Questions on reading the City Pages’ “reporting” on s the departure of Jack Tomczak from KTCN
- If a conservative caucasian male orders a pizza in the woods, and no “progressive” media hack is there to hear it, is the conservative still “angry?”
- Quick – name any person of color that’s ever worked for the City Pages. Interns, and freelancers who wrote single articles (generally on race-related issues) don’t count.
- On the off-chance that you do find a person of color at the City Pages; