Last winter, there was a leftyblogger conference in downtown Saint Paul.

Someone must have run a session on how to play investigative reporter. “Minnesota Observer”, writing at “Cucking Stool”, thinks she’s onto something.

Let’s read the story…

D’oh.  Not that link  It’s a dead link.  Because MNob had to pull the story down and retool it just a tad.

But retool she did – and it finally ended up at this link…I think.

Yes!  It’s there!

Spot [leftybloggers have trouble using their real names]  has often jousted with St. Cloud State University professor of the dismal science King Banaian over matters of economic policy here at the Cucking Stool.

Spot “jousts” with King in the same way the Washington Generals “joust” with the Globetrotters.  But I digress.

What I want to talk about today is something a bit different, and a bit more personal to the professor: the Communications Act of 1934. Specifically section 315 of the Act and its equal opportunity requirement on a broadcaster, say a radio station. The Act requires that

If any licensee shall permit any person who is a legally qualified candidate for any public office to use a broadcasting station, he shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates for that office in the use of such broadcasting station

I remember having to learn this bit of law ,when I first started in radio (um, 31 years ago this month); it means that radio and TV stations have an obligation to provide the same access to the air to candidates from all parties.

Of course, not every candidate;  otherwise, stations would be so busy broadcasting screeds from the Grass Roots party and the Natural Law party that they’d sound like AM950, and have the ratings to match.  No, candidates have to be officially-endorsed candidates that are legally on the ballot.  Which means they’ve been endorsed and the convention or, if there’ a primary, the election winner.

The equal opportunity requirements contained in section 315 of the Act have been described as “the closest thing in broadcast content regulation to the ‘golden rule.'”

In the same way that I’ve been described as “Original Gangsta”.

The law – or at least the Cliff Notes version of it – aside, MNob cuts to what passes for the chase:

Professor Banaian is running for the Minnesota legislature, seeking to serve the people of House District 15B…He has a website up, he’s on Facebook and the Twitter. He’s pretty obviously a “legally qualified candidate” these days under the Act.

And, as MNob noted (it was apparently why she took down the original post) the DFL doesn’t have a legal candidate yet; they’re duking it out in the primary tomorrow.  King will take the winner on in November (and, I suspect, win by 5-10 points).

But he also has a media presence that his opponents do not, one that brings us back to section 315 of the Communications Act of 1934. You see, he also has four hours of air time every single week in the form of the “King Banaian Show” on 1570 AM, some “Business Talk Radio” station here in the Twin Cities…

Remember that phrase – “here in the Twin Cities”.

Candidate Banaian has had hours of air time at his disposal. I don’t see that anyone else in the race appearing on the KYCR schedule.

Well, no.  Economist Banaian has had the hours “at his disposal” to do a show about economics.  And it is “in the Twin Cities”; not in Saint Cloud, part of which is in 15B.

But MNob is – to a point – correct; he’s a candidate.

On his candidacy website, Facebook, and Twitter he makes no mention of his radio show, and the radio show’s website doesn’t mention his candidacy, which makes me think he knows that all is not entirely according to Hoyle in this scenario.

Not sure how MNob’s crack research skills missed the fact we’ve been plugging King’s show every week for ten months now; King’s been on the air on one Salem Twin Cities station or another for six and a half years, now.  I’m not a lawyer, so I’m obviously not mentally equipped to ponder the workings of the law-school-trained mind, but if “according to Hoyle” means “publicized”, King’s pretty much got it covered.

I’m not completely detached from the discussion; I was there for part of it.  When Salem Communications switched King’s program from AM1280 to AM1570, to give it one of the most solid, credible local voices in the market for discussing business and economic  issues, everyone knew that there was a possibility that King would run for office.  The question went up the corporate food chain and came back down positive.  King could do his show, but he couldn’t talk about being a candidate; his focus was the same as the station’s; business, not politics.

Still, MNob’s right, so far – since King is a candidate…

…under the law, his care in avoiding discussions of his candidacy doesn’t won’t matter. Most likely, once he received a party unit’s endorsement and certainly once he filed his paperwork, his presence on the air triggered the equal opportunity provisions of the law.

Well, sure, once the Democrats endorse an opponent.

Or it would; if KYCR were heard under any normal, reasonable circumstances, in House District 15B.

Here’s HD15B (warning: PDF file!): it’s eastern Saint Cloud and its southeast environs in Stearns county.

Here’s KYCR’s listening area:

The red circle is the “Local Coverage” pattern – the area where the station can be reliably picked up. it ends a good half a county short of the nearest tip of District 15B.  The lavender line is the “Distant Coverage” pattern – where the signal catches a bare corner of 15B, but only if you’re pretty darn motivated and have a good radio or a big antenna.  The blue line is the “fringe coverage area”, where you have to be more or less lucky to be able to find the station even if you want to try really hard (and I’m here to testify – it’s real hard to get a station in the fringe area, and harder still to get a meaningful signal).

As you can see, over 90% of the district is in the “Fringe” overage area (Coverage maps explained).  Experience says even the red circle is optimistic.  Oh, and at night – when half the “equal time” would occur – the range is about 2/3 of what you see on the map above.

I’m not bringing this up for the wonky radio-geek-olicious fun of it; the “Equal Opportunity” rules have limits.  One of those limits, as far as the FCC is concerned, is “does a voter in an area have a reasonable chance of being able to pick up the candidate’s broadcast?”   If a candidate in Fargo has a show on a station in Louisville, Kentucky, the Kentucky station would not likely be forced to give up equal time; nobody in Fargo will ever hear the candidate’s broadcast, so it can’t influence the election even indirectly.

And, according to a source familiar with this situation, that’s why Banaian’s show continues – because it is impossible for anyone in HD15B to hear it under normal circumstances, except via the internet – and the FCC doesn’t require Equal Opportunity on the Internet, because candidates can produce their own webcasts as easily as Salem can.  Probably easier.

So while the Equal Opportunity rule might apply to the race in 15B, it’s a real stretch.

Of course, “stretch” doesn’t mean “impossible”.  So if I were KYCR’s program director (and I am not!), I’d say something like this:

MANAGER MITCH: Sure, Zach Dorholt or Carol Lewis, whichever of you wins the primary!  You want equal time?  You got equal time!  You roust yourself up at 7AM on Saturday, and get on the road by 8:30.  Get yourself from Saint Cloud to Eagan by 10 or 10:30, because you’re going on the air at 11!  You have two hours (the same length as King’s broadcast; we’ll rebroadcast it on Sunday night, just as we do King’s.  Oh, unless you’d rather come down here on Sunday night!).

The law requires us to give you two hours of airtime and a microphone.  I’ll throw in an engineer to run the board for you, naturally.  But making yourself sound good and credible when you’ve probably never done any radio – that’s your job!  So you can sit in that room for two hours – it’s actually 88 minutes after commercials – and try not to sound like a cottonmouthed stammering fool.  Unless, of course, you’d like to have one of the hosts in the building lead you through a discussion of the district’s issues…oh, wait.  All conservatives.  Sorry about that.

And you can do that 88 minutes on the air knowing that not a single person in your district will ever hear what you’re saying, unless they really love tinkering with radios, which, let’s be honest, on a summer Saturday in Minnesota, nobody does.

(D’oh, sorry – you might be dimly audible in the southeasternmost tip of the district – the Republican part.  Time well spent, folks!)

You’ll be off the air at 1PM, which leaves you back in St. Cloud by about 2:30, if there’s no construction.

