in-five (22%) think the brouhaha will help re-energize Limbaugh and his core fan base. One reader says, "This is what he’s about-- secretly it’s what we like about him: he ruffles feathers.”

While Rush has been a hot topic on talk shows, the internet and social media, nearly three-in-ten (28%) of Inside Radio readers think the controversy won’t have a long-term impact. One reader writes, "Jocks and talk show hosts have been saying things like this or worse for 30 years and most of the time there are no long term effects."

Among those responding to our unscientific, online survey, there were those who think Limbaugh could be hurt by the controversy. One-in-five (22%) said it will further narrow the list of potential advertisers willing to buy his show. Nearly as many (17%) think he could see his overall political influence weakened. Says one reader, "I think it will energize women and will hopefully force more advertisers to back away from his crudeness."

A popular thread among the dozens of comments was the thought that broadcasters should have stepped forward and defended Limbaugh’s free speech rights more aggressively. "This is Rush’s ‘Imus’ moment and it shows that free speech is under attack,” one reader writes. Lots of broadcasters also subscribe to the "no publicity is bad publicity” school of thought. "Who in the business didn’t get this is a huge Rush promotion-- he couldn’t buy attention like this,” one reader says.

One broadcaster adds, "For the record, we never received a single complaint call."

This morning, one of the top radio industry tip sheets, Taylor On Radio-Info, surveys the damage Limbaugh has inflicted on himself with his jihad against women. And it's spilling over to Hate Talk Radio in general.

Premiere is circulating a list of 98 advertisers who want to avoid “environments likely to stir negative sentiments.” The list includes carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm) and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway). As you’ll see in the note below, those “environments” go beyond the Rush Limbaugh show –

"To all Traffic Managers: The information below applies to your Premiere Radio Networks commercial inventory. More than 350 different advertisers sponsor the programs and services provided to your station on a barter basis. Like advertisers that purchase commercials on your radio station from your sales staff, our sponsors communicate specific rotations, daypart preferences and advertising environments they prefer. . .They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public." That's the question, isn't it? How small is that percentage, and how long will this uproar last? And is there a long-term impact on talk radio as it's currently practiced?

I started working in radio-- if you can call it "work"-- when I was still in college. I played hippie music, mostly live tapes from the Fillmore that Bill Graham was sending me, from midnight to 4am on WUSB on Long Island. A decade later I took it up again-- in the late '70s-- to celebrate the forever revolution with punk rock on KSAN in San Francisco. Eventually I became a record company executive and radio became the main way we sold our music. I was never quite sure it worked-- unless you had a massive hit. It always worked when you had a massive hit. But now I'm always trying to figure how to use the Blue America PAC money most effectively. Cable TV, billboards, field operations, radio, newspaper ads, robo-calls... what works best? Friday, Arbitron released a study on radio formats' political reach. It is estimated that 50% of the $8 billion advertising budget for this year's campaign will be spent on radio and television. Over 200,000 people participated in this study. That's what you call a sample!

The study found that 38 percent of adults 18 and older identified themselves as Democrats (28 percent identified themselves as Democrats and 10 percent identified themselves as independents who lean Democrat). Also, 35 percent identified themselves as Republicans (25 percent identified themselves as Republicans and 10 percent identified themselves as independents who lean Republican). Ten percent of adults identified themselves as independent without leaning either Republican or Democrat and 18 percent did not identify themselves as Democrat, Republican or independent.

"The media landscape has grown increasingly complex since the 2008 election year and political candidates are looking for the most effective ways to reach voters," said Ron Rodrigues, Marketing Manager for Arbitron. "Radio's near universal reach of potential voters and its ability to target voting segments that mirror the national landscape through its various music and talk formats make it a highly effective platform for political campaigns. In addition to talk formatted stations, music formatted stations offer candidates the ability to reach a wider spectrum of voters and enhance 'Register to Vote' and 'Get Out the Vote' initiatives."

Some of the key findings of the study include:

• The format with the most listeners nationwide per week according to Scarborough, Adult Contemporary attracts slightly more Democrats than Republicans, 39 percent Democrat and 34 percent Republican respectively.

• Surprisingly, with the exception of Alternative Rock, all Rock-oriented radio formats attract more Republicans than Democrats. Classic Rock, Active Rock and Album Oriented Rock all attract more Republican listeners.

