In One Basket - As

In One Basket - As I mentioned the other day, I rarely listen to Limbaugh. Part of it is my schedule - I'm usually busy from 11-2 weekdays. Part of it is Limbaugh himself; he's great at what he does, and I'm rarely in the mood for it anyway.

But when he's hot, he's hot. And yesterda, he was shooting steam out his ears.

He was talking about the FCC's ownership debate, wherein the FCC wants to further loosen rules on media ownership for companies within given markets. The Democrats oppose it, natch, saying that deregulation is concentrating too much power in too few hands.

Limbaugh hammered that notion - and called the left on some of their own hypocrisy in the bargain; while the left is squawking that the top ten radio conglomerates own 44% of the nation's radio stations, Limbaugh pointed out their silence about the parallel facts; the top ten (really top 5) movie companies own 99% of the film industry, and the top 10 record companies own a similar proportion of the music market.

The bid to re-regulate seems, more than anything, to be a bid to stifle the growth of conservative talk radio.

One of the de-regulators' main points; radio seems to have gotten more diverse, not less; the big conglomerates get 80% of the ratings, but they still own 2/5 of the stations. And that 60% of the remainder cover a wider variety of customers than they have in recent memory.

Back when I was still in radio - 13 years ago, during the twilight of the regulations that had ruled the industry since its inception - the Twin Cities had 20-odd commercial radio stations. Of them, four were country-western, and 7-8 were some combination of "classic rock" and "oldies" (the line between the two is hazy and involves picking an age out of a hat), 2-3 "CHR" stations of various flavors. You could hear the same song three times per hour if you were "lucky". When each station could only own one AM and one FM station, each had to cast the broadest net possible.

Today, the market has moved where the people are; each format has one, or at the most two, stations covering it, as the conglomerates use their many properties to narrowcast to different audiences; in the Twin Cities, one conglomerate has a classic rock station to keep the 25-54-year-old guys happy, a pseudo-"urban" station for his teenage kids, a country station for his redneck brother, an all-sports station for his not-very-bright, belligerent brother in law, an oldies station for the in-laws, and a pseudo-alternative station for his wife to listen to at work.

Another example? During the glory days of regulation, the Twin Cities' afro-American community constantly and accurately decried the market's lack of an "urban" or "R and B" station (other than an occasional foray by a weak AM station). Today, there are two.

Here's the part I find interesting; one of the biggest, albeit tacit, supporters of re-regulation has been Minnesota Public Radio, led by Bill Kling. Now, if genuine diversity is what you want, it'd seem that one would support the FCC's proposal to start licensing "low power FM" stations, little FM stations with a range of a few miles that can be bought (proponents say) for as little as $1000 - cheap enough that any non-profit community group can get into the radio business.

Who leads the opposition to LPFM, at least here in the Twin Cities?

Bill Kling.

It's hard to count the ways that further deregulation is a good idea, but I'll keep trying.