So you go ahead and tell your campaign manager “Hey, I’d like to take six hours of prime Saturday campaigning time to drive to Eagan to do a broadcast that absolutely nobody in our district will hear, except maybe a few people who are rock-ribbed Bachmann supporters anyway; nobody from Saint Cloud, the only place we’ll be getting any votes, will be able to hear it even in the unlikely event they’d try”.

And then, you tell that manager you’re going to be doing it every single week until the election is over, or until Banaian decides to take a break from it.

C’mon down!  Mi airtime es su airtime!

Perhaps Mr. Dorholt and Ms. Lewis’ campaign managers might want to be in touch with MNob to ask her to quit doing them favors.

Look – it’s entirely possible that King will put his show on hiatus has the campaign switches to its final push for November, and hand it over to guests hosts or do a few months worth of “best ofs”.   Campaigning is hard, and I’d imagine King could use a few extra hours a week when the end-of-cycle grind really kicks in.  And if he gets elected – and I think he will, and I think the smart money would think so even if King hadn’t been one of Smart Money’s friends for over six years – we’ll have to see what happens, then.

But it’ll have nothing to do with the FCC – for the radical reason that everyone involved in the show at Salem and KYCR thought about all these possibilities well in advance.  Equal Opportunity might apply to the DFL candidates in 15B; they might just be really dumb to try to use it.

But if all you leftybloggers want to get equal time, pass the word to Dave Walz, Keith Ellison and BettyMcCollum that my repeated invites to appear on the Northern Alliance still stand.  Of course, nobody at any of those offices has the manners to respond, much less the seeds to take us up on it (even though RT Rybak found Ed and I perfectly respectful and civil interviewers; McCollum and Ellison apparently need interviewers who’ll paint their toenails on the air for them)…

…possibly because there’s no FCC law that requires them to accept the offer.

Pity.

…I’ll be on AM1100 The Flag with Rob Port at 6:35 or so to talk about the Governor’s race.

You can listen in here:
Live video by Ustream

The Tic-controlled Congress has the  confidence of 11% of the American people:

Gallup’s 2010 Confidence in Institutions poll finds Congress ranking dead last out of the 16 institutions rated this year. Eleven percent of Americans say they have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in Congress, down from 17% in 2009 and a percentage point lower than the previous low for Congress, recorded in 2008.

To put this in perspective, used car salesmen got 24%, Lindsay Lohan got 18%, and the Snooki from Jersey Shore clocked 14%

The part that should have gotten the headline?  The Presidency dropped from 51 to 39% over the past year.

Let’s see if we can get it into single digits!

I’ll be on Rob Port’s “Say Anything” show on KZFG “AM1100 The Flag” in Fargo at 6:35 Monday morning to talk about the Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s role as a front for Dayton family money in trying to buy the Minnesota gubernatorial election.

I’ll be running links to the live video stream and the chat room starting about 3AM Monday morning.  Tune in via any means necessary (including AM1100’s live stream)!

Our liberal elites in action:  liberal talk host Bill Press says Obama’s polls are collapsing because  Americans are a bunch of spoiled brats; Brian Maloney transcribes:

I think this says more about the American people than it does about President Obama. I think it just shows once again that the American people are spoiled. Basically, spoiled– as a people, we are too critical. We are quick to rush to judgment, we are too negative, we are too impatient. Especially impatient. We want it all solved yesterday, and if you don’t, I don’t care who you are — get out of the way.

And again, basically spoiled. To the point where it makes me wonder if it’s even possible to govern today. I gotta tell you, I don’t think Abraham Lincoln — who certainly didn’t get everything right the first time — could govern today. I’m not sure Franklin Roosevelt could govern today, the way we are again. Just about like spoiled children. And it’s Americans, and it’s the media, and if we don’t get instant gratification, then screw you is basically our attitude.

Bill Press:  Get a grip.

You think Ronald Reagan got carried to success on the shoulders of the entire American people right after his election?  Please – the media certainly sniped at him nonstep (then as now).

And yet he succeeded (not that you can tell that to people like Bill Press).

Competence helps.

I was enjoying an all-too-rare hour of listening to Jason Lewis the other day.

I was driving through the teller line at the bank, when he chimed in with an oldie but goodie:  “Bikers don’t pay taxes”. 

And the teller looked at me, perplexed, when I shouted “you are wrong for two reasons!”.

First:  I do pay taxes.  City and county taxes.  Some of which go to paying for bike lanes – the odd strip of asphalt around the lakes, and a stripe lane on the occasional street.  Not every street mind you; one street about every mile or so, generally, usually not the high-traffic ones.  (And by the way – Minneapolis’ re-work of Hennepin and First Avenue North, putting the bike lane between the parking lane and the curb?  Reekingly stupid.  It smacks of equal parts revenue generation plan and green-über-alles arrogance).   While there may or may not be state transportation dollars mixed in there, I most certainly do pay taxes for them. 

Now – in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided not to make bike paths a user-fee-based system, paid for by tolls or bike licenses or whatever.  Got any ideas?   I’m down with ’em – although we all know it’ll just mean more property tax revenues for government to spend.  But that’s a larger problem on which we all agree.

Second (ironically, inasmuch as I was in a car when I thought this):  Like 99% or more of bikers, I pay gas taxes.  I drive.  Six months or so a year, though, I commute by bike (as well as all sorts of recreational riding).    For longer trips, or trips where I have to haul groceries, I drive. 

And you can ask any engineer, but five five-mile trips cause more road damage than one 25-mile trip; the longer trip is likely to be on the highways (which my gas taxes pay for), with fewer starts and stops and turns, the kind of thing that wears down roads.  So since a higher percentage of my gas-tax-generating car travel is longer, more efficient, less-damaging trips, while for half the year most of my short-hop trips cause no damage to roads at all (because I”m on a bike!), the state taxpayer is actually getting less damage per gas tax dollar out of me, the driver who bikes a lot, than out of someone who drives all of the equivalent mileage.

By the way –  while I drive, I buy less gas – which means less demand pressure on the market, which lowers the price for the rest of you. 

On all counts, you’re welcome.

I was enjoying an all-too-rare hour of listening to Jason Lewis the other day.

Years ago, when I ran an annual “State of Twin Cities Talk Radio” feature, a solid year before the Northern Alliance Radio Network went on the air (I discontinued the series when the show started, due to my obvious bias); in it, I noted at least once that “Jason Lewis is the host I’d like to be when I grow up”.  And that day was one of the broadcasts where I realized exactly why.

I’m not one of those people who bays “politics is the worst it’s ever been”; it’s not.  1928 was bad; 1828 was worse (albeit for many of the same reasons it’s bad today, only on steroids).   But it is getting pretty bad these days.

And not because people aren’t “bipartisan”.  “Bipartisanship” is a chimera; taken to an illogical extreme, it is antidemocratic. 

And in a multipolar political world, people are going to disagree – on issues, and on lesser things.

To paraphrase Lewis, we need to avoid bagging on the lesser things – especially personalities and personal attacks. 

Conservatives: Barack Obama was born a US Citizens.  Even if he wasn’t, it’s really too late to do anything about it; but it’s a moot point, because he is.  Get a grip.  And he’s not a Marxist or a communist, and won’t be until he opens re-education camps somewhere in Utah.  He’s a cut-rate Richard Daley, not Josef Stalin.   He’s a fabian statist, all right – and he got elected President.  He’s doing the job that 52% of your most gullible neighbors sent him to Washington to do, for now.  Let’s see if we can fix that in 2012.

And yeah, the left is doing it, too.  Unable to fight the Tea Party and the resurgent grassroots right on the issues, they’re going for the ad-homina, the name-calling, the fearmongering and slander, and the yellow hackery – all standard drills for people who are running on intellectual empty, and need to count on their opponents to react to an ofay provocation to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve dug.