• All Urban and Spanish-language radio formats attract a decidedly higher number of Democrats versus Republicans.

• Gospel and Urban AC have the highest Democratic listener base, with 64 percent and 61 percent, respectively.


• Religious and News/Talk/ Information formats have the highest percentage of Republican listeners among popular radio formats. The Contemporary Christian format has the highest percentage of Republican listeners at 46 percent; News/Talk/ Information has a listener base of 44 percent Republicans.

• However, public radio tends to skew more Democratic. Public radio listeners who identify themselves as Democrats make up the audience while 32 percent of the audience identify with Republican ideologies.

• Country music, the format carried on the most stations nationally, skews more Republican than Democrat, with 41 percent of its listeners identifying themselves as Republicans. Only 32 percent of Country music radio listeners identify themselves as Democrats.

• The music formats with listeners who characterized themselves as frequent voters includes Album Adult Alternative, Classic Rock and Urban AC, all with more than 60 percent of listeners classified as frequent voters.

I can't believe rock fans have turned into Republicans! No... I can. I guess I knew it was inevitable ever since I met Sammy Hagar and Alice Cooper. But not these guys...

Ramping Up the Wingnut Propaganda for 2012: Clear Channel Radio Moves in San Francisco

Mike Malloy talks about the demise of San Francisco's Green 960, and a parallel development in Sacramento -- and the late stages of the right-wing corporate capture of American radio.

by Noah

The Plague Of Texas is upon us. Will it ever stop? This time it’s not children’s textbooks warping the minds of the younger citizenry and it’s also not a bunch of Texans shouting “We’re number one” when their governor proudly announces that his state has executed more people than any other state. No, this time it’s San Antonio-born Clear Channel (now owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital) moving once again to add more pollution to the radio airwaves with their disease, just in time for the 2012 election year.

Clear Channel plans to make over, effective January 3rd, the San Francisco area’s last progressive AM radio station, Green 960-KKGN, and give the radio jackboot to progressive talkers Stephanie Miller, Mike Malloy, and Thom Hartmann, replacing them with incoherent conspiracy monger Glenn Beck and a cabal of FOX “News” Radio freaks like John Gibson and Dave Ramsey. On the plus side, progressive talker Randi Rhodes (who works for Clear Channel’s Premier Network) will serve as a token lefty and still have her noon-to-3:00 slot, at least for now. FOX calls it “Fair and Balanced.” The pointless Alan Colmes gets an evening slot. Only FOX could call him a liberal.


Randi Rhodes survives on the soon-to-be-former Green 960 -- for now.

Short of a Christmas Miracle, the progressive talk format in San Francisco will now be, courtesy of Clear Channel, super ghetto-ized on the FM-HD2 band as Malloy, Hartmann, and Miller move there in what amounts to a forced relocation to the radio reservation. How many people do you know that even own an HD2 receiver or phone app? Republicans like to refer to things like this as “shrinking it down so much that you can drown it in a bathtub.” As I said, jackboots.

The final touches have yet to be applied, and the move is no doubt being met with the moves of smaller competitors and the anger and derision from many who were operating under the assumption that the airwave licenses really are publicly owned, but this is happening right in San Francisco, the city Republicans love to hate. They just can’t stand its "live and let live" brand of healthy, nourishing liberalism. Oh, how they long to change its ways!

Says Clear Channel’s San Francisco Director of Operations, Don Parker:

We saw the opportunity to expand our footprint in this crucial arena as we head into an election year and a population increasingly engaged in local, state, and national events and activism.

I’ll give this fascist PR flack credit. At least he’s honest. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to read between the lines of his mission statement. He could have just said, “We need to ramp up the wingnut propaganda for 2012!” I bet he even wears some kind of quasi-military uniform while he struts around his office, though, to be kind, maybe he just wears it at home behind closed doors.

Remember hearing about when Germany invaded France and installed their teams of media propagandists and governing officials in every city and town in the country? It took D-Day and a whole lot of deaths to fumigate the place. Let’s also not forget that some state governors such as Michigan’s Rick Snyder are doing something similar when they essentially declare elections null and void and bring in their own teams to run things. Local media and government control have long been favored tools of the right. It’s not just for history books. It’s happening right now.

