I don’t care for Glenn Beck. Never have.

I’ve never quite put my finger on it, really; the fact that while there’s a lot to be upset and motivated about these days, his ire and militancy seems at times to be almost as manufactured as lefties claim the whole medium is?  His voice?  The fact that he has a seven-figure gig while I’m plugging away on weekends at WWTC?

I don’t know – or didn’t until Allahpundit at Hot Air broke it down in discussing one of Beck’s “Tom Paine” segments:

I don’t like is this guy’s habit of lapsing into rhetoric about a second revolution, legislators ignoring the people “at your peril,” and, per the letter from a Marine that he reads near the end here, the idea that “our country is under attack from an enemy within” — which isn’t the first time he’s used language about enemies and attacks to describe policy disagreements. I get that the character he’s playing obliges him to use a certain amount of revolutionary parlance, just like I get that I’ll take plenty of heat in the comments for being a squish who’s afraid to fight nutroots fire with fire, etc, but what can I tell you. That sort of rhetoric leaves me cold, and I can’t be the only one.

Theatrics are fine and dandy – every pundit uses ’em to some degree or another. But it seems like it’s the only trick Beck has.

Time has been standing still as the world wonders – will Michele Tafoya take the noon-3PM slot at WCCO-AM?  Or will she not?

David Brauer captures the breathless anticipation:

Thursday, I wrote that Michele Tafoya was “likely” to be named WCCO-AM’s noon-3 p.m. host next week. Today, C.J. casts some doubt on the hiring, noting the Good Neighbor’s announcement had been delayed amid “insider” speculation that money and Tafoya’s Monday Night Football committment are the snags.

That might be right — I’m relying on insiders, too, which is not definitive. However, I have a couple of additional data points that could explain the hold-up.

OK – I lied.  The only people who care are local media wonks.

Among the rest of us, the only real question is this: given that Michele Tafoya is a TV personality (and that TV personalities make almost universally terrible talk radio hosts) who is doing yet another mushy general interest show on a mushy general interest station that has in a generation fallen from market dominance to weak also-ran status, is Tafoya’s show going to:

1. Smell, and get tubed at the end of Tafoya’s contract.
2. Reek to high heaven, and get blitzed for trumped-up cause within a year.
3. Suck chunks through a straw and cause the once-great Good Neighbor to “go dark” (which is, for the benefit of all of you leftybloggers, a broadcasting term for “shut off its transmitter for good”, not a racist jape).

Discuss.

I finally got a chance to listen to KSTP-AM’s new mid-morning show, “Przebyl (sp) and Murphy”, this morning. These guys are putatively Bob Davis’ replacement on the mid-morning slot.

Not, I suspect, for long.

As we’ve noted in the past, once KSTP-AM lost Limbaugh, it drank the then-vogue-y consultant Kool-Aid that “conservative talk is dead”.  Over the past three years, it’s ditched all semblance of “out” political talk (Davis, Dave Thompson) as well as anything off-puttingly edgy (Tom Mischke).

I remember hearing the grumblings from some of KSTP’s staff even back in 2003 when the place was a cash cow (and heavily, overtly conservative, with Limbaugh, Jason Lewis and Bob Davis, on top of Joe Soucheray’s not-so-much-conservative-as-curmudgeonly schtick); boss Ginny Morris would complain to all and sundry that “we have to live in this town”, and audibly pine for the station to edge more towards the middle of the road.  To be all things to all people.  To be more like…

I was going to say WCCO, but that’s only half true. I think she wants KSTP to be the station her grandfather built, back in the 1930’s; the station WCCO copied throughout the thirties and forties, and passed in the fifties and sixties.

Make no mistake; Morris’ grandfather Stanley Hubbard the First was a true pioneer, a genius, one of the great figures in American broadcasting.  While he ran KSTP-AM in the thirties and forties, he pioneered things like spot news (he had the a car outfitted with a short-wave transmitter, capable of reporting back to KSTP from anywhere in the country, the predecessor of the satellite trucks we see at news events today), entertainment radio (he broadcast adapted vaudeville shows from the Minneapolis Orpheum, where among many others Jack Benny got his start) and many other things we all take for granted.

This was back when the Twin Cities had maybe a dozen radio stations.  This was back when people were acclimated to town that had 3-4 newspapers, eventually three TV stations, and that was it.  This was back when media became community.

This was another era.  It’s gone forever – except in a very narrowcast sense.  Joe Sourcheray is to curmudgeons what Boone and Erickson were to Minnesota parents and lunchpails forty years ago.  Rush Limbaugh is to tax-paying working stiffs what Steve Cannon was to afternoon commuters thirty years back.

Listening to Przebyl and Murphy is just like listening to a time capsule of pre-1987 talk radio, maybe preserved on tape at the Pavek Museum of Broadcasting; lots of chatter about local stories without any particular slant or bias or, truth be told, reason to stay tuned in.

And that’s just the overall theme.  I don’t know much about the two guys, but they can’t have a lot of radio background; it’s hard to say who stammers worse on the air.  They need to take a deep breath and relax and try to have fun with material that, I have to say, really isn’t very.  At least not at first listen.

Disclosure: I worked for KSTP-AM from 1985-87.  I also came in second place for the Program Director job there in 1991, behind…current PD and former KDWB colleague Steve Konrad.  I do a weekend show at a competing station. I declare that I’m utterly clinical about the radio business, but feel free to filter accordingly.

Tom Mischke  Steve Cannon:

I think about the day he was diagnosed with cancer. I knew he hadn’t been feeling well. The last time we had gotten together he hadn’t had much of an appetite. Still, the news was a blunt-force strike to the heart, made more difficult by the matter-of-fact way he addressed what was so awful about his situation.

“There’s still things I want to see,” he said. “These are such interesting times, aren’t they? There’s so much going on. I want to find out how this Obama does, I want to see what changes are going to happen in this country. I want to see the new Twins stadium and the Gopher stadium.”

He was 81, but he might as well have been 21. The world around him was endlessly fascinating to Cannon. He kept up with everything. His mind was sharp, and his biting wit alive and devastating.

It was hard to pick an actual clip from Mischke’s Strib elegy.  Just go and read the whole thing.  It’s the kind of thing you just don’t see in the mass media.

Last week, KSTP-AM fired longtime utility infielder Dave Thompson.

And yesterday, we’re told, was Bob Davis’ last broadcast on the Evil Talk Empire.
This email made the rounds among KSTP-AM fans yesterday:

Hi [Fan, redacted],

Below is an e-mail just distributed to AM1500 Staff regarding Bob Davis:

I come to you today with news that Bob Davis is no longer with AM1500
KSTP.

His last show was today, April 7.

Bob’s contributions over the last eight years are appreciated and we
wish him well. His effervescent demeanor, his always-ready belly laugh and
his iconic head of hair leave a lasting impression on all who meet him.

Starting Thursday morning at 9am, we will have a brand new radio program
for the Twin Cities. I could tell you their names (yes, a two-person
show), but you have not heard of them. They are new to Twin Cities radio, but not new to upper Midwest radio and both guys have personal ties to the Twin Cities metro.

Any bets on this one?

I, for one, haven’t the faintest clue, other than they’ll be innocuous, politically “neutral”, a neutered nod to the “glory days” of WCCO (in an era where nobody’s asking for any suc thing); I wouldn’t bet against a couple of sports guys, probably from one of the Twin Cities dailies.  That’s just a hunch, worth exactly what you’re paying for it, and I’m certainly not betting my mortgage on any part of it…

…except that’s not going to take the world by storm.

Expect an e-mail from me Thursday morning about 8am with further
details.

I am excited about this addition to AM1500 KSTP and I encourage you to
share your view of them after you give them a few listens.

As for Dave Thompson, I think you may be interested in the headline of a
news release that was issued earlier this afternoon:

Dave Thompson Announces Candidacy to become next State Chair of the
Minnesota Republican Party

Now, that is interesting news.

Thank you for your continued support of AM1500 KSTP as we further

dedicate our focus on serving the Twin Cities.