Americans need to be smarter.  Conservatives, in particular, need to be smarter than the opposition; we’re fighting against a full-court media press that is at present fully in the bag for the President.

And this president is so easy to attack on the issues; he’s really been an incompetent disaster, so far, except inasmuch as he’s copied Bush’s policies that worked.  There is no need to barber on about his birth certificate, his religion or his labels; he is so weak on the issues that there’s no excuse for it.

Because when he’s essentially destroying, in the long run, everything that ever made this nation great, who really cares where he worshipped as a child?

Peter Suderman notes that the Federal Communications Commission is poking its nose into regulating the Internet.

But that’s not the main issue.  The question is not whether we need the FCC at all:

The FCC’s entire approach is to rule by impulse and expand its reach whenever and wherever possible. Recent FCC actions include investigating the approval process Apple employs in its iPhone App Store, mulling whether and how phone companies might upgrade their networks and passing judgment on various consumer devices of minimal likely importance, such as the Palm Pixi.

The FCC is a crank-and-wire institution in a nanocircuit age:

When the FCC was launched in 1934, backers argued that airwave scarcity justified its existence. In an age of information overload, with a nearly infinite array of media choices available to anyone with a mobile phone or broadband connection, no such argument can be made. Yet rather than shrinking, the FCC has ballooned, growing its budget by more than 60 percent between 1999 and 2009.

The FCC is one of many government agencies that an administration that cared about responsible, limited, unobtrusive government could eliminate in toto without anyone noticing.

KSTP-AM pulled the plug on its thirty-year, once-wildly-successful experiment with talk radio this week.

General Manager Ginny Morris, from the station’s website:

Radio is an ever-changing landscape and throughout its 87-year history, KSTP-AM has been known for many things. In the very earliest days, when my grandfather was programming the station, we covered a lot of news and carried the NBC radio network, we aired soap operas and played many different types of music. Later, when my dad ran the station, he played Jazz and classical music, and then evolved into playing rock music, which at times dismayed his dad.

On Monday, February 15, we evolve again, and you will know us as AM1500 The SportsTalk Station.

Joe Soucheray and Patrick Reusse invented SportsTalk in this town – arguably in the country – and we look forward to featuring them together every afternoon. They are wonderfully talented entertainers and storytellers, as individuals and as a team, and they will anchor our new line-up that we think you will enjoy.

Well, we could hardly enjoy it any less than the one the station’s had for the past year or two.

I more or less predicted this a little over a year ago.  KSTP’s been drifting toward…something for a long time, now.

A little background:  After almost sixty years as one of the leading radio stations in the country (in the ’30s and ’40s), and then one of the top music stations in the metro (60s and early 70s), KSTP-AM switched to talk radio in about 1980; music radio had pretty well died on AM radio by that point.  And in the days of the “Fairness Doctrine”, it nearly died again; Hubbard Broadcasting was actively seeking a buyer for its once-flagship station, amid rumors that the FCC would soon decommission the entire AM band.  It even stuck the AM operation in the old transmitter shack, on Highway 61, to make it easier to move.  It’s asking price in 1986? A ludicrous $5 million (or so said the rumor among the staff at the time, of which I was one).

And then, in 1987, Ronald Reagan killed the “Fairness” Doctrine, opening up the radio market to untrammelled political talk of all kinds.

A consultant pitched this new host – Rush Limbaugh – to KSTP’s management, saying that sure, Limbaugh was political, but his schtick was much more about his irreverence and humor.  So Hubbard took a chance.

And it paid off handsomely; in 1986, the AM station was the poor cousin of the Hubbard family.  By 2003, with Limbaugh, Jason Lewis, Bob Davis and the newly-“conservative” Joe Soucheray dominating their time slots, the AM station was rolling in money, and financially carrying the rest of the Hubbard slate (“Chick-Talk 107”, KS95, and Channels 5 and 45), making so much money they were able to experiment way outside the format with hosts like Tom Mischke.

But the rumors were always there; Hubbard didn’t like being “conservative”.  Ginny Morris pined for the days when her grandfather’s KSTP, like its hereditary nemesis WCCO, was all things to all people, offended nobody, and was the broadcast pillar of the community (back when the community had three newspapers, three TV stations, a couple dozen radio stations – and that was it).

And so when Jason Lewis, and then Rush Limbaugh, left KSTP – buoyed by a 2005 meme among consultants that “conservative talk is dead” –  the station replaced them with middle-of-the-road milquetoast, and sports.  The station landed the Minnesota Twins in 2007.

The mixture performed terribly.  KSTP’s ratings are a shade over half of what they were seven years ago.  More importantly, the station’s revenues are doing about the same; scuttlebutt around the market says that KSTP’s revenues are off 40%.   Some of that is the economy, of course – but it’s worth noting that revenues at “AM1280 The Patriot”, where I do a show, dropped by a tiny fraction of the losses at KSTP (expressed as percentage of overall revenues).  By way of discussion, KTLK-FM, which started with the same “dog’s breakfast of ideas” format to which KSTP has aspired, saw its revenues drop by 30% – and decided to switch to more or less all conservative talk to get back in the saddle.  Because conservative talk is the only mass format in radio that’s paying its freight these days.

Except, perhaps, sports.

Amy Carlson Gustafson at the PiPress covers the carnage:

As of Thursday, the station had gotten rid of weekday on-air folks including Bob Berglund, Jay Kolls, mid-morning show hosts Shawn Prebil and Chris Murphy, late-night host Al Malmberg and midday host Kelly Webb.

Most of whom – Berglund excepted – should never have been on the air in the majors anyway.

KSTP’s management rationalizes:

“In a talk radio marketplace that’s gotten pretty [crowded], we’ve found that it’s tough to succeed if you don’t own a position,” [Hubbard exec Dan] Seeman said. “KSTP-AM was the original talk station and for a long time that meant something — you could do some talk, some opinion, some sports. Well, then, all of a sudden you have specialized formats in conservative talk, liberal talk, sports talk, pop culture talk. We really decided we needed to settle on a position.

This is tush-covering.  KSTP-AM had a position.  It was in fact a very dominant one, ten years ago; Limbaugh, Lewis and Soucheray were as potent a ratings punch as this market has seen.  KSTP squandered that position.

And our strengths are Joe, Pat and Twins baseball. Sports, sports, sports.”

Well, no.  Those are the only strong hosts the station left itself with.

The station is eventually going to switch to ESPN’s morning show, which would normally be considered a bit of a black eye for a station with KSTP’s history and size; most big stations in major metro areas have their own local morning show.  But KSTP’s morning lineup has been utterly hapless since 1980, and the gabbling bobbleheads on ESPN will likely be an improvement. Or at least cost less.

As a way of making a rayon purse out of a sow’s ear, it’s not a bad move; it’ll support the Twins broadcasts better, it’ll draw a defined audience for the first time since the station ditched political talk, and it’ll give the station the first chance it’s had at an actual identity – “position” – in a long, long time. Maybe, if they’re lucky, it’ll be a “position” that management actually gets behind as well.

Which would have helped the station a lot over the past 5-10 years or so.

Brian Lambert shows why KTLK-FM had such a rocky start in the Twin Cities, in a piece that purports to be about Air America tanking; along the way, it also shows why liberalism is starting to gasp for air in the age of Obama.

Lambert starts with the genesis of his short-lived radio show:

I was summoned to a meeting with Clear Channel Communications “talk radio guru”/consultant, Gabe Hobbs, after only a couple weeks on the job. Having just spent a chunk of the previous 15 years covering radio consultants, or more accurately, the inanity and chaos they left behind, I was prepared to sit across from a complete cartoon.  (OK, not every radio consultant I had met or interviewed was a “complete” cartoon. But that’s a little like saying “some cigarettes are good for you”, to which you reply, “yeah, the ones you don’t smoke.”)