Of course, the righties can’t abide with calling the station Green 960 anymore. Plans call for it now to be called KNEW. I would have suggested KKKNEW or KLIE, but no one asked. Perhaps a guerilla billboard campaign is in order. After they find some reason to alter or burn Rhodes’ contract, we can honestly refer to KNEW as --

KLIE -- All Lies, All The Time!
KLIE -- Where Truth Goes To Die!
KLIE -- Beautiful Delusions!

Apologistas from the right will, no doubt, say that it was just a money and ratings decision, but statements like that don’t pass the smell test when progressive on-air talent like Stephanie Miller routinely beats neo-fascist/FOX guest loon Laura Ingraham in markets where they go head to head. Ingraham also happens to be carried by 300+ stations to Miller’s 36. Now go ahead and ask yourself if corporate Amerika has a bias or not. Liberal media? What liberal media?

How does something like this happen in America? It happens when two right-wing corporate fascists named Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich team up to ram the Telecommunications Act of 1996 down our throats, allowing some well-moneyed goons in Texas to buy up as many stations, even in the same market, as they possibly can, exterminating competition and assuring that only one message, a right-wing extremist one, will blanket communities across the country. Clinton and Gingrich obviously regarded the term “publicly owned airwaves” as quaint or outmoded.

Thanks, clowns.

You want a dark thought for the day after all of the above. Think about Mitt Romney in the White House, controlling Clear Channel, through Bain Capital, and all of its vast array of radio stations across the country. The ghosts of Saddam Hussein, Khrushchev, and so many other dictators will glow a bright gooey green with envy.

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"No ordinary assignment": So you want to be a spy? Er, a "national clandestine officer"?

"The mission is a constant, but every day is different." Sound good? No sweat on that polygraph requirement, but can you tell us about the benefits package? (Good news: It appears that having difficulty remembering the address "CIA.gov" doesn't automatically disqualify you.)

by Ken

Never thought about that, eh? At least not since your early teens? Exhausted all the career opportunities in your newspaper's "Help Wanted" section? Well, consider: "You can make a difference for the nation." That's something you can't say about that job in classified-advertising sales, or in pizza delivery.

As we know from the once-on-everyone's-lips, now-fastidiously-forgotten Washington Post investigaton "Top Secret America," the national security industry -- which has very little to do with the nation's security, but rather functions as a cash cow for the connected entrepreneur community and a jobs program for the upper crust -- is booming, and likely to remain for the foreseeable future one of our few seemingly unlimited growth industries.

So if you're shopping for a vision of your professional future, or maybe for a second (or later) career, and you and your career counselor are coming up blank, have you ever considered becoming a spy? Or rather a "national clandestine officer"?

Our pal Al Kamen writes in today's Washington Post "In the Loop" column, "Spies wanted. Apply  here. No black sites provided," that he was alerted by a Loop Fan "to a strange job-recruitment ad now airing on WTOP radio" in the DC area -- for, yes indeed, girls and boys, CIA recruits! Al says he had Spy Talk blogmaster Jeff Stein run it down, and got confirmation from an unnamed spook spokesperson that yes, the ad is for real. "It makes sense for any organization, including the CIA," said the Agency source (not from the Disinformation Section, one hopes), "to make known its job opportunities, especially when we're focused on growing the diversity and foreign-language capabilities of our workforce."

Al provides this blow-by-blow account of the spot, with running commentary:

A phone rings twice. It stops.

"Understood," a man says, and then he hangs up.

"My working hours can change instantly," the man continues. "The mission is a constant, but every day is different."

Cue the rising violins.

"What I do is important," he says, "yet no one will ever know. But an entire nation will be grateful."

Dramatic pause. Cue the cellos and timpanis, then silence.

"Don't just watch the news," he says. "Live it, 24-7."

A woman comes on to widen the pitch:

"Be a part of history in the making. Become a National Clandestine Service officer, in a Washington, D.C.-area career at the Central Intelligence Agency." (Surely there are overseas options.)

"This is no ordinary assignment," the woman continues. "You can make a difference for the nation." History tells us sometimes a positive difference, sometimes not so much.

Then the small print: "You must have U.S. citizenship and the ability to successfully complete medical examinations and security procedures, including a polygraph interview. For additional information, and to apply, visit CIA.gov.

"That's CIA.gov," it repeats, in case your memory's not so good, or you write slowly. "The work of a nation. The center of intelligence. An equal-opportunity employer."

Cut.

Um, what was that URL again? Wait, wait, I know I've got a pencil here somewhere. Just hang on!