Steve Konrad
Program Director

This stinks, of course; both Davis and Thompson are longtime friends of the MOB, and deserve a whole lot better than the misbegotten pile that KSTP-AM has become.
Will KSTP-AM’s last listeners please lock up on your way out?

To lefties, conservative talk radio just can’t be an organic success.  There just can’t be a demand for it.  There just has to be some shadowy conspiracy – a “Scaifenet” – slipping envelopes full of Jacksons to inveigle radio stations to run the stuff.

In the most risible bit of “investigation” since Joe Bodell went all Chloe O’Brien on True North a few years back, “Jimmy Olson” from Minnesota  Progressive  Project is – shhhhhhh! – onto something:

I’ve been doing a bit of digging after getting an anonymous tip that NARN may be paying for their radio time (and not disclosing it), or that townhall.com pays for it.

Now, for those of you who haven’t been paying attention for the past eighty years or so, let me give you a quick remedial course on Radio Programming; let’s call the course “Radio Programming For The Utterly Ignorant”.

There are four types of programming in commercial radio:

1. Programs The Station Owns – Think programs like Joe Soucheray.  They provide programming for the station; the station pays them as long as the ratings justify it (or, in the case of Tom Mischke, sometimes when they don’t).  It’s a traditional employer-employee relationship, only (I say this from a career’s worth of experience) more mercurial.
2. Network Programs – These are provided by a third-party production company, and provide their programming to stations; sometimes they charge the stations for the right to play the show (this is National Public Radio’s model); others provide the show for free, but get advertising slots for their networks on the affiliates’ stations during the shows.  The most famous example of this is Rush Limbaugh – who is free to all of his affiliates, in exchange for eight minutes of ad time per hour, which is sold to national advertisers (for amazing prices, because Limbaugh dominates the industry and gets spectacular ratings).  Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck, Dennis Miller, Fast Eddie Schultz, Jason Lewis, Art Bell – they all use the same model. They draw their salaries from the networks – as long as they draw the ratings, systemwide.
3. “Brokered” Talk – In this example, a broadcaster “rents” airtime from a station (or several stations), either because they believe that strongly in getting their message out, or because they think they can turn around and sell enough ad time to recoup the investment (not always financially, or (often, in talk radio) some combination of the above.  The Taxpayers’ League Live was an example of this. So was “Talk Education”, which I used to co-host on KYCR.  Auto Talk on KSTP?  Ask the Veterinarian on Air America Minnesota?  Most of your “Ask the Lawyer” and “Ask the Financial Planner” shows?  All pretty much the same thing.  Sometimes the goal is to just get a show some time, which might not otherwise get picked up by a station (see #1, above).  Note that the entire Air American lineup, for the network’s first several years, was “brokered” in New York, Chicago and LA (until the checks started bouncing).
4. Commercials – These can be short-form commercials – :30 to :60 second “spots” dropped into commercial breaks during any of the types of shows above.  They can also be “infomercials” – entire half-hours, hours, or longer.  They can be distinguised from regular programming by the observation that they’re trying to sell you something, and the station is getting paid good money to broadcast it at all.

Now, “Jimmy Olson’s” opening graf might make you ask: which is the Northern Alliance Radio Network?

It’s simple.  We are #1 – only without the money.  And when I say “without the money”, I mean yeah, we get a few bucks here and there; when I do a commercial for someone, we’re getting a little money – called a “talent fee”, believe it or not.  You can tell when this is happening, because the voice of Mitch Berg (or Ed Morrissey, or King, or whomever) is trying to sell you a product or service, as opposed to talking about politics.  But we get no salary from Salem, from WWTC Radio (AM, from Townhall.com, or from anyone else.  We never have.
We’ve also never paid for airtime at WWTC.  The “Sponsors” we announce every week – Thompson, Keegans, whomever?  They pay to put ads on our show, which is the only money that the station makes directly off of us.
Now, what if “Jimmy” is right – that I write a check every month to WWTC, or Townhall did?  Well, we’d be under no more obligation to disclose it than Stephanie Miller is to tell you her salary.
If we were paying for our airtime – like, say, Health Insights, heard on Air America Minnesota, not that anyone cares since more people will learn about it via this post than will listen to it in a given week – we’d also be under no more obligation to tell anyone about it, since it’s a program, and there’s no real business requirement to tell people that you’re paying for your time.

Now, if you’re paid to give plugs for medical products, or for political candidates, and a few other things, there are ethical rules involved.  We’ll come back to that.

The bad news is, nobody – with a few exceptions – is required  to say “Somone is paying for this airtime”.

The good news is, anyone who can pony up a few hundred or thousand bucks – and convince a station that you won’t scare off the rest of their audience – can rent the time to host a talk show!

Which brings us to the part of “Jimmy Olson’s” investigation that really cuts to the chase:

Here’s (with redactions to protect identities) a letter I got back from Salem Communications re my queries about buying airtime:

———————————-
Good Morning ********,

My name is ********** and I am an Account Executive here at Salem Comm, Twin Cities and ********** asked me to follow up and get you any information you need. We do sell programming on our stations both on the National and Local level.

Here’s something you may be very interested in…..  Effective Monday, March 30, we are transitioning our KYCR AM1570 station to an all-business format.

Hey, that’s right – tune in to AM1570’s new BizRadio lineup, starting today!

And yep; some of the time will be “brokered” (see #3, above).

This next bit, though, Jimmy?

Also, If you could have your friend who is up here in Minnesota call me, I can get them any information they need as well..

So you lied about who you were?

I took the additional step of calling this contact, identifying myself as a journalist,…

Another lie about who you are! Dude – I’ll call you a journalist.  But you gotta call me “Admiral” first.

and asking if he’d “go on record” to confirm the tip.

“Tip?”

“Jimmy”!  Slapnuts!  It’s a sales pitch!  Salem makes money from brokering out time on all three of its Twin Cities stations (AM1280, AM1570 and AM980).

He declined but used interesting language. He asked if we were attempting to “nail them,” meaning townhall.com.

Wrong!

“He” did not mean Townhall.com!  Salem Twin Cities’ sales staff do not represent Townhall.  Salem Radio owns WWTC/KYCR/KKMS, and they own Townhall; the only place they come together is on the stations’ websites, which are centralized.  And of course the podcasts, which Townhall distributes.  That’s it.

I answered frankly that I just wanted information on disclosure and if that was all it takes to “nail” them then yes, that is what I was doing.

Most informercials start with the disclaimer “the following is paid programming.” As far as I know townhall.com-subsidized shows don’t have a similar intro. They are in multiple markets, not just MN.

The call ended pleasantly and he promised to have others there call me to answer my questions.

I’ll let you know if that happens!

So here is what “Jimmy Olson” brings you:

1. An “anonymous tip” that someone out there is “paying” AM1280 to broadcast the Northern Alliance.   Nope.  Isn’t true.  Has never been true.  Nobody has ever paid AM1280 to air the Northern Alliance, directly or indirectly.  The station and Salem “pay” an opportunity cost, arguably – they could sell those six hours to infomercials; they choose to use that time to market the station locally, broadcasting local, entertaining, successful programming.  And it is succesful; our ratings (Ed and I dominate our time slot against KSTP, WCCO and KTLK; John, Brian, King and the Stroms are all very competitive) make the “investment” more than worth it.  If it didn’t, would the station have invested five years’ worth of valuable air time in us?
2. A email and a conversation with a Salem Account Exec saying that, yes, Salem rents airtime to people.  This is a big scoop.  And if you want to play “journalist” and get that scoop yourself, you can go to the Salem website, email the Sales department, and buy yourself some air-time too – presuming that you’re either conservative (AM1280), Christian (AM980) or know a lot about business (AM1570).  The upside; you’ll be every bit as much a “journalist” as “Jimmy Olson”; the downside – it’s really not that big a rush.

And that’s it.
So let’s go back to the top; Jimmy Olson’s claim that an “anonymous tipsters” told him “NARN may be paying for their radio time (and not disclosing it), or that townhall.com pays for it”.

What has “Jimmy’s” “story” given you?  Other than the impression the “lad” has delusions of grandeur (“Hello! I’m a journalist!”), a sales pitch, and a tip-off that the guy doesn’t know jack about Radio?