Lambo got that one right.  But I digress.  But so did he.

In their wisdom the local Clear Channel group had decided that “a WCCO for the 21st century” was the way to go for the FM talk experiment they were starting up.

Which was how I put it at the time; for whatever reason, a generation of consultants decided that conservative talk was dead (based largely on wishful thinking after the 2004 election), and tried floating the “all things to all people” format all over the country, including KTLK and KSTP-AM.

After saying that he wasn’t sure what to make of the idea of dogs and cats playing together, Hobbs conceded he was intrigued by the righty-gal vs. the lefty-guy dynamic. And then he got to the nut of modern (conservative) talk radio.

(I’m paraphrasing a bit here, but I swear the essentials are accurate.)

And he’s right about the consultant’s opinion being accurate – an awful lot of “talk radio gurus” deeply hate conservative talk; some of them are ideological liberals, but most of them are just dying to come up with a take on a format that clicks, somewhere, and makes them millions of dollars in consulting fees.  It’s not going all that well, by the way, after almost 20 years of trying.

One of the problems is the contempt these people have for “the talk radio audience”.  Mr. Hobbs would seem to have shared his with Mr. Lambert:

“Try to keep in mind,” said Hobbs, “that the average listener for a show like yours is a 42 year-old guy who doesn’t follow the news all that close but is listening because he doesn’t want to be left out of the discussion. What he wants from you is something he can bring to conversations at work and at home. Something that makes it appear he’s in touch with what’s going on. You’re not here to educate him so much as you are to give him a few ideas he can throw out to feel like he’s part of the conversation.”

Well, it must work; Pew shows that Limbaugh’s audience is better-informed on news and current events than the average American, testing about the same as the famously-smug NPR audience in terms of overall knowledge.

Which is – even Lambert might admit – at odds with what the consultant had to say about ’em.

Well, maybe Lambert wouldn’t admit it:

Since this image so thoroughly gelled with the image I’d had for years of the Limbaugh Dittoheads…

The point being that talk radio doesn’t square well with having contempt for one’s audience.  Consultant Gabe Hobbs’ advice famously splattered; KTLK-FM’s first incarnation, the “WCCO for the 21st Century” famously cratered on impact.  (Does anyone remember their first lineup?  Colton and Guest in the morning?  Pat Kessler? Sarah and Brian?  Dan Conry?  They wanted to be all things to all people so badly they practically adopted Norwegian accents).  Part of it was the concept; part of it was some of the talent wasn’t that talented.  But mostly, it’s that whether people really are as stupid as Gabe Hobbs thinks they are (and that image “gells” with that of Lambert, who is lest we forget one of the Twin Cities foremost media columnists) or not, they can tell in this day and age when they’re being condescended to.  When the whole concept for your format is based on the kind of cynicism that Lambert and Hobbs shared, you think it doesn’t show?

It did!

No, really:

A radio audience of middle-aged guys who, for whatever the reason — distraction, indifference, laziness and/or stupidity — haven’t done their own homework on the big events of the day but want to pretend they have among their workmates, pals and spouses, by staying up to date with the bumper sticker slogan du jour. Hmmm, and I guessed “Make Love Not War” wasn’t exactly what these guys wanted to repeat down at the office, across forklifts in the warehouse, or over dinner, to impress the wife and kids with how tough it is out in there in a real man’s world.

That is, of course, the conceit that drives the entire mainstream media; you, the people, are bunch of mindless cattle that need your news, your entertainment and everything short of your food carefully pre-digested for you, lest you choke from trying to think about something too big. Information is too precious a gift to get in too big chunk – at least for all of you lumpen peasants.

No.  Again, really:

Beyond Hobbs’ carefully parsed point, is this: The “pretense” of thoughtful consideration, at least in terms of a commercially successful narrative delivered via mass media, requires much … much … heavier doses of simplicity and indignant finger-pointing than scholarly nuance.

Lambert mentions “simplicity” – as opposed to condescenscion – like it’s a bad thing.  As if making complex ideas “simple”, or simpler, isn’t among the most important missions for all of journalism, from Edward R. Murrow through NPR down to the Highland Villager.

This is all a lot of set-up for a couple thoughts on the little-lamented demise of Air America, the “liberal alternative” to the monolithic presence of conservative-radio. There are roughly 12,500 radio stations in the U.S., 22% fall under “news/talk” and “religious”. The former describes a few, like WCCO, and WBBM in Chicago, but mostly its conservative talk,  and the vast majority of the “religious” are conservative-driven. Moreover, a significant of those conservative stations are full-power licenses, broadcasting across the entirety of  all of the biggest metro areas in the country. By … stark … contrast, from its inception in 2004 Air America was confined to much lower-power AM stations that only barely blanketed the entirety of the few  metro markets they could buy in to.

Lambert, the media columnist who chided [his mental caricature of] the conservative talk radio audience’s “simplicity”, apparently needs to oversimplify the issue himself.  Radio stations aren’t sinecures; every format has to prove itself at every station, every time the ratings “book” comes out.  Big conservative talk – Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck – settled on big AM stations because it pays the bills.

And the fact that Air America had to “buy in” to metro markets shows what an awful concept it was.  Becuase nobody pays to get Limbaugh.  The Rush Limbaugh show (and Hannity, and Beck, and Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Miller and every other conservative show that matters) is free to the stations that carry it, provided they agree to carry the network’s commercials, 5-8 minutes worth per hour.  That’s it.

If there were any organic demand for Air America, they’d have been able to do the same.  But there was not.  So in New York, Chicago and LA, they had to pay radio stations to carry the programming.

And even that didn’t work.

It’s not as simple as saying “conservtives got all the big stations!”, but it’s in fact the truth.

But the bigger problem — by far — is the mindset of your average liberal, who, in my unscientific survey is a somewhat different animal than Gabe Hobbs’ mythical under-informed 42 year-old male.  For one thing, if the gender breakout of national delegates is any indication, the average liberal is more likely to be a woman than a man. But, in my experience, there’s also the very familiar liberal quality of believing you already are the smartest guy/gal in the room, which means you hardly need some cartoonish radio bloviator spoon-feeding you your “fact of the day”. More likely — if you’re a liberal in the media — the liberal audience with whom you think you are simpatico will rear up and quarrel with every interpretation of statistics, trends and historical reference you dare make. They know better and if just given the chance could do better.

Which is an interesting view which, I suspect, has more to do with Brian Lambert’s view of himself than the NPR/MSNBC/Air America audience’s actual merits.

Where conservative media audiences display a startling affinity for what I’ve called “The Big Daddy Guru Complex”, pompous-to-preposterous all-knowing father figures, liberals, more often than not, maintain the attitude that “big daddy” is a bit of a ponce, and needs to be brought down a peg.

Dunno, Lambo.  I sat in front of a room full of Air America fans with Matt Entenza, Michael Medved and Fast Eddie Schultz a while ago.  And the AA fans were a lot more prone to chanting pre-approved slogans and hissing on command than the people to stage and ideological right, if you catch my drift.

The idea is a trend in search of evidence; the closest they come to “evidence” is the fact that, yes, people listen to Rush Limbaugh.

But it’s a fact of human nature that any mass group of people gets pushed, or pulled, by someone, and that the best way to pull is not through the mind, but through the heart; Someone who captures the group’s fancy on some level; Martin Luther King, Richard Simmons, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Clinton, Lech Walesa, John Lennon, Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan all led people in improbable directions by simplifying complex ideas into forms their followers could feel as much as think.

Lambert quotes a few talking heads re the “problem” liberalism under Obama faces, and concludes:

The takeaway is this: The Conservative narrative dominates this country because it is simple, asks (and requires) nothing of its audience other than that they accept it and express a kind of rote indignation … at others.

Leaving aside the poison-pen fuming about the audience’s motivations – Lambert’s wrong, but then he’s supposed to be wrong about conservatives.  Simplicity in a narrative is a good thing.

And at the end of the say, it’s not all that simple.  Conservatism itself takes a lot more mental energy to wrap ones mind around than liberalism; the ideas of abstemiousness, enlightened self-interest, and rejection of instant gratification both personally and culturally are tough ones for modern people to choke down.

As opposed to leaden cop-outs:

Given the lack of 2000-plus radio stations to amplify a counter-narrative,

Which is balderdash; the liberals have four broadcast networks, NPR, and practically every newspaper in the country.

It’s just that their narrative, at the moment, isn’t selling, and certainly isn’t up to the competition it’s getting in the marketplace.

I actually let this post sit for a couple of days as I tried to figure out how to respond to this next line:

as well as liberal resistance to paternalistic “guru-ism”,

Remembering the masses of liberals who “rejected guru-ism” by chanting in unison waiting for Obama to appear, I’m going to have to keep thinking about it.

Obama and the few bona fide liberals in D.C. are at a profound disadvantage when it comes to a very real battle of relentless accusation and sloganized consensus-building , which, sadly, is what works quite effectively on largely apolitical 42 year-olds who just want to sound like they know what they’re talking about.

And just like Gabe Hobbs, Brian Lambert leads with the contempt.  We’ll see how it works.

And he says about the Chicago politican…:

Bottom line: The burden to deliver such a message of constant attack — utterly justified in the case of how this economic disaster started — falls to a guy, Obama, who finds shamelessly demagogic rhetoric and divisive-ness-baiting beneath him and his idealistic standards of statesmanship.

Speaking of simplification.

Air America is ceasing live broadcast operations today:

In a statement to employees of the New York-based network, Air America’s chairman, Charlie Kireker, wrote: “It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

Air America gets its last ratings book

To be fair, I figured it would have been out of business by 2006 at the latest.  Apparently there were enough liberals with deep pockets and shallow understandings of the broadcast market to flog the corpse for another four years.

“The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally . . .

Generally?  Sure!

But there’s one specific exception to that very broad generality; one niche within the larger format of political talk radio that was, is, and is slated to remain profitable – indeed, is prospering on an epic scale. 

That’d be the conservative talk radio that Air America set out to try to knock off, way back in March of 2004 – indeed, the very month that the Northern Alliance Radio Network got started.

Victors

Air America launched in March, 2004, and styled itself as a liberal alternative to conservative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage. Although at one point its programming was heard on as many as 100 stations nationwide, it ran into financial trouble early. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October, 2006, and was sold to new investors for $4.25 million in early 2007.

It was never as close as even those numbers make it look.  Most of Air America’s “as many as” 100 stations were small, low-power operations on the fringes of their markets; when the network launched, it paid for its air time on its three most important affiliates (New York, LA and Chicago), and quickly ran out of money to do even that.  Indeed, the vast majority of its distribution came from Clear Channel, which also distributes Air America’s putative enemies Limbaugh, Hannity and Glenn Beck.  Air America programming was only really competitive in one market on one station (KFI in Portland Oregon) and then only for about a year.  Indeed, the only liberal talk that is remotely successful is Fast Eddie Schultz (who really is as dumb as liberals think conservative talk is), and Stephanie Miller, who basically does Laura Ingraham’s show with a lefty slant.

So goodbye, Air America.  You were good for a few laughs, back when we even cared about your existence (and that ended pretty much back in ’05). 

Stop by and say hi.  We’re the ones that are still on the air.

Ed Schulz – who actually is as dumb as the lefty caricature of conservative talk radio – on the importance of fair elections and working together to build a better, more civil society:

“I, uh, I, uh, I, uh, I dunno – if I lived in Massachusetts, I’d trah to vote ten tahms.  I dunno if they’d let me, but I’d chee-yut to keep those bastahds out.  Because that’s exactly what they are”.

No, Ed.  You might have to cheat to win a debate with a lobotomy patient, but I’m afraid it’s possible even Massachusetts Democrats might be more ethical than you.

And Ed?  You are living, breathing proof of Berg’s Seventh Law.

And there’s evidence even you know it:

A stopped clock is right twice a day – and Schultz may see some advantage in looking like the first libtalker to be seen to publicly spit up the koolaid.

Democrats Diane Feinstein and Dick “Turban” Durbin – who have long been the Dems’ official trial-balloon-floaters for assaults on free speech like the “Fairness Doctrine” – are proposing an amendment to a Senate bill (S.448) clarifying the press shield law.

And it’s aimed squarely at citizen journalists like you and I.  Via RWN, here’s the amendment text, with some emphases added:

AMENDMENTS intended to be proposed by Mrs. FEINSTEIN (for herself and Mr. DURBIN )

Viz:

In section 10(2)(A), strike clause (iii) and insert the following:

[a “journalist” is shielded if he/she] (iii) obtains the information sought while working as a salaried employee of, or independent contractor for, an entity—

(I) that disseminates information by print, broadcast, cable, satellite, mechanical, photographic, electronic, 1or other means; and

(II) that—

(aa) publishes a newspaper, book, magazine, or other periodical;

(bb) operates a radio or television broadcast station, network, cable system, or satellite carrier, or a channel or programming service for any such station, network, system, or carrier;

(cc) operates a programming service; or

(dd) operates a news agency or wire service;

In other words, you need to be an employee of a news business.  All of us hobby hacks in our pajamas in our basements are out in the cold.

In section 10(2)(B), strike ‘‘and’’ at the end.

In section 10(2)(C), strike the period at the end and insert ‘‘; and’’.

In section 10(2), add at the end the following:

(D) does not include an individual who gathers or disseminates the protected information sought to be compelled anonymously or under a pseudonym.

This would seem to be aimed at the likes of James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles – provided they’re not employed by a Major News Outlet, of course.

Leaving aside the obvious indication that this is the Democrats’ way of circling their wagons around ACORN – this is a fascinating look into the authoritarianism of the Democrat party at work.

The conservative blogosphere is dominated by independents who cover their fields of expertise, whatever they are (this blog: music, financial planning, wine, tomatos and Minnesota politics) for the pure, unadulterated love of the game.  From Power Line (which covers all they survey) to Speed Gibson (who patrols the ramparts of northwest-suburban education), we mostly do it because we want to, money be damned. 

The left, on the other hand, has built up a network of “business” entities and non-profits, from the pseudo-newspaper-y “MNPost” to the not-very-covert propagandists at the “Center for Independent Media” (parent of the Minnesoros “Indepdendent”), at exquisite cost; one might now presume that this money was spent to get ahead of the legislative curve that the Feinstein/Durbin proposal represents, as a further attempt to shut down independent, non-government-vetted thought in this country.

This is Obama’s America.

So why is the left – not just the the media and the attack-PR-osphere and the left’s lumped horde of chattering classes, but indeed the Administration itself – so invested in attacking the informational lynchpins of the opposition, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News?

Not to mention slandering the motivations and character of every single dissenter to their polities, on a national, media-wide and systematic basis?

Because the opposition just keeps growing.  The April 15 tea parties drew 600,000 people; the 9/17 parties, millions. 

Dissent from Hope n Change isn’t going away.

And they’d so hoped that it would.

Four years ago, in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 elections, a slew of radio consultants made a zillion dollars telling talk-radio program directors that conservative talk radio was dead.

It was wishful thinking, of course.  And now that conservatives are the underdogs again, we have entered – as I predicted during our election-night broadcast – a second Golden Age of Conservative Talk Radio.

The I Hate The Media blog R unpacks the latest Arbitron ratings nationwide in head-to-head competitions between Rush Limbaugh affiliates and affiliates carrying Ed Schultz and/or Stephanie Miller, the closest the left’s come to “successful” programming so far.

And it’s not a pretty picture – unless you like conservative talk radio.  Then, it’s a very, very pretty picture. 

Note that the ratings below are for the stations as a whole, not for Limbaugh (or Schultz/Miller):

1. New York
WABC Rush 3.7 (8th in market)
WWRL Ed/Steph 0.2 (50th in market tie)

2. Los Angeles
KFI Rush 5.0 (1st in market)
KTLK Ed/Steph 0.4 (48th in market tie)

Catch that?  In two of the nation’s largest and most liberal markets, the conservative talk leader not only beats liberal talk, but does it by an order of magnitude and more.

8. Washington
WMAL Rush 2.7 (17th in market)
WTNT Ed only 0.3 (33rd in market tie)

This, not long after Washinton’s “Obama 1260” all-leftytalk station bit the dust.

16. Minneapolis
KTLK-FM Rush 3.6 (13th in market)
KTNF Ed/Steph 1.1 (21st in market)

It’s not “libtalk’s” best performance – that’d be in Seattle, where the Rush affiliate only gets 2.5 times the ratings the FastEddie/MiniIngraham station gets.

But Rush is hampered by the fact that he’s on KTLK-FM, a station that only recently adopted conservatism as a driving format motif, and has otherwise made a royal botch of things until fairly recently. 

Now, there’s a fair point to be made here; liberals don’t need to listen to talk radio; they already have the mainstream media, plus National Public Radio, plus MSNBC, CNN and CNBC, plus the Big Three, plus their real news standardbearer, Jon Stewart.

Andt that’s true.  The real point of this post isn’t so much “how bad is conservative talk clobbering liberal talk” – everyone in their right mind knew it would – as it is “how wrong were the consultants four years ago”, and “how does that inform the Administration’s current campaign to demonize all dissent?”

Very wrong, and very much, which is providing both a mission for the Administration and an inconvenient truth for its mainstream media supporters:

Yes, the release of Arbitron radio ratings for August 2009 created quite a stir in Los Angeles last week when it was revealed that AM news-talk giant KFI had moved into first place.

But judging by the coverage in the Los Angeles Times, Orange County Register and Los Angeles Business Journal, this feat was somehow accomplished without the help of the medium’s star performer, Rush Limbaugh.In covering the achievement, the latter two publications didn’t even mention Rush, while the Times noted Limbaugh only in passing deep into one story and left him out of another entirely.Is it really that hard to admit Rush could be so popular in their own backyard?

Here’s what we know about Limbaugh’s contribution to KFI’s feat, along with some new details on his performance elsewhere during August: The Rush Limbaugh Show gained a full share point overall, from 5.9 to 6.9 to take first place with a weekly cume of 635,700 listeners. With men 35-64, the jump was from 4.7 to 5.6. In the 11am hour, Rush pulled in a mammoth 6.3.

These results are cropping up from coast to coast (read Maloney’s entire piece).

Which tells the media that the peasants are revolting.

And that is why the White House and the media it keeps in its hip pocket have switched into full-blown smear machine mode.

TANGENT:  During the Bush years, the left clutched at its pearls and accused Karl Rove of running a “smear machine” through any number of right-leaning groups – the Swiftboat Vets, Fox News, you name it.  But can you imagine what’d happen if there’d been the faintest hint of Bush Administration involvement in leaning on media dissent – which, unlike the current Administration, was omnipresent and utterly vicious?

Five and a half years ago, the Northern Alliance Radio Network was the first all-blogger, all alt-media radio show in the world.

I’ve been waiting to see if other radio stations would give it a try – indeed, as desperate for free content as they are, I’m mildly shocked that the Twin Cities’ AM950, our token liberal station, hasn’t snapped up a bunch of leftybloggers to try to do for their schedule what the NARN did for AM1280.  There was a station in Boston that had a blogger-run show a few years back, but I think it’s no more.

But it was gratifying to note that Rob Port – proprietor of the excellent Say Anything , North Dakota’s foremost political blog – is on several nights a week at Fargo’s excellent AM1100 “The Flag”.

Port has also put together some regional syndication with at least one other station in central North Dakota – making him a real network!

Tune in!

Ed Schultz bags out on one of his radio shows:

Its been an interesting couple of months in Ed Schultz news, which is never usually an interesting news category unless you find men who consider shouting insults to be keen political analysis to be interesting

I don’t, as a rule – but when Schultz is involved, you have to handicap a bit. 

First Schultz and his North Dakota rival Scott Hennen (full disclosure: I guest host for Hennen and have my own show on his station) announced a partnership whereby Schultz would host a morning show on Hennen’s recently-acquired AM station in southeast North Dakota and debate with Hennen himself once a week on Hennen’s morning show.

This sparked a great deal of criticism of Hennen which I never quite understood.  I understand that a lot of people don’t like Schultz (including many on his own side of the political divide), but as far as Hennen goes what’s wrong with debating with the other side? 

The whole “if you talk with the “enemy” some of it rubs off on you” school of thought is something that irritates the piss out of me when it’s liberals doing the whinging. It doesn’t bother me any less among conservatives. 

Anyway, last week during the Hennen vs. Schultz debate Schultz got so angry he hung up during the program.

If it was anything like last year’s “debates” between Schultz and Michael Medved, I’ll bet it didn’t take long.  Schultz wasn’t Medved’s intellectual peer.  He isn’t Hennen’s equal.  For that matter, Tonya Harding outmatches the guy.

Then Schultz pulls the plug on his radio show on Hennen’s station.  We can at least be glad that Schultz didn’t get so angry that he got drunk and punched a girl (as he’s been known to do) but even so that seems like a sissy move.

Sissy?  Perhaps.

“The move of a guy who is trying to fight way above his intellectual weight class”?  Definitely.

While nobody’s issued an official explanation for why KTLK-FM – the Twin Cities’ Clear Channel talk station – decided to tube all their weekend talk shows in favor of an endless stream of music that sounded like the “Classic Rock” playlist on someone’s IPod, I think I know why.

The Northern Alliance beat them.

While the 100,000 watt FM juggernaut sports Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Jason Lewis during the week, even they were not enough to put KTLK-FM over the top against the 5,000-watt AM1280 The Patriot on the all-important weekend time slot.  Against lavish expenditures on talent, salaries and promotions, AM1280 not only continued to clobber KTLK on the bellwether weekend time slots, but expanded their lead.

AM1280’s lineup – led by the Northern Alliance Radio Network (NARN) – continues to clobber the ratings of the much larger stations in head-to-head competition.  KTLK’s retreat is only the latest confirmation.

From this point, the question isn’t so much “why did KTLK put their 100,000 watt tail between their legs and scurry from the weekend talk market”.  It’s “how long will WCCO and KSTP-AM take to do more or less the same?”   WCCO’s 50,000 watts lumber along, and KSTP would do better running “Soucheray and Reusse Sportstalk” reruns than whatever it is they’re doing now.

Yes.  Yes, it is good to be king. 

(more…)

Last week, the conservative punditry lit up, discussed a brief series of rumors that popped up saying that Sarah Palin might be considering a run at the Talk Radio business.