(I'm thinking that if you can't remember "CIA.gov" on the first try, it's possible you're not Grade A spook material.)

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Bill McKibben on innovative public radio

This American Life's Ira Glass

by Ken

Given a long enough weekend, I hold out the possibility, at least, that a person's (meaning "my") mind may slowly resume functioning. Over the weekend, facing a medium-length subway ride, I armed myself with a New York Review of Books issue that -- like most of them for me these days -- was incompletely read, and stumbled across an interesting piece (in the Nov. 11 issue) by Bill McKibben on interesting doings in public radio.

McKibben begins:

Radio receives little critical attention. Of the various methods for communicating ideas and emotions—books, newspapers, visual art, music, film, television, the Web—radio may be the least discussed, debated, understood. This is likely because it serves largely as a transmission device, a way to take other art forms (songs, sermons) and spread them out into the world. Its other uses can be fairly pedestrian too: ball games and repetitive, if remarkably effective, right-wing commercial talk radio. Rush Limbaugh is the radio ratings champ; according to the industry’s trade journal he reaches 14.25 million listeners in an average week. Sean Hannity, working the same turf, trails him slightly.

But then he confounds me at least with some surprising numbers about public radio listenership:

[A]n equally large audience turns to the part of the dial where public radio in its various forms can be found. Public radio claims at least 5 percent of the radio market. National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes -- are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts. Morning Edition and All Things Considered are supplemented by well-regarded programs like The World, a BBC coproduction with Boston’s WGBH, and the business broadcast Marketplace -- programming produced outside of NPR itself but within the larger world of public radio. In polls, public radio is rated as the most trusted source of news in the nation. The audience for most of its programs dwarfs the number of subscribers to the The New York Times or The New Yorker, or the number of people who read even the biggest best sellers.

About one in ten Americans tune in to public radio each week; if you landed in a spaceship someplace in America searching for thoughtful and nonpartisan culture, your first stop would be the public radio stations that usually show up below 92 on the FM dial. You'd find not just the big news shows but also a variety of call-in shows: national ones, like On Point, The Diane Rehm Show, or Talk of the Nation, with its much-loved Science Friday edition, but also a number of superb local talk programs, with hosts like Leonard Lopate and Brian Lehrer in New York, Michael Krasny in San Francisco, Steve Scher in Seattle, Larry Mantle in L.A. -- the list is very long.

These differ from the commercial right-wing shows in that they daily feature guests from a wide spectrum of American political and cultural life: on the morning I'm writing this, for instance, Tom Ashbrook of On Point in Boston spent an hour discussing the rise of social gaming on Facebook, Krasny covered "the troubled construction industry," and The Leonard Lopate Show examined the current state of the company Google. The sine qua non of these efforts is Terry Gross's relentlessly intelligent interview show Fresh Air, which is based in Philadelphia, has been running for thirty-five years, is syndicated to more than 450 stations, and claims nearly 4.5 million listeners.

"And yet," McKibben notes, "very little gets written about public radio." Nor is there any "well-known radio equivalent of the Emmys or the Grammys or the Oscars (or even the Tonys)," which he suggests "reflects public radio's smooth professionalism -- it's gotten so good at its basic task that it's taken for granted, a kind of information utility."

I've mentioned before that I'm a rather reluctant daily Morning Edition listener. Since the loss of Rachel Maddow's Air America morning show (and before that the amazing Morning Sedition) I haven't found anything better on TV or radio to help me get out of the house in the morning. I find ME kind of stodgy and limited in its purview. Still, the information it does present isn't hopeless and is somewhat useful.

As a matter of fact, McKibben isn't here to defend what he describes as the public radio "flagship" broadcasts like Morning Edition and All Things Considered, which he suggests have undergone something of the ossifying process observable in much more complete form in the standard infotainment newsmedia. He quotes All Things Considered veteran Brooke Gladstone:

As they become the primary news source for more and more Americans, public radio newsmagazines are restricting their own ability to move listeners. Like physicians in medieval times they seek to balance the four humors (so as not be too choleric, sanguine, phlegmatic, or melancholy) by blood-letting. Public radio newsmagazines are looking a little pallid these days, because the passion has been drained off.