Nothing.

Here is the story, the whole story, and nothing but the story; nobody pays for the NARN.  There are exactly two “highly-placed sources”on this story; Salem Twin Cities’ General Manager John Hunt, who lets us use his air time, and yours truly.  Me.  Mitch Berg. The guy who hatched the original idea for the Northern Alliance Radio Network, and pitched it to the station, as well as my good friends John, Scott, Brian, Chad, Atomizer, JB, Ed, King and Michael.

So on the one hand, “Jimmy Olson’s” story is – I think I’m justified in saying this – a crock of bulls**t.

On the other hand, “Jimmy” can now take his place beside Grace “9/11 was an inside job!” Kelly in the pantheon of great Minnesota Progressive Project “journalists”.

UPDATE: Behold, “Jimmy Olson”:

“Igotmyreasons” is a guy named Fred Gates.  He’s from New York, and I don’t know much about him, except that he was a fellow guest on Marty Owings’ now-defunct “Radio Free Nation”; Mom always said if you can’t say anything nice about someone, don’t say anything at all, so I’ll keep my counsel, except to note that “Jimmy”/Fred was completely unable to carry on a political discussion on RFN without hyperpersonalizing it (with me or anyone else, according to several of the other guests with whom I’ve spoken), and has been carrying on a rather curious little vendetta against me on Twitter and his “blog” and BlogTalkRadio “show” for a while now.

Wooooh!  Scary!

And while everyone involved is more or less anonymous, I will assume (and note the assumption) that “MNProgressive” is Eric “Big E” Pusey, of the MPP. Mr. Pusey is apparently soliciting Mr. Gates’ unsourced, un-true “story” for the Minnesota Progressive Project, without knowing any of Gates’ substantiation for any of his claims (or, obviously, that no such substantiation exists).

And the “anonymous tip” is apparently Fred Gates’ assumption that someone just has to be paying the station to air us.

They just have to!
EPILOGUE:  I’ll cop to it.  I resort to more ridicule than I should when dealing with the MPP.  It’s not the better me speaking.  I tend to work the room I’m in; if I’m dealing with responsible, intelligent, capable liberal commentators, like Marty Owings, Charlie Quimby, Liberal In The Land of Conservative, most of the Uptake crew, or the MNPublius guys (except for Landry), I’m on my best behavior.  Dealing with shrieking ninnies like Grace Kelly, Two-Putt Tommy, Andy Driscoll or Fred Gates?  Well, let’s just say when in Rome, I do what the Romans do, to my occasional chagrin.  I will, and do, try to do better; to taunt less and prove more.

But in this case, the Romans are just plain dumb.  Seriously.

(And thanks to regular commenter Tolowen for the tip!)

EPI-EPILOGUE:  Fred “IGotMyReasons” Gates is apparently the same whackjob troll that Ed Morrissey wound up repeatedly banning from his old BlogTalkRadio show for being a depraved lunatic.

Well, Eric Pusey?  This is what you want “Minnesota Progressive Project” to be?

My comment section is open (which is more than one can say for yours, apparently).

EPI-EPI-EPILOGUE: I missed this the first time I read this:

Gates/”Olson”: Most informercials start with the disclaimer “the following is paid programming.”

That is something the station does to distinguish commercials from programming that is within its format!  It’s so that the audience doesn’t mix up commercial, off-format programming (say, a program on nutrition supplements on a political talk station) with the station’s actual programming.  It is a marketing, not legal or ethical, issue.

As far as I know townhall.com-subsidized shows don’t have a similar intro. They are in multiple markets, not just MN.

Townhall subsidizes absolutely no shows!  Townhall is a fully-owned subsidiary of Salem Communications, which also owns the Salem Radio Network.  Townhall is not in the radio business, and subsidizes no programing.

Fred/”Jimmy”, in addition, continues to claim that he has an “anonymous source” that has all the facts on this story.  Fred/”Jimmy” and his “source” has gotten every single fact in contention wrong (I said “in contention”; yes, you can rent airtime, although nobody’s doing it for the NARN) throughout this story. And now he’s backing and filling to cover his lies.

But here’s the deal; since your story has been debunked, then if you have an “anonymous source” (supposedly an “expert on the industry”), Fred/”Jimmy”, then either reveal “him” (which will be interesting, since “he” doesn’t exist),or corroborate “his” “statement”, or just crawl away.

I hope your effort to institute socialilsm fails, too.

 In fact, I hope it fails even more than Rush does!

By the way, all of you – my show is the Northern Alliance Radio Network, Volume II, heard every Saturday from 1-3PM Central on AM1280 in the Twin Cities, or at Town Hall for podcasts.

No, really. Fail fail fail. Not you, Mr. President, personally, but your policies, yes. Definitely.

Feel free to sic your dogs on Ed and I. Really. Please hop to it!

One side effect of the Democratic campaign against Rush Limbaugh has been to increase — dramatically increase — the talk show host’s ratings.

This morning I asked Rush if he had any numbers he could share on just what effect the increased visibility has had on his business. This is his response:

The latest numbers I have are for January, well before this kerfuffle began, and they are through the roof — six shares in NY, for example. There are daily ratings taken now in about the top 15 markets but I have not seen them yet. All I can tell you is that as of January, we booked 80 percent of all our 2008 revenue and we’ll be over 2008 by the end of this month.

Given those numbers, it’s clear that the most decisive economic stimulus produced by the Obama administration so far has been at the Excellence in Broadcasting Network.

Socialism bad!

You’re Nancy Pelosi’s lapdog!

You’re destroying the market!

Who the hell does Michelle’s hair? T

hat should give you and your staff plenty to respond to. Please see to this. Thanks.

…did anyone catch Mischke’s debut at the City Pages yesterday?

The CP has fallen so far off my list of regular browses, I gotta confess it didn’t even occur to me to try to listen yet.

Anyone?

UPDATE:  Um, City Pages?  For the benefit of those who work day jobs, and whose companies’ firewalls choke down most live streaming – would it kill you to actually post the damn show?

Thanks.

The last couple of weeks have seen big news in the local talkradio community – albeit for very different reasons.

This week, former KSTP host and cult object Tom Mischke will start an internet-based talk show, affiliated with formerly-readable boutique freebie ‘zine The City Pages.

David Brauer at the MinnPost writes:

Of course, Tommy Mischke is a rare bird; for two decades on KSTP-AM, he somehow blended content and advertising in a way that generated fierce listener and advertiser loyalty. But when Mischke was fired from AM1500 and disowned commercial radio, few thought he could replace his radio income on the Internet.

Without getting into specifics, let’s just say he did amazingly well. But it didn’t happen without help from a much-mocked legacy medium: print.

Internet advertising alone wouldn’t pay the freight for a 2-4 p.m. weekday show (beginning March 4 at citypages.com). But advertisers did pony up enough for a print-web combo that Mischke secured a one-year deal. He’ll also do a weekly column in the paper.

The benefit for City Pages? It was able to get around a corporate hiring freeze because most costs were covered on Day One, and its reps now have a new selling opportunity.

To someone who’s been in media, off and on, for most of his adult life, it’s a bit of a departure.  In traditional entertainment media, the “owner” of the show bets long – produces and airs a program (including hiring and, indirectly or directly, paying the air and support talent) based on the potential for ratings and the money they might bring.

Mischke’s model is different; he’s bringing his advertisers – some of his big backers from his long-running KSTP show – with him.

Will it work in the long term?  Does internet narrowcasting draw enough ears to make it work?  Has the City Pages – a fairly pathetic shell of its former self, journalistically speaking – got the mojo to serve as the fiscal and demograhic bedrock for a cult figure like Mischke?

Given the singular history and qualities of its namesake, the “Mischke Model” may be tough to replicate, and its long-term success remains unknown. But it does show how old and new media can be woven together. The Strib, PiPress — hell, the local edition of the Onion — might’ve pulled this off. Perhaps they can rig up something like it.

Perhaps they can – yes, indeed.  We’ll come back to that.