There are some ups and downs to the idea (which, let’s be clear, is still only a rumor; further rumors claim that Clear Channel, which broadcasts Limbaugh, Beck and Hannity, has taken a pass on a syndicated Palin show). 

I think there are ten better plans out there for Sarah Palin (and am discussing them right now, 1:15PM Central Time, on the Northern Alliance Radio Network): 

10. Run for Senator from Alaska.  This is a bit of a gamble, in that it would traditionally imply that she’s giving up on 2012.  It’d be especially important for Palin; she’s already left one office early.  2012 is going to be a challenging time to run as a Republican – but as with all challenges, there are opportunities.  Does Palin run against an incumbent whose numbers are down now, but who could well bounce back big by 2012 (remember Reagan’s polling, which was dismal in 1982 but bounced back to landslide levels in 1984?), or wait until the nation is really ready for a change?  It’s a tough call.  That’s why it’s #10.

9. Start a blog.  She should be doing this anyway; if there’s a conservative pol out there who has the capacity to outflank the media the way Reagan did, it’s Sarah Palin.  If blogs had existed in 1980, I suspect Reagan would have had a great one.

8. Do a collection of frank, to the point Youtubes.  The model for this would be Milton Friedman’s classic 1979 PBS series “Free To Choose”, which sold conservatism and economic liberty to many of the unconverted (which means PBS will never ever let that happen again – hence Youtube).  Cover the big Palin issues – growth, liberty, prosperity – on her own terms, in her own way, playing to her strengths.  Quit relying on the mainstream media to do anything other than be in the bag for her opposition.

7. Talk Radio – Oh, what the heck.  But she should not do a three-hour-a-day show, like Limbaugh or Beck.  She should shoot for a one-hour daily show, or maybe a two hour weekend show.   Making fifteen compelling hours of radio a week  – easy as the good ones make it sound – is a lot of hard work.  It takes commitment – and Palin needs to commit to a higher calling than earning ratings.  But a one-hour daily, or two-hour weekend show is ideal for getting specific, focused messages out there, and taking just the right amount of positive and negative feedback from callers.  Each hour could be a major event in its own right.  And doing an hour of radio, especially with a solid support staff, is not that difficult.  Especially if Palin had a good sidekick.  Especially a sidekick with impeccable conservative credentials and lots of experience working with radio neophytes.  Ahem.

6. Get that book done.  Make sure it’s a doozy – as in, “less autobiography, more challenge to today’s status quo“.  Of course, some autobio

5. Big honkin’ speaking tour.  She showed during the campaign that she can work a room as well as anyone, and better than most.  She also showed, I think, that she needed to top the marquee; speaking in support of John McCain was like bailing in support of the Titanic, especially given the number of Mac’s staff that were actively sabotaging her.  Let her do the tour as the A-list, and let her – no, make her fail or, ideally, succeed on her own terms.

4.  Do what Reagan did; hundreds and hundreds of small speaking and commentary engagements.  Reagan’s gig as General Electric’s PR face was not only great exposure, but great training 

3. Sunday morning talk show.  Talk with Fox; nobody’ll be surprised that it’s a bald-faced showcase (because that’s what it needs to be), and one hour a week of mixing it up with the punditry can only be great training.

2. “The Opportunity Tour”.  Yes, it’s a takeoff on Robert Kennedy’s “Poverty Tour” (and Paul Wellstone’s cheap 1999 copy) – but the opposite way.  Where RFK (and PW’s) versions were tours of American failure, Sarah Palin’s tour would be a parade of seeming failures that are actual opportunities for the free market, for liberty, for the American way, by way of contrasting Palin (and conservatism) with the dismal reality of Obama’s lumpen socialism-lite.

1. Anything but announce her candidacy!

I’ve ripped on talk radio’s “Cult of Personality” – the belief, against all rational evidence, that “celebrities” make good talk radio hosts – for years. 

It’s been a cancer on the business for a decade and a half, both locally (for years, KSTP-AM has figured that newspaper columnists and TV reporters are perfectly  suited to host talk shows, despite a decade and a half of foisting flops like Pat Milan, Jesse Ventura, Katherine Lanpher, Nick Coleman, Jim Souhan and others on their poor audience; KTLK-FM briefly partook in the same madness with Brian Lambert and Pat Kessler) and nationally.  For everyone who’s forged meat ‘n potatoes success at talk radio after coming to the business as a celeb – Dennis Miller, Bill Bennett, Michael Medved – there are piles of Al Frankens, Mario Cuomos, Joe Scarboroughs, Marc Marons, Chuck Ds, Janeane Garofalos, Mika Brzezinskis, Monica Crowleys and Jim Hightowers buried head-down in the cement on radio’s Cadillac Ranch. 

Radio management seems to miss the key lesson of this past twenty years; the real successes in talk radio are radio people (Limbaugh, Laura Schlesinger, Hannity, Beck), or people who learn (or hire the learning) to do radio (Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage) as entertainment, rather than either preaching or extensions of their own celebrity.

All that being said, I’m genuinely of two minds about this dispatch from the radio rumor mill:

While not exactly shopping the GOP’s 2008 vice presidential candidate, sources say Palin representatives have been quietly testing the waters to see how much interest radio syndicators have for her.

Sources say Palin hasn’t committed to radio either, but rather it could be a possible next step for her. 

On the one hand, I think she could be dynamite, especially with the right sidekick (airchecks available to syndication execs on request).

On the other?  It’s not many people who can do radio really, really well as a sideline to other ambitions.

I don’t know that I see it happening, but it’ll be an interesting couple of months.

…if Bush’s administration had suggested this – federal control over content on the Internet. White House advisor Cass Sunstein is talking about the White House – the Feds, anyway – taking a huge role in censoring the Internet.
And the insurgents – whatever their party?  They’d have been right:

Perhaps most disturbing is Mr. Sunstein’s vision for the future of web content, as he argues for a so-called “notice and take down” law. Under this provision, those who operate websites – – The Washington Post, radio stations, private bloggers, and perhaps even you, yourself -we would all be required “take down falsehoods upon notice” from the U.S. government.

And not only would the original content of websites be scrutinized by the government for “falsehoods,” website operators would also be held responsible for the content of “posts” created by the website’s visitors and readers. At first blush it may seem that, for a web operator to be held accountable for content generated by “posters,” is completely untenable. But that may very well be Mr. Sunstein’s goal – – to create an “untenable situation” for website operators – given his assertion that “a ‘chilling effect’ on those who would spread destructive falsehoods can be an excellent idea..”

Well, we all want “the truth” to prevail, don’t we?

But who shall determine what, exactly, is “true” and “false?” Mr. Sunstein laments the supposed “lie” that emerged during last year’s presidential race, that “Barack Obama pals around with terrorists.” Despite that fact that a friendship between Obama and known domestic terrorist William Ayers was something that both men acknowledged, Sunstein alludes to the notion that this was one of those “destructive falsehoods” of the sort that needs to be policed.

As I was recently talking about this matter on-air at Arizona’s NewsTalk 92-3 KTAR radio, a caller to the show observed that “there’s no way this could be legal, or constitutional..” Thoughtful Americans of all sorts will immediately view this situation through the lenses of constitutionally guaranteed rights.

But issues of “legality” don’t seem to matter, at times, with the Obama Administration. In March of this year, there was nothing illegal about executives of the AIG Corporation being paid bonuses that they earned from their employer, but they were harassed and publicly belittled, nonetheless. President Obama himself demonized them, while dozens of Obama supporters “demonstrated” in front of the private residences of the executives, alleging that it was “unfair” for those executives to be making “so much money.”