Later, McKibben writes:

It seems churlish to criticize even mildly the flagship public radio news shows -- their reliable excellence deserves lavish praise. In recent years, though, it's started becoming clearer that, for all their polish, the big shows like All Things Considered suffer from some of the same constraints that plague other parts of elite American journalism. They aim for a careful political balance -- one academic study found their list of guests slightly to the right of The Washington Post and "approximately equal to those of Time, Newsweek, and US News and World Report." That's not a particularly interesting place to be, and it may explain why, especially in the Bush years, many left-of-center listeners defected to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, a highly professional but ideologically engaged daily hour on the Pacifica network. Others -- particularly young listeners -- are listening to The Takeaway, a morning news show that pairs veteran public radio voice John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee. It takes stories one after another, and gives each a few serious but fast-paced minutes. It feels electric, alive -- Web-paced journalism, purposely not as polished as Morning Edition but every bit as intelligent. "There ought to be something in the public radio idiom that delivers information live," says Hockenberry.

Now throughout the piece I'm not confident that I'm hearing the same thing as McKibben. I should probably listen to more of the shows he recommends, but the ones I've sampled haven't done much for me. Notably, in a few weeks of listening to The Takeaway, I didn't get it at all. I couldn't even figure out what the show thought it was doing which represented an upgrade over Morning Edition. Of course, it may just be that I'm too old and/or hidebound to represent the "particularly young" audience thirsting for the kind of innovation he's so excited about.

For McKibben the fountainhead for the new wave of information-based radio programming is Ira Glass's This American Life, from Chicago Public Radio. (I can't say I've given the show a fair chance, but it's never held my attention. Again, though, that may just be me.)

Those who restrict their listening to Morning Edition and All Things Considered are well informed -- there's no better news operation in English-language broadcasting. But they are missing a quite different world, one that's never been richer or, thanks to the Internet, easier to access.

The most important name in that other world is Ira Glass, the inventor of the show This American Life. He learned his craft at the big NPR news shows and slowly developed a powerful style that centered on storytelling. There was a group of others -- like Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva (known as the Kitchen Sisters), David Isay, and Jay Allison -- who had long been producing remarkable programs, including segments for the flagship news shows, extended features, ranging from quirky accounts of family kitchen rituals to politically minded portraits of juvenile prisoners. The best ones came to be called "driveway moments," because listeners were so hooked that they would linger in their cars to hear the end of a piece even once they'd gotten home. In fact, NPR now packages CD collections of these beloved pieces.

But Glass figured out that he could make a weekly hour entirely of this kind of radio, dispensing with traditional news and talk; and since 1995, under the wing of Chicago station WBEZ, that's what he's done in This American Life.

Glass and the people who have come to work with him, and the people who have been inspired by his example, have in common "a commitment to covering the 330 degrees of life that didn't show up on the newscasts," to covering "life the way most of us experience it, where heartbreak or lunch is as important as stock prices or distant revolutions."

"A FEW OF THE BROADCASTS WORTH LISTENING TO"

In the print version of his article, Bill McKibben promises a list in the on-line version of radio shows he considers worth listening to. As he points out in the article, via streaming and free-download podcast, virtually every show he mentions can be heard by anyone who owns a computer "free of charge and without the slightest hassle." Here's the list. Note that in the on-line version each listing is a live link.

• This American Life
• Sound Opinions
• Planet Money
• Re:sound
• Too Much Information
• Radiolab
• Studio 360
• Fresh Air
• 360documentaries, with the best from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
• Wiretap, from the CBC
• Transom podcast
• On the Media
• BBC Radio 4
• The Sound of Young America
• Q podcast
• Vocalo
• The Takeaway
• To the Best of Our Knowledge

McKibben has a lot to say about Glass's approach, and about shows like Studio 360 and Hearing Voices and Radio Diaries and To the Best of Our Knowledge and especially Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad's Radiolab. "In one sense," he writes, "this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It's like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules." However,

there's one problem, and that's the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it's very hard to get paid anything at all; in the early weeks of the fiscal downturn two years ago, NPR canceled two of the shows -- Weekend America and Day to Day -- that were consistently airing the work of new independent producers. Up-and-coming broadcasters are increasingly left to make their own way. Consider, say, Benjamen Walker, whose show Too Much Information airs weekly on New York's independent radio station WFMU. It absolutely crackles -- an hour-long mix of "interviews with real people, stories about fake people, monologue, radio drama." It's good enough that 240,000 people have downloaded some of the twenty episodes he's made so far. That's a lot of people, but it's zero money, since podcasts, like most websites, are by custom given away for free. Walker's previous show, a similar effort called Theory of Everything, was widely promoted on the Public Radio Exchange, and six public radio stations across the country actually paid for and ran it. "I think I made $80," he says. "If I thought about it too hard, I would just quit. It's much better not to think about it."