I am, of course, a big Mischke fan.  I’m a fan, of course, because he’s a real original, wildly creative, and just plain fun to listen to.

For a good chunk of the Twin Cities intelligentsia, of course – the likes of Garrison Keillor, Brian Lambert and, if I may be so bold, David Brauer – Mischke is more than that.  He’s a thumb in the eye of the “establishment” in talk radio, standing defiantly against the tide of conservative programs. And in some respects, I can even go along with that; while I disagree with whatever politics Mischke likely believes, I much preferred “The Mischke Broadcast” to the likes of Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck; Mischke clobbered the lesser ranks of conservative hosts in all ways that matter to the likes of Keillor, Lambert, Brauer – that is, everything but ratings and revenue.
“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how’d you like the play?”

Brauer’s point seems to be that to get anything “interesting” on “the air”, one needs to get creative.  Outlets like City Pages are floundering; shows like Mischke’s, long KSTP run notwithstanding, have always been fish out of water in the radio industry.

And there might be something to that.  Outlets like the Pioneer Press might do well to ally themselves with other media outlets; a content and advertising alliance between, say, the Pioneer Press, AM1280, and one or more internet content and video operations (like “The Uptake” and “True North”, to pick out some random examples) would provide some interesting cross-media possibilities, not only for advertising and opinion content but – cue the drum roll – journalism.

So, if you take Brauer’s piece at face value, it’d seem that “interesting”, “creative” media’s future is going to depend on a concerted do it yourself effort.

Unless – Brauer doesn’t go into this in his piece on Mischke – you operate in a format that’s actually succeeding, even despite the current advertising economy.

Salem Radio Network’s ad inventory is reportedly pretty well sold out.   Rush Limbaugh’s salary is greater than the Paraguayan military budget. And long-time local radio fixture Jason Lewis is, as of last week, in the big show: That’s worth a separate article.

Anyway, the lesson – as filtered through the lens of the “progressive” “alternative” media, is this:  the current media landscape requires creativity to survive.  Unless you’re a huge success, in which case we ignore it all.

Everyone knows one; the neighborhood Jeremiah.

He’s the guy who hangs out at the hardware store, stocking up on the one hand, ranting about the “Trilateral Commission undercutting our currency” and proclaiming that “in five years the United States’ll be like Red China” on the other.  He was a survivalist before the term became a dirty word; he’s positive that the end of civilization is nigh, and he never stops talking about it.

Or should I say, never stopped.  Because you knew him during the Carter and first term of the Reagan Administration.And though you last talked with him twenty years ago, and wonder if American Idol isn’t evidence that he was at least partially correct, you still recall the sense of crushing fatigue his harangues left wafting over you.

Glenn Beck does that to me.

Allahpundit talks about Beck:

Even before watching this, if you’d asked me which media star’s most likely to turn survivalist, move to the mountains, and start doing his show from a lead-lined bunker, there’s no doubt what the answer would have been. There’s something “off” about Beck in a way that’s not true of other chat-show hosts, although that’s not necessarily a criticism: O’Reilly and Hannity can be tiresome in more than small doses but this guy I find watchable even at a stretch. Partly it’s the sheer bravado of the performance, partly it’s the challenge of trying to figure out what’s going on in his head to make him the way he is. As big an audience as he has, I’m surprised it’s not bigger. He’s one of a kind.

Look, don’t get me wrong; it’s always prudent to be prepared for emergencies; putting extra food by is just plain smart; anyone who doesn’t have guns and ammo laid in isn’t really all that American anyway.

And he’s right, in the sense that all real conservatives are right; this country has painted itself into a corner, with endless entitlement spending and the stupid, neo-socialist policies of the past ten years that privatized the fruits of greed but socialized the results of stupidity.

But – how do I put this – Glenn Beck bores me just as silly as his equally-nutty, slightly less listenable forebears in nuttiness do. This nation is in a bind – and this current trough in the business cycle is just the beginning – and The One’s policies seem sure to keep the bind going for a nice long time.

But more than any other talk show host – more than O’Reilly, vastly more than Hannity or Limbaugh or anyone in the Salem or TRN stables of hosts – when I listen to Beck, I feel like I’m listening to someone who regards the whole mess as less than a blight on the nation he loves and the society that allows him to earn a living doing what he does than as material.
I know he has fans out there.  Let me break this down for you; stop.

Whenever I bag on Beck, his fans write in to defend him. Feel free.  But be advised; you’re wrong.

No wonder the libs want the “Fairness” doctrine; the market is rejecting their material like badly-matched transplant organs.

Nova M – Sheldon Drobny’s second attempt at a LibTalk network after Air America’s initial meltdown – has coded, taking Randee Rhodes and Mike Malloy with it:

Randi Rhodes’ on-air home for less than a year will shut its doors. In an email message of February 17th from counsel for Nova M Radio, Inc. to Randi’s entertainment attorney, Robert V. Gaulin, the company is said to have been advised to file for bankruptcy protection next week. All payroll deposits were reversed on Tuesday, leaving Nova’s employees unpaid for the past two weeks.On Sunday, Nova received a letter from Mr. Gaulin asserting that the contract with Ms. Rhodes was terminated due to material breaches and other reasons. Ms. Rhodes had not broadcast for over a week prior to this time, a situation which was diplomatically referred to as a “problem” that was solely within Nova’s control to solve. A few days earlier, Sheldon Drobny, founder of Nova M, and a co-founder of Air America Radio, attempted suicide and is hospitalized in Chicago.

The only thing lower than Nova’s revenue numbers were its audience.  Nova M was, if anything, a more vacuous flop than Air America.

To add insult to injury?  Brian Maloney reports (in the same story linked above) that Randee Rhodes’ “flagship” station, WJON in Palm Beach, has tubed her.

For Sean Hannity.

So long, Nova M.

If a DC liberal pundit tells you you’re paranoid for worrying about your house being robbed, aim your gun at your door; there will be an armed burglar bursting in shortly.

Anytime a liberal pundit, politician, apologist or powerbroker “guarantees” to keep hands off a liberty that might undercut the left in any way, they are lying.  Every time.  There are no exceptions. To the left, civil liberties are not “rights endowed to us by our creator”; they are tools in the political toolbox, to be manipulated to the left’s singular advantage.
For the past year, as conservatives warned that Obama (and/or his followers, and/or his masters in Congress) were aiming towardreimposing the “Fairness” Doctrine, the lefty peanut gallery tittered and tut-tutted; “you’re being paranoid!”, we were assured – ignorant, of course, of the fact that we conservatives have in our institutional memory many examples of the left’s casual outlook on civil liberties issues.

We are right, of course:

[Chris] Wallace asked [Obama minion David Axelrod] about an issue making the rounds on both conservative and liberal radio shows, where Democratic Congressional leaders (and even Bill Clinton) have recently weighed in.”Will you rule out reimposing the Fairness Doctrine?” asked Wallace.

Now, remember; Obama was putatively “crystal-clear” on the subject last summer, when his press flak Michael Ortiz said “Sen. Obama does not support reimposing the Fairness Doctrine on broadcasters.”

Why would there be any need to fudge what was once – as the lefty peanut gallery has pointed out – a clear, definitive statement?

Because Obama is no more about “clearness and definition”, to say nothing of honesty, than he is about “depth”:

“I’m going to leave that issue to Julius Genachowski, our new head of the FCC, to, and the president, to discuss,” Axelrod said. “So I don’t have an answer for you now.”

Um – why not?

The One’s position seemed (we have been assured!) pretty clear before the election.  Why not now?

Lester Kinsolving, the conservative radio host, has twice asked Robert Gibbs about it in the briefing room, and each time, the press secretary didn’t reveal the administration’s position.Last week, I reached out to press office staffers in order to find out if the administration’s position is the same as in June, and have not yet received a response.

This is, unlike many political questions, an utterly black and white issue; “Do you support free speech?”  You do, or you don’t.  Last year – when Obama was trying to suck in reach out to “moderates” –  he saw it as such, as well.  No “Fairness” Doctrine.

Today?