Remember when the lefties told us we were paranoid for thinking Obama would re-institute the Fairness Doctrine?

They may have had a point.  This makes the Fairness Doctrine look like a piker.

In a similar way, it appears that the Obama Administration may be ushering-in an era of harassment for website operators. Regardless of what U.S. courts may or may not say about this in the future, a “notice and take down” letter from the White House could have quite a “chilling effect” for today.

‘ For my part?  Consider this post a “Notice And Take Down” letter for this entire wretched administration.

I used to joke, before the election, that Obama would be the worst President of my lifetime by sometime on inauguration day.  I was joking.  At the time, anyway.

The “Broadcaster Freedom Act” may come up for a carefully-hidden vote – and if you support freedom of speech, we need your help:

There’s a chance to get the newly expanded Broadcaster Freedom Act (BFA) tacked on as an amendment to the Financial Services appropriation on Tuesday. The BFA is currently being redrafted to prevent the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from not only reimposing the Censorship Doctrine – also mis-known as the “Fairness Doctrine” – but also to address the new censorship threats – inc“localism” and “media diversity.”To get it a full, fair up or down vote, we need to act over the weekend and all day Monday.

We need to get as many people as possible to call their Representatives and have them tell Speaker Nancy Pelosi to add the BFA as an amendment.

Contact your representative…

Note to Glenn Beck:

I actually like your TV show, if only because it’s better than most cable-TV methane-fests.

But on the air?

Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Beck.  You’re a conservative, ergo right about everything underneath all the schtick.  Duly noted.

But if people were to take your hyperbole seriously, Glenn, we’d all be moving into bunkers in the mountains; I certainly want to after listening to you for an eveing.

So I say, Glenn Beck; lead the way.

I’m not a big Michael Savage fan.  Never have been.

But when it comes down to something between him and libtalker/idiot Ed Schultz, I’ll cop to it; I’ll close ranks.

Schultz is calling for an “international Weiner ban”, which is the kind of joke that’d lead to half an hour of junior-high-level tittering on Schultz’ daily 180 minutes of hate:

On Thursday, May 14, syndicated left of center radio talk show host Ed Schultz, who has hosted The Ed Show, a daily political talk program (6-7 PM ET) on MSNBC since April 6, devoted his regular “Psycho Talk” segment to Michael Savage…

Having seen Schultz grow red-faced and downright unhinged in debating the cool, professional, civil Michael Medved (and equally unhinged the next day on his show, attacking me, the lowly MC), that whole “Psycho Talk” thing is…

…you know where this is going, right?

I digress:

With a caption over a photo of Savage that read “Pond Scum,” Schultz, who referred to Savage by his birth name, Michael Weiner, which he consistently mispronounced, said:

“Oh, what a sweet irony we have here tonight in the Psycho Talk zone. [Savage] wants Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help to get him off the UK banned list. This is the same guy who calls her a ‘fraud,’ a ‘yokel,’ a ‘very dangerous person. . .’

“Now here’s an idea: Maybe I should send a letter over to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and say ‘Dear Madam Secretary, Would you please encourage other world leaders to ban Weiner from their countries. . .’

“We’re calling for an international Weiner ban.”

Video of the segment can be viewed here.

Not that you’d want to.

Take two patties of crap.

Mold them around a piece of pungent, sharp swiss cheese to form a “Juicy Lucy” patty.  Grill the patties to perfection, and put them on a fresh, just-crusty-enough Kaiser bun, with Jamaica onions, tomatoes, a little smear of garlic paste, dijon mustard and ketchup.  Plate it with some impeccable steak fries with pepper-catchup and ranch dipping sauce. 

You’ll have a real work of culinary art and craft on your hands, a testimony to the skill of the cook and the quality of the ingredients…

…or you would, if it weren’t for the fact at the center of it all it’s still just a crap sandwich. 

Film buffs tell me I’m supposed to looooove Quentin Tarantino.

I can’t stand him.

Oh,  Pulp Fiction is all right; it’s entertaining, but terribly overrated.  But a little of it goes a looooong way.

Which is better than I can say for the rest of his filmography.  Reservoir Dogs is like Diner for people who were raised by bad dog trainers.  The Kill Bills  were like the sandwich above; crap sandwiches, albeit well-crafted with with the occasional “ooh, cool!” piled between the patties of crap and the bun.  I never saw Grindhouse, but I’ll take a guess and wager “crappiest” was the adjective I’m looking for.

But here’s my big beef (as it were); what would we say if, say, a music producer came to the fore whose entire oeuvre was recapturing the magic of Tommy Roe or Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods?  We – people who care about actual music – would shake our heads, mutter etro Uber Alles people have gone too far”, and go about our business.

If a chef opened a high end restaurant featuring Tang, Space Food Sticks and Cap’n Crunch, what’d the culinary crowd say?

Well, we know what some of them – the crowd that flocks to Chino Latino to get abused by the surly hipster waitstaff, the ones that get their yuks at just how tacky people used to be by wallowing in faux irony.

And that’d explain Tarantino.  He’s a one trick pony; his only trick is endless, pointless homage to the kitschiest, ugliest, shabbiest things American moviemaking has ever done.

Wheee.

Tracy Eberly at Anti-Strib once said that my dislike of Tarantino was a musician thing:

Mitch Berg has highlighted the massive chasm that exists between movie people and music people.

He actually admits to hating Quentin Taratino’s movies!

No.  It’s a “I dislike, and refuse to celebrate, crap” thing.  Accepting Tarentino as a good example, much less as the sine qua non of American filmmaking is like going to Manny’s and ordering a cow flop steak with all the trimmings.

Look – just for future references:  Doesn’t matter if it’s crap music, crap literature, crap dance or crap movies.  And it really doesn’t matter if it’s just a well-crafted, lovingly-obsessive, irony-drenched homage to crap, or the first-generation variety. Crap is Crap. 

Tarantino: he may not be crap.  He’s just built a career out of repackaging crap for those who idealize crap or, worse, think that paying homage to crap ennobles it. 

Go ahead, Quentin.  Pull.

According to David Brauer, the Twin Cities’ Clear Channel stations are outsourcing their news.

Not to Bangalore, Manila or Mumbai, funny as that would be.  But almost as good:

Not that anyone listens to the local Clear Channel radio family (KFAN, K102, KOOL 108, KDWB, Cities 97) for the newscasts, but amid budget-slashing, the Denver Post reports the Mile High City’s KOA-AM “will now provide news for four other markets: Colorado Springs/Pueblo, Ft. Collins, Minneapolis and Ft. Smith, Arkansas.”

The biggest impact might be felt at conservative talk station KTLK, where host-newscaster chatter has at time produced some interesting exchanges. I can’t wait to hear some Colorado drone get Little Rock, Red Rocks and Rocori mixed up. Talk about your Rocky Mountain oy-sters!

Har.

Well, good for Denver, anyway.  KOA – the WCCO of Denver – has always had a commitment to doing commercial radio news; if they have a niche that’ll keep some jobs open, good for them. Expect more of this sort of thing.

More interesting, perhaps?  Brauer calls KTLK “conservative”.  Now, when KTLK-FM went on the air, it steered aggressively down the middle; it had drunk the post-’04 Koolaid that “conservative talk is dead”, so other than Limbaugh and Hannity the station steered well clear of the “conservative” label.

But with Chris Baker, Limbaugh, Hannity, Jason Lewis and Glenn Beck anchoring the station these days, it’d seem the consultants were wrong again. Which should shock nobody that’s ever worked in radio, but it’s nice to see the market put a bullet in that meme’s head once and for all.