McKibben lays a good share of the problem at the doorstep of public radio station program directors. In the following excerpt he's quoting Greg Kot, cohost of the pop-music discussion show Sound Opinions, which he thinks is the bee's knees.

They are the gatekeepers for what gets on the air -- and their default mode is clearly to say no. "I'm not a radio veteran," says Kot, "but in my experience, program directors are conservative, afraid to rock the boat." They depend on their listeners to ante up about half a station's budget at pledge time, and local underwriters such as restaurants and bookstores to provide most of the rest, so they don't want to do anything that might offend them.

But the result is all too often flaccid radio, and listeners who have no idea what else is out there that they might enjoy. There are public radio stations so hidebound that they run the not-that-hilarious Car Talk twice each week.

Well, um, actually I think Car Talk is that hilarious -- and a lot else besides. I get a much better sense of the way people are living life in the America of today from a single broadcast of Car Talk than I got from all those weeks of trying to figure out what the Takeaway people thought they were up to, besides being "innovative," of course.

Nevertheless, as McKibben points out, we have hardly any serious discussion of what's happening on the radio, and I think anyone who cares should check out what he has to say.

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WBCN: The thrill is long gone. Corporate mindlessness proudly kills another iconic radio station. (With a personal look back from Howie)

Onetime WBCN "News Dissector" Danny Schechter is a serious news guy, as you can see from his present-day dissection of the current news business.

by Noah

When I was a kid, I built radios. It started with me rooting around in the attic. My family never threw out books, records, clocks, or radios. I don’t know why. I can conjecture about some sort of emotional attachment for three of the four, but when they got old, these objects got retired to the attic, not to the curb.

As a loner kid, I found hours of entertainment up in what amounted for me to a sort of museum. First it was the clocks. I would bring them to my room and get them all ticking away again, so much so that my dad had to stuff them all in drawers after I went to sleep, just so everyone else in the house could get a decent night’s sleep. Then, ignorant of the danger, I would haul the radios down, taking them apart, rearranging tubes and wires, while I played the records, just to see what would happen. It graduated to safer store-bought kits. Then I built antennas. Fortunately, I knew about ground wires (wasn’t that what the radiators were for?), or the house would have been long gone, blown to bits by lightning on some hot summer night.

The point of all of this inquisitiveness was a desire to hear music and voices from as many places as possible, the farther away the better. In those days, different stations in different towns played different music. Now it’s the same playlists with the same songs everywhere you go. Bill Clinton’s and some total bozo named Newt Gingrich’s horrid Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the biggest and most final nail in the coffin. Before then, true diversity ruled the airwaves. It wasn’t just a word or corporate slogan. DJs didn’t all sound the same. You could actually tell them apart. Hard as it may be to believe today, radio actually employed living, breathing people with real personalities, and our culture was richer for it. Today, you might find a ghostly shadow of such radio style down on the left side of your dial (Not to sound like Andy Rooney or anything, but radios used to also have dials).

Before iPods, there were portable transistor radios. I took mine everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I was obsessive then, and I am obsessive now. Bite me.

The thing is, radio was exciting, and of all the distant exotic lands that I tuned in, no radio was as exciting and entertaining as the radio waves heading my way from Boston. It had a life of its own. New York radio, my home turf, had its high points, but it was more restricted than Boston radio. Boston radio offered a broader selection of music within each format. It was looser. Even the DJs had more freedom. It is out of this tradition that WBCN was launched, almost by mistake, in 1968. It was one of the first truly free-form (anything goes) rock stations that lasted any length of time. It did so on the strength of its DJs' personalities and their honest good sense and musical taste, as reflected in the records that they played. If they liked it, they played it. Evil, destructive, negative entities such as Clear Channel who now program thousands of stations all across the land from some dead pit of a hell called Texas hadn’t yet made their huge “contribution” to the deliberate dumbing down of America.