If Obama’s position on the Fairness Doctrine is the same as during the campaign — and I have no reason to believe it isn’t — stating that clearly would quickly silence a lot of conservative critics who assume the Democratic president is going to push to reinstate the defunct policy. Otherwise, the Fairness Doctrine chatter on the airwaves isn’t likely to die down.

I won’t rule out the idea that Obama wants to leave the question open.  Knowing as he does that conservative talk radio is the most focused, effective opposition to his rule right now, and knowing that actually acting to shut it down would tie his Administration downin endless litigation and justifiable accusations of overreach, it might be in The One’s interest to leave this issue out there, to serve as a stalking horse to occupy peoples’ attention.

It’s equally likely that Nancy Pelosi has told The One “jump”, and Obama is still just wondering “off what?”

The Brits deny Geert Wilders – critic of Islamofascism – entrance to the UK because it might upset Moslems who are busy picking on Jewish kids.

US Senators jump on board for a reprise of the “Fairness Doctrine”.

And a dictator messes with a hero who’s already notched one dictatorship:

Nobel laureate, former Polish prime minister, and hero of the Cold War Lech Walesa will not be allowed to visit Venezuela ahead of that country’s referendum on extending the rule of Hugo Chavez. El Jefe told Venezuelan media that Walesa was unwelcome in Caracas, where he was set to meet with opposition student groups, and would be prevented from entering the country. After Walesa cancelled his visit, Chavez claimed that he would, in fact, be allowed through customs but would be “closely monitored” on his visit.

The left’s chattering classes around the world can not handle criticism of them or those they deign to protect.

By the way, look for Jon Stewart or Keith Olberman to start bagging on Lech Wałesa sooner than later.

On the one hand, Speaking of Faith is one of my favorite programs on Public Radio.  Their current episode, discussing the relationship between Charles Darwin and faith, is particularly good – exploring a conflict between reason and faith that (to the chagrin of atheism-pimps like PZ Meyers and Richard Dawkins) needn’t exist at all.  Leaving aside the overarching moral objection to government-supported media (to the extent that public radio is government-subsidized – neither total nor trifling), it is the kind of program you can not find anywhere on the commercial media, and yet is something I’d hate to do without.

That’d be “Sublime”.

On the “Ridiculous” side, we have SoF‘s online-only production, “Repossessing Virtue”, a series of podcasts ostensibly about the spiritual aspects of the current economic crisis.  They don’t seem to involve Tippett, but rather other parts of the shows cossack-horde-like herd of producers, who…

…well, that’s the interesting part, isn’t it? What do they do?  Mostly interview people whose contribution seems to be to wax sanctimonious about how fat ‘n happy American are.  And while any good conservative would agree, the whole series seems to serve more as a catalog of Public Radio cliches than an entree to any sort of interesting discussion.

It’s also one more set of lines on my podcast list to skip past.

When the subject of the “Fairness” Doctrine comes up, Democrats respond “Obama’s said he won’t for it”.  It’s both correct and irrelevant; Obama doesn’t need to do a thing; the cynical among us believe he knows that full well, and that he’s got henchpeople to do that hyperpartisan, not-so-hopey-changey work for him.

And they are doing it:

Another Democratic U.S. senator has gone on record as supporting the reinstatement of the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” adding, “I feel like that’s gonna happen.”

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., told radio host and WND columnist Bill Press yesterday when asked about whether it was time to bring back the so-called “Fairness Doctrine”: “I think it’s absolutely time to pass a standard. Now, whether it’s called the Fairness Standard, whether it’s called something else – I absolutely think it’s time to be bringing accountability to the airwaves. I mean, our new president has talked rightly about accountability and transparency. You know, that we all have to step up and be responsible. And, I think in this case, there needs to be some accountability and standards put in place.”

Did you catch that?

We need “Accountability” and “Standards” for free speech?

Can you imagine if, at any point in the past eight years, any Republican had suggested we needed “standards” for any First Amendment liberty?  He’d have been tarred and feathered…no, he or she’d have been pilloried in the media, and quietly shuffled off the stage.

Of course, no Republican suggested doing any such thing to the civil rights of Americans in the past eight years.

Asked by Press if she could be counted on to push for hearings in the Senate this year “to bring these (radio station) owners in and hold them accountable,” Stabenow replied: “I have already had some discussions with colleagues and, you know, I feel like that’s gonna happen. Yep.”

I have felt that the Democrats were going to use Obama’s anointment and coronation as an excuse for overreach; in their decades on the intellectual margin, they have become brittle, shrill, dogmatic…

…and I guess, given these proposals, “authoritarian”:

“For many, many years, we operated under a Fairness Doctrine in this country,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., told Albuquerque radio station KKOB last year. “I think the country was well-served. I think the public discussion was at a higher level and more intelligent in those days than it has become since.”

It was not.  It was dreary, monochrome, and nobody cared, because nobody listened to it.

And yes – behind the shaking heads and the solemn assurances, the Dems have been lining up behind the proposals.

And, lest we forget, the Dems don’t need Obama, or Congress, or the title “The Fairness Doctrine” to ram this piece of garbage through:

FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell, a Bush appointee whose term runs through June, however, warned that Democrats may be adopting a stealthier approach to shutting down conservatives on talk radio.

In a speech to the Media Institute in Washington last week, Multichannel News reports, McDowell suggested there are efforts to implement the controversial policy without using the red-flagged “Fairness Doctrine” label.

“That’s just Marketing 101,” McDowell explained. “If your brand is controversial, make it a new brand.”

Instead, McDowell alleged, Democrats will try to disguise their efforts in the name of localism, diversity or network neutrality.

McDowell further suggested that the FCC may already be gearing up to enforce the “Fairness Doctrine” through community advisory boards that help determine local programming. While radio stations use the boards on a voluntary basis now, McDowell warned if the advisory panels become mandatory, “Would not such a policy be akin to a re-imposition of the Doctrine, albeit under a different name and sales pitch?”

I warned you about this months ago. The Dems have been preparing the ground for this fight for quite some time.

And while Republicans’ prediction of “Fairness Doctrine” legislation remains unfulfilled and highly speculative, a WND investigation has revealed that McDowell and Walden aren’t just fear-mongering, as some have suggested. A think tank headed by John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team, mapped out a strategy in 2007 for clamping down on talk radio using language that has since been parroted by both the Obama campaign and the new administration’s White House website.

In June of 2007, Podesta’s Center for American Progress released a report titled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio,” detailing the conservative viewpoint’s dominance on the airwaves and proposing steps for leveling the playing field.

I worked this report over when it came out. Please read that piece – it’s one of the better pieces I’ve written.

To borrow a phrase from Reagan, we do have a time for choosing, here.  After eight years of whinging endlessly about Americans’ civil liberties that were never in the faintest shred of danger, we now face a genuine threat to the First Amendment, intended purely to stifle debate in this country.

Part of me hopes the Democrats try.  They’ve overreached badly in Obama’s first two weeks; this would be the mother lode.
(Coming soon – Fairness Doctrine FAQ)

I don’t follow talk radio around the country quite as much as I used to; it’s not like I’m about to go move across the country to take a talk show gig or anything.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, when I still followed talk radio obsessively – almost like I was trying to make it a career or something – I’d have known that a DC-area station had christened itself “Obama 1260”.  The station was a liberal talk operation, featuring the likes of Bill Press, Stephanie Miller and Fast Eddie Schultz.

I said “was”:

President Obama may be riding high in Washington, but OBAMA 1260 is not.

The area’s only progressive talk station is changing formats…The move by Redskins owner Dan Snyder, who purchased the station, WWRC, and others in Washington last summer, leaves the city without a liberal radio outlet. Program Director Greg Tantum says he thought the station could work because of enthusiasm over Obama, but that ratings collapsed to a level that could not be measured after the election.

“Of course, it’s because all talk radio is tanking”, you might hear someone say.

Er, no:

But ratings nearly doubled, he says, at Snyder’s conservative station, WTNT, which features Laura Ingraham and Bill Bennett. Tantum said he will move Schultz to WTNT to give him another shot.

Which isn’t so much a nod to the efficacy of liberal talk radio as to the fact that Schultz – dumb as a bag of hammers as he is notwithstanding – understands the basics of making a talk show entertaining, unlike just about every other liberal host in the nation.

This brings up an interesting question, though; one of the purported justifications for the “Fairness” Doctrine is to make sure there’s “competition” between ideologies, and a variety of them, on the airwaves. And yet in Washington DC – the ultimate “buyer’s market” for political talk, and a place with the most favorable demographics for liberal talk anywhere this side of Berkeley, and in a perfectly free market, let me repeat, “ratings collapsed to a level that could not be measured”.

The pattern holds true everywhere. After a poor start, Air America is barely clinging to existence.  Locally, AM950 – after making a play of it for a few ratings books back in 2006 – is well behind AM1280 in ratings, even though it has a vastly more powerful signal than The Patriot (disclosure for those who are new to this blog; I do a show on the weekends at AM1280) and revenue (where it’s not even close).
How exaggerated were rumors of conservative talk’s death?  Leaving aside Rush Limbaugh’s titanic eight year contract, conservative talk is the only format in radio that’s even making a pretense of holding its numbers and revenues during the current recession.

Locally?   Of the six commercial talk stations in the Twin Cities (WCCO, KSTP-AM, KTLK-FM, Chicktalk 107, Air America Minnesota 950 and the Patriot), the Patriot has by far the weakest signal – and yet the Patriot crushes AM950 in all time slots. On the vitally-important Saturday time slot, the Northern Alliance is not only demolishing AM950, but from 1-3PM is even beating KSTP and WCCO, to say nothing of KTLK and 107.

Conservative talk is not only alive; it’s moving silently through the woods and taking aim at the left’s packed masses of rhetorical redcoats marching in step down the road…

Damn, this is fun!

At any rate, best of luck to all you Obama 1260 people.  You might wanna think about leaving the ideology at home, swallowing your pride, and looking for a gig in a format that can survive…

(Via Ed)

Why does the left hate Limbaugh so much?

It’s not just that he eats their lunch in the marketplace (markets have no meaning to the left); it’s not that he “dumbs down” the American people (a Pew study last year showed that…:

…Limbaugh’s audience is often underestimated by critics who don’t listen to the show (only 3 percent of his audience identify themselves as “liberal,” according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for the People and the Press). Recently, Pew reported that, on a series of “news knowledge questions,” Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” — the defiantly self-mocking term for his faithful, supposedly brainwashed, audience — scored higher than NPR listeners.

So intelligence doesn’t matter to them either.

No.  It’s because Limbaugh is the one nationally-prominent ideological conservative who is unapologetic on the subject,and has the capability of leading people – as opposed to the party – back to where it belongs.

Todd Huston notices just how wrong that is:

I am through with Limbaugh’s supporting the long tradition of rugged American individualism, done with his harping on free trade, and up to here with his going on about the Founders and our American character. I am worn out with his bellicose talk of stopping terrorism, and so done with Limbaugh’s high profile as one of the most listened to conservative advocates in the country that I could just spit. I simply don’t want this Limbaugh character to be the sole voice of the GOP. Stop it now. Make it go away.Instead, it would be nice if just ONE of our actual, purported Republican politicians would be the voice of the GOP espousing all the conservative ideals that Limbaugh so eloquently expounds upon day in and day out. Wouldn’t it be grand if just one guy with the guts to back up the rhetoric with a voting record would become the voice of the party of conservatism?

Liberals have their Ted Kennedys and Nancy Pelosis that do no compromising. They have their “Baghdad” Jim McDermotts that cavort across the globe advocating for murderers and tyrants the world over. They’ve had their presidential candidates “reporting for duty” that have in the past been key members of committees advocating for putting our own soldiers in jail and indicting Americans for faux war crimes. For that matter, the left even has an actual ex-president that runs to the support of every tin-pot dictator in the world pretending at being a diplomat.

The left is unapologetic for its support of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, the biggest mass murderers in history. They are resolved to turn our foreign policy over to foreign bodies like the UN. The left is four square against freedom of religion and keen to remove uncounted numbers of our Constitutional rights from us. They hate capitalism, property rights and are against open debate in our schools… yet they say so proudly and their politicians cultivate voting records that reflect those beliefs.

There’s no “compromise” there. The left knows that politics ain’t beanball.

The Obama Administration is just like Lori Sturdevant; they want their Republicans to be nice and wishy-washy and pliable.

They want a party full of Chuck Hegels and Ron Erhards – worthless “moderate” vermin (politically speaking) who are of no use to dissenting from the majority agenda.
I figured before the election that Obama would overreach on things like the “Fairness” Doctrine, measures to silence opposition.

In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think he’d do it this fast.

I hope he continues.  He’s clearly been reading his own press; he thinks he’s invincible; that he can get away with anything.
Good.

Note to Twin Cities’ Leftybloggers:  Please, please try to get your facts straight when you want to try to noodle about with issues I genuinely care about.  You might get Haugenned.

Fair warning.

Liberal in the Land of Conservative writes:

HOLY CRAP, the Democratic leadership in Congress is pushing the Fairness Doctrine. Who are the magical creatures that can pass a doctrine without nary a bill in existence?

Dear LITLOC:  Congresspeople, thanks to the miracle of “voices”, the “First Amendment” and “the Media”, can say things outside the context of “bills”.  For example, they can tell a reporter “It’s time to reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine. I have this old-fashioned attitude that when Americans hear both sides of the story, they’re in a better position to make a decision.”  That’d be Dick “Turban” Durbin.  Bear in mind, he said that without authoring a bill on the subject.

Yet.

And – just so’s you learn something, LITLOC – let’s be clear; Congress needn’t pass a single bill to reinstate the “Fairness” Doctrine.  If Obama puts three pro-Doctrine members on the FCC Board, the “Doctrine” can become fact again by executive fiat; no legislation will be needed, beyond confirmation hearings.  This, indeed, is the most dangerous scenario for supporters of free speech; Obama (and the smarter Dems) don’t want to pee on the third rail by legislating censorship – but how much political capital do you think Obama will burn getting in the way of an allied bureaucracy doing it for them?

Seriously, I thought Mitch Berg was supposed to be the smart one.

Among conservative bloggers?  No. I’m the cute one.

Compared to Twin Cities’ leftybloggers?  In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Do your homework, kids.  You’re gonna need to.

Camille Paglia – no conservative, she – sums up the absurdity of Dem proposals to reinstate the “Fairness” Doctrine.

For starters,they just don’t “get” radio (emphasis sparingly added):

Radio is a populist medium where liberals come across as snide, superior scolds. One can instantly recognize a liberal caller to a conservative show by his or her catty, obnoxious tone. The leading talk radio hosts are personalities and entertainers with huge rhetorical energy and a bluff, engaging manner…The best hosts combine a welcoming master of ceremonies manner with a vaudevillian brashness. Liberal imitators haven’t made a dent on talk radio because they think it’s all about politics, when it isn’t. Top hosts are life questers and individualists who explore a wide range of thought and emotion and who skillfully work the mike like jazz vocalists.

I’ll cop to “Mick Jagger”.

Talk radio is a major genre of popular culture that deserves the protection accorded to other branches of the performing and fine arts. Liberals, who go all hushed and pious at Hays Code censorship in classic Hollywood, should lay off the lynch-mob mentality. Keep the feds out of radio!

The liberal response is “But President Obama isn’t pushing the Fairness Doctrine”.

I answer “he’s not President for five more days, and it doesn’t matter; the Democrat leadership in Congress is, and I doubt Obama would waste a veto to protect Conservative talk.

In any case, all of us who’ve spent decades fighting – and lately, winning – the battle for the Second Amendment can tell you; liberty takes eternal watchfulness.

So we watch.

WCCO tubes Al Malmberg.

Malmberg – the Good Neighbor’s long-time graveyard host and one of the most somnolent radio personalities since Marconi first tickled an oscillator – falls victim to hard ad times.  Brauer:

Over at the Good Neighbor, having a nationwide wee-hours clear channel signal apparently isn’t what it used to be. I haven’t confirmed the details with WCCO management, but new station boss Mick Anselmo is under orders to slice costs — top talent was asked to take a 10 percent pay cut, and two news reporters were recently let go — so low-revenue overnights was probably a tempting target.