What set WBCN apart was not just the good taste of the people who worked there; it was its innate irreverence and humor. When I moved to Boston, I got to experience BCN firsthand for many years. Those qualities were a perfect match for the overwhelmingly youthful population (thanks to what seems like hundreds of colleges in the area) it served. Notice the word "served." FCC licenses used to be granted to radio stations so that they could serve the community. Such a notion is still in the bylaws of the FCC charter, but it has been ignored and rendered meaningless by Washington slimebags who hold a different agenda. BCN was inspired radio as opposed to the paint-by-numbers, devoid-of-humanity radio now imposed on us by polyester-draped corporate yahoos who spend their days throwing buzzwords around, somehow convincing themselves that their joke lives have meaning. BCN arrived in the days when you could still tell the makes of the cars on your street apart without having to look for some damn logo that the car company paid someone a million bucks to “design.”

BCN rose out of the ashes of a failed classical station (BCN = Boston Concert Network) whose desperate owner, in a moment of nothing-to-lose, turned his nighttime slot over to some local freaks. Within four months, the station was wall-to-wall hippies, very smart hippies. In 1968, that suited Boston’s youth brigades just fine. They tuned in, and advertisers wanting to reach the several hundred thousand college kids in the city followed. At first their Madison Avenue advertising got rudely and deservedly laughed off the air, but, the people at BCN were a talented lot, and saved the day. They soon convinced would-be advertisers to let them write the ads for their products. With comic minds like BCN’s Michael Fremer creating ads, the audience meant for the advertising could relate to it, and everybody was happy. BCN had its own style.

Listening to BCN in the early '70s was like listening to The Daily Show, with music, and, you never knew who might drop by, often unannounced and unhyped. It could be anyone from David Bowie to guru Baba Ram Dass. It was just peer-to-peer conversation. You could even think of it as a cult. To its audience, BCN was an integral part of the day. To the straights or fearful repugs of the day, it was a vaguely menacing foreign-language station.

Legendary morning DJ Charles Laquidara, with his Big Mattress Show, didn’t need shock to wake up the city. He, like the other BCN DJs, just had to be himself, a witty and passionate purveyor of music, traffic reports, and even astrology forecasts, presented by a mysterious entity known to Boston as the Cosmic Muffin, who admonished listeners, “It is a wise man who follows the stars, but a fool who is ruled by them.”

The news was presented by one Danny Schechter, “Your News Dissector,” and dissect he did. Every Bostonian of a certain age and bent made it a point not to miss what the News Dissector had to say. His dead-on warped interpretations of Richard Nixon and his coverage of the Watergate hearings still resound in my mind, as does his successful effort in helping to stave off the end of rent control in Cambridge despite the City Council’s efforts. It was about strength in numbers and serving the community.

Afternoon DJ Maxanne Sartori simply had what may be the warmest, friendliest, and greatest radio voice of all time. She also had a knack for being first when it came to turning listeners on to music, whether it was Queen, Big Star, or a band then ill-regarded by its record company named Aerosmith. She changed perceptions with her passion. That doesn’t happen on radio anymore, and it hasn’t happened in a very long time. People like Maxanne didn’t care whether the record company believed. She believed, and her show wasn’t being programmed by some asshole in a suit somewhere in San Antonio.

As the years went on and BCN got bigger, the corporate world’s war on style and personality took its toll. It almost happened in the late '70s. By then, even BCN was playing it safe, and they were in danger of getting stale. I personally remember shaming them into playing an artist we were doing well with on just in-store play at the record store where I worked as the rock buyer. The artist was Tom Petty. At the same time, local college stations were playing the onslaught of punk rock from England and places here in the U.S. These stations were even drawing listeners away from BCN. I remember having lunch with BCN’s program director, who asked me what was selling. When I told him how well we were doing with The Clash, The Police, and The Ramones, his demeanor instantly changed, and he told me that if any of his DJs “played that punk shit, it would be their jobs.”

BCN soon had a new program director named Tony Berardini, fresh in from San Francisco, who made a point of being in constant contact with area music retailers and the local music scene. The station even began hiring the top college DJs in the area, who brought a fresh and now-needed younger perspective to the station. It was adapt or die, and BCN adapted. They continued to serve the community and its huge population of teens and 20-somethings. One of them, Carter Alan, championed U2 when no one else gave the band the time of day. An Irish band clicking in Boston; who woulda thunk? Certainly not someone programming the station from Texas.