One tipster told me the station will shift to a syndicated show out of St. Louis on Monday; I haven’t pinned down its identity yet. Another tipster says the station that advertises itself as “NewsRadio 830” is so short-staffed that it now runs recorded weekend morning newscasts in the afternoon; also unconfirmed.

Wouldn’t Mischke be a great fit, huh?

(Well, that’s the rumor that’s bouncing around Twitter…)

In its ongoing quest to be all things to all people, KSTP is bringing in Pat Reusse to try to jumpstart the station’s long-dormant (as in “forever-dormant”) morning drive:

“Somewhere between wacky and MPR, there’s a morning radio show to be done, and that’s what I hope to be part of Monday through Friday on KSTP,’ Reusse said. “The goal is for us to put together a morning show that I would listen to.’

Which should be an interesting bit of work, considering Reusse’s on-air persona; how do you make a morning show that an omnivorous dyspeptic like Reusse will like?

I digress:

One of the Twin Cities’ most well-known media personalities, Reusse has written four-to-five columns per week for the Star Tribune over the past two decades. He will continue in his role as a sports columnist, writing two columns per week after his new morning show is unveiled.

Hiring Reusse is not a dumb move, in and of itself.  Reusse has almost three decades of track record with KSTP’s audience.  He can do radio (although I can certainly see a Reusse show ending up as “all of the curmudgeonly dyspepsia of the Soucheray show, with none of the humor”).  And KSTP’s management isn’t completely tone deaf; while conservative talk is among the only formats making any money anywhere in radio, sports seems to be doing adequately as well.  KFAN has eked out a decent niche in Twin Cities radio; it’s not a dumb idea for KSTP to try to stake out  piece of that turf, especially given the huge investment they made in the Twins.

In the longer term, though, KSTP-AM’s ongoing drive to be the new WCCO – to be “broadcasters” in the marketing as well as technological sense of the term – seems grossly misguided.  The audence – heck, all audiences – has been splintering for decades.  Narrowcasting – in particular, providing a destination, even a sense of “community” (shaddap, Soucheray) for a fairly tightly-focused group of listeners – is where the money is, provided the focus isn’t music (the IPod has been flensing music radio).

For all of its mistakes, Clear Channel in the Twin Cities has done a good job of marketing KFAN to a community of sports nuts-who-dabble-in-news. 

KSTP’s problem isn’t that Reusse won’t do a decent job on the mornings, especially given help from the listenable Jay Kolls and Kenny Olson – although I’m tempted to ponder that having Jeremy “Kodiak” Kienitz would be a huge help (presuming Kodiak hadn’t fallen on the outs with Reusse over the previous decade or so).  The problem (yes, I’m monday-morning quarterbacking, here) is that a single personality isn’t going to turn back a huge systemic problem.

KSTP could rebuild its entire format around Reusse and Soucheray, going mostly/all sports like KFAN and using its 50 kilowatts of raw power to build a regional sports/news-o-tainment/goombah community powerhouse.  They could hire a brace of firebrand conservatives to recapture their glory days.  They could re-hire Mischke and scour the country for more stream-of-consciousness humorists.

But KSTP is trying to broadcast in a world that’s becoming narrowcast.

Brad Carlson also addresses the change.

I finally got around to reading David Brauer’s two part interview with Tom Mischke (parts one and two), about his exit from KSTP and his thoughts on the future of the business.

More on that in a bit.

———-

I remember walking into KSTP the night I filled in for Bob Davis, on January 23, 2003.  It was the first time I’d set foot in a radio station in ten years; the first time I’d done a talk show in almost sixteen.

I felt a little bit like Rip Van Winkel.  When I’d left radio, shows were recorded on cassettes; audio editing and production work was done on twelve-inch reel to reel tapes; commercials, songs and dropins came on “Carts” (which looked and worked like eight-track tapes, for those of you old enough to remember them).  At my last previous radio “job” – as a volunteer news guy at KFAI – they’d just installed a computer to download the AP wire and allow a little rudimentary editing.

At KSTP (and AM1280, which followed about a year later), everything was on computer; commercials, dropins (on a slick touch-screen array), commands to switch between recorded, live and satellite programming, even the recorded programs themselves. 

And that was the least of it.  As I’ve noted many times in the past, when I left KSTP-AM, it was the poor cousin of the Hubbard empire; Hubbard Broadcasting had been trying to sell KSTP-AM for years, with no luck – because rumors had it that AM was dead, and the band was going to get decommissioned eventually.  By 2003, that was in the past; KSTP-AM was financially carrying Channel 5, Channel 45, KS95, Estrogen 107 and the rest of the Hubbard operation.

A number of things hadn’t changed, though.

• When radio management wants you gone?   You’re gone.
• If you give Hubbard Broadcasting a silk purse, they’ll not only find a way to make a sow’s ear out of it, but in such a way as to make the observer wonder if sows can be on meth. 

———-

Mischke on exactly why Hubbard told him they’d gassed his show:

On the day I was fired, I was handed a transcript of a conversation I had with my producer two weeks earlier. I remembered the conversation. I had been curious to know where the jingle for [Hubbard-owned] Channel 45 had come from. It’s the little sing-song way they say “45.”

I wanted to know who came up with it, how many other ways they thought to sing it, what talent they hired to deliver the jingle and how many different takes there were. I suppose I just wanted to learn the backstory behind a modern corporate jingle.

I asked my producer to call them and ask them, knowing full well these are fellow Hubbard employees. My producer refused. I think he was just tired of me having him do various things while he was busy trying to answer the phone.

So I picked up the phone and called them myself, on the air. I phoned downstairs, a receptionist answered, and I asked to speak to someone at Channel 45. She said, “Just a minute” and put me on hold. I then put the entire call on hold and asked my producer if he’d now please speak to them off the air so as to get a sense of where that jingle came from.

That’s what I was fired for. Making that call to the receptionist without getting her permission.

[David Brauer]: Isn’t such a call an FCC violation?

A: They told me it was indeed an FCC violation.

Back in 1986, Don Vogel caught wind that the afternoon guy at the old WLOL-FM, a chucklehead named “Doctor Dave”, was lifting a bit of Vogel’s (a takeoff on radio tele-shrink Dr. Harvey Ruben) on WLOL’s wacky afternoon zoo.  He told me to get “Dr. Dave” on the air.  Via a contact or two, producer Dave Elvin had their studio line number handy.  I called “Dr. Dave”, and Don put him on the air, live.  Of course, being a newbie to talk radio, I didn’t know there’d be a problem; Don, a fifteen year vet of Chicago talk, didn’t know either.

There was.  There is an FCC regulation whose number I could, until recently, recite from memory, saying that radio stations can not put someone on the air without them having a realistic expectation of knowing they are being put on the air.  You have to tell people they’re going to be on the air, we were told, by an irate station counsel who’d just gotten an irate phone call from an irate general manager at WLOL.  We spent the next day wondering if we were going to get fired.  Our own GM, Scott Meier, saved the day, basically saying that we’d forget their plagiarism if they’d forget our stunt.  It blew over.

You’re thinking “not only does every half-assed FM morning show in the world do ambush calls for yuks, but Mischke’s made an art form of those kinds of calls”.  And you’d be right.  Heck – we had a long-running bit on the Vogel show, “Random Call”, where we’d pick an area code and dial a random number, often to hilarious results (like Christmas Eve, 1985, where we got a hold of the Nome, Alaska Police Department squad room, with predictably deadpan-hilarious results).

And beyond that? Back in Mischke’s early years on evenings – one of the first times I listened to him, in the early nineties – I heard him struggling to get someone on the air, live and uninformed.  I called the studio; my old friend and colleague Joe Hansen – aka “The Jackal”, at that point – answered, and I told him about my near-miss on Vogel.  They waved off on the bit – that time.  Naturally, Mischke followed through on the bit the next umpteen jillion times.

Do you think this was news to KSTP-AM’s program director, Steve Konrad, or to his various levels of management?

If so, I have a tape from Willie Clark that I’d like to try to sell you.

———-

If you can say one thing for Mischke, it’s that he’s a comedic genius with a flair for using radio, with all of its foibles and limitations and traditions, as a tool in his comic toolbox.

If you can say one more thing for him, it’s that he’s always seemed to keep radio, with all of its foibles and limitations and corrosive dysfunction, in its place. 

Mischke said, and believes, all sorts of things that separate him from the mainstream (i.e. successful) parts of talk radio, but make it safe for the likes of Garrison Keillor to be an “out” fan.  Still, it’s hard to work in commercial radio (outside of Air America) and not understand what actually works out there these days:

I watched many people attempt radio shows over the years. I saw talk hosts come and go. In all my years at KSTP, I saw only three shows succeed — truly succeed. The only three programs to ever generate any kind of decent ratings at all were Rush Limbaugh, Jason Lewis and Joe Soucheray. That’s it.The rest of us never offered anything in the way of mass appeal. So any talk host, outside of those three, should walk away, following a firing, feeling lucky to have been given a shot.

Three hosts; a populist conservative, an intellectual conservative, and a culturally-conservative-to-the-point-of-reactionary curmudgeon. 

Mischke clearly understands something that KSTP-AM’s management does not.

[Brauer]: Where do you think KSTP is headed? The talk around town is about terrible numbers, save for Joe, and a pricey Twins contract that might not pay off, since it was signed during good times but now must be sold to advertisers during bad times. This is a strange time in radio and there’s something to say here.

A: Radio, as we’ve known it in this country, is dying. I don’t envy anyone trying to make the transition to the next stage in media. The Twins gamble has not paid off for KSTP. It has not affected ratings.

That has been very disappointing. It was a coup to steal them from ‘CCO, but oh, the cost.

You add that to the fact that Soucheray is the only talk host over there driving home each day feeling good about his ratings and you have big worries. Tack on the dismal economy with its bleak advertising picture and you have more than just worries.

But after all that – especially after my “Rip Van Winkle” riff at the beginning of this long post – we get to the interesting part; the future of talk radio. 

It’s overly obvious to say that “things have changed since Mischke and I got into the business”.  The interesting part is, “where are those things going?”

I was pondering that as Ed and I did the NARN2 show last Saturday; while talk radio was years ahead of the traditional dead-tree and showbiz-broadcast media in incorporating interactivity – phone callers with their own points to add – it was all still very hierarchic.  Callers passed through a screener to get to the host, who was the center of attention.  And that’s changing, I thought, as Ed and I worked the webcam, kept up with the chatroom and the Twitter thread and the incoming email and, by the way, did a broadcast show.  The audience’s relationship with a talk show host is changing in an analogous way to the changes the Blog brought to the reader’s relationship to the newspaper; the host isn’t necessarily in charge of the conversation by sole virtue of having the microphone. 

It’s not bad – indeed, being a blogger, I’d be dumb to do anything but embrace the change.  But it is different. 

I think every radio station in town has to pray to God they have a visionary on their staff. This is the time for change and innovation. A dramatic shift needs to occur.

I hope to end up somewhere where this idea is fully grasped, where the ideas move to the Internet, websites, video-blogging, music, live streaming. I think what is about to rise out of the ashes of the old radio model is far more exciting and interesting than what has come before. Some station in this town is going to be the first to fully exploit this. To those folks go the spoils.

The future is out there.  I sincerely hope – and believe – that Mischke is a part of it.

Among others.

Limbaugh Is Right on the Fairness Doctrine

Conservative talk radio has worked itself into a tizzy lately over the rumored revival of the Fairness Doctrine — the FCC policy that sought to enforce balanced discussion on the nation’s airwaves.

As the founding president of Air America Radio, I believe that for the last eight years Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have been cheerleaders for everything wrong with our economic, foreign and domestic policies. But when it comes to the Fairness Doctrine, I couldn’t agree with them more. The Fairness Doctrine is an anachronistic policy that, with the abundance of choices on radio today, is entirely unnecessary.

The conventional wisdom is that Rush’s success depended on the 1987 repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. Some say that if he had to make time for opposing opinions, Rush would have flopped. Personally, I think he is most entertaining when he is dismantling opposing arguments. He’s successful because he is a superior entertainer.

…I also think he’s successful because despite his personal foibles, he’s right more often than he’s wrong.

KSTP-AM tubes Willie Clark and Jeremy “Kodiak” Kienitz.

I got this internal memo from a KSTP fan. The writer is KSTP’s program director, Steve Konrad:

Staff,

Effective today, Willie Clark and Jeremy Kienitz are no longer with AM1500 KSTP.

We are appreciative of each of their efforts and hard work. We wish them only the best.

In the coming days, expect an announcement of a freshly re-structured morning-drive show, including who will be sharing the airwaves with Jay Kolls, Kenny, Bergie and Patrick Hammer as soon as some external details get wrapped up.

Steve Konrad
Program Director
am1500 KSTP

Four years ago, KSTP got the memo from the consultants; “conservative talk is dead”. So they moved to a kinder, gentler, more WCCO-like format; they largely ditched politics, they got the Twins, they hired the somnolent Clark to do mornings.

And things fell rapidly apart.

Of course, Kienitz was one of the station’s few links back to its glory days. A sharp, capable producer who could probably host his own program in a just world, “Kodiak” was the producer the night I filled in for Bob Davis in January of 2003. The station’s immense prosperity when it was hitting on all cylinders (Rush, Soucheray, Jason Lewis, Mischke and Bob Davis) allowed it to do something it’d never tried before; invest in solid, capable support staff. Producers had always been pretty much disposable at AM1500; the station’s long-belated success allowed it to start investing in good,capable support staff. Joe Hansen, “The Rookie”, Kienitz and others had the kind of job security (and money) that previous generations of KSTP’s control room galley slaves didn’t even bother dreaming of. And they were worth it; Hansen was an important factor in the chemistry that made Lewis a success; Rookie has been for years just about the only entertaining part of Soucheray’s show.

And Kodiak? Lileks – for whose “The Diner” show Kienitz was the original producer – says it best:

Jeremy has been a voice on the station for every ten years. I repeat this to program directors everywhere: PRODUCERS ARE TALENT. If they’re good. PRODUCERS ARE PERSONALTIES. If they’re good. And he was. You want to attract a younger demo, by the way? Don’t axe the only person at the station with a foot in geek culture. Don’t become the all-grumbly-geezer station.

KSTP-AM has backed away from the one thing that dragged it out of the pack – conservative talk in all its dyspeptic, fun, angry, hilarious variations – and trying simultaneously to “aim young” and be all stations to all people, sort of a WCCO of the 21st century. It’s not even working for WCCO anymore. Indeed, as the recession gets its claws into advertisers, the only part of talk radio that’s close to making money is…

…conservative talk.

Best of luck, Kodiak.

“Obama doesn’t support the “Fairness” Doctrine” is the standard response from lefties when asked about Barack Obama’s putative fascist tendencies.

Of course, it’s really not about him. It’s his caucus in Congress that’ll be the problem, that’ll push legislation to extinct conservative talk radio, and that Obama will (very likely) not veto after they ram their legislation through.

More proof? Brian Maloney finds another Tic that is committing a “gaffe” by telling the truth:

Now, we can add another Dem’s name to the list: far-left Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA), who represents an oddly-shaped district covering portions of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Areas.

Not content to merely silence Rush Limbaugh, however, Eshoo would take her crusade to cable and satellite broadcasts as well. Could they shut down the Fox News Channel as well as commercial talk radio? How about XM – Sirius?

Anna Hush-You would tackle them all in a way that would make Vladimir, Hugo and Fidel proud, not to mention her new friend in the White House.

When it comes to the “Fairness” Doctrine, liberals are like a two-headed pit bull; Head #1 might talk you into scritching its ears – but only to give Head #2 cover to chomp onto your butt. When it comes to fighting the “culture war” in this country, there is no such thing as an honest liberal.