As for the old program director, he went on to a bigger position in the radio world, working for a corporate consulting company, telling stations what they should play from his cushy office in his new hometown of Los Angeles. He became a suit. Some might say th at he “failed upward.” It is the way of things in today’s radio world.

The tragedy of what has happened to stations like WBCN (which sounds something like what Ken was describing happening at New York classical station WQXR) is the result of a human weakness called greed. Companies can easily become victims of their own success. The staff convinces itself that it hasn’t changed; that they have just made some “improvements” to the product. What I call "The Wet T-shirt Contest Mentality" encroaches. If you get big enough, sooner or later a bigger company thinks about the dollars it can make by charging maximum advertising rates to companies that want to reach the large number of people that you attract. They will get the dollar signs in their eyes and buy you out. How many say no thank you?

In the case of BCN, it was Infinity Broadcasting and then CBS. Money doesn’t just talk, it swears. BCN got bigger and bigger. As it did so, its playlist tightened, and it got safer and blander. The friendly dialog with the community ended. The listener was no long a friend or peer but a target demographic. In its place were generic voices reading generic scripts written for them a thousand miles away. Rather than have personality that appeals to people, corporations worry about offending someone and losing or never having one of their sponsors, as if they didn’t have enough already. It becomes a quarterly numbers game. Quality doesn’t enter into it, no matter how much those polyester-draped clowns rationalize themselves into thinking that it does. The word quality becomes just another slogan, its meaning redefined in some faraway corporate headquarters by people who’ve never walked the streets of the town where your once-favorite radio station lived.

The war on style and personality is a race to find the lowest common denominator, a race that holds the hollow prize of not mattering to people’s lives anymore. In the end, people stop buying it. The corporation wonders what went wrong and unloads it to the next guy, Infinity to CBS. Laquidara to the execrable Opie and whatever-his-name-is or some other mindless Bevis and Butthead pairing. BCN is a far-too-often repeated story, but it is big because BCN rose from nothing and was loved by so many so intently. It became a vital organ for a major city. It had national influence on pop culture for a long time.

It was a station where a DJ once spoke the truth when he uttered the words “This war is being brought to you by Honeywell,” a locally based major defense contractor in the Military Industrial Complex. The DJ got fired but then was rehired, due to both the actions of fellow station DJs and a very involved listening audience. Now Honeywell will probably be a leading sponsor for the station’s new programming: sports talk. Now that’s “new and innovative”!

In the war between art and commerce, commerce usually wins. It’s just business.


UPDATE: A Personal Look Back From Howie

Noah asked me to chime in with my own BCN recollections. They start when I had a small indie label based in San Francisco, 415 Records. WBCN was the first meaningful station-- meaningful in terms of making significant amounts of records sell-- outside of California to play our artists. I remember when they started playing the first RomeoVoid album, Its A Condition, we started shipping cartons of albums to Boston and then to the surrounding areas. The band got booked to play there and Rik Ocasek offered to produce an EP for them (which he did, including the song that launched our label commercially, Never Say Never). The station became a 415 mainstay, helping break all of our bands and giving us our first #1, China, by the Red Rockers.

All of our bands wound up playing in Boston over and over, and everything sold there, and because of BCN our music spread to other stations. I became friends with the punk rock guy on the station, Oedipus, who later became program director, and we used to argue about who started the first punk rock radio show in America. (They started within 2 weeks of each other; his was on a college station, WERS WTBS, I think, and mine was on the mighty KSAN, ironically the WBCN of San Francisco.) I became a regular judge at the finals of the WBCN Rock'n'Roll Rumble and even wound up signing a contest winner to Sire one year, a band called Seka, which was forced by one of David Vitter's girls to change their name to Strip Mind and then went on to spawn Godsmack. WBCN became one of a small handful of stations around America not just willing but eager to discover and break new music that more conservative stations were afraid to test out-- like U2, Talking Heads, Green Day and Depeche Mode. The station became a national cultural force.

When I came to town BCN would have me on as a guest dj. When I discovered some great new song or band, I would call Oedipus and tell him or he would do the same for me. San Francisco DJs went to work at BCN, and WBCN DJs came to work at San Francisco stations. When I discovered how wonderful Thailand was in the late 1970s, I told Oedipus about it, and he wound up loving it as much as I did, buying a house there and finding a wife! I'm going there next week; I hope I run into him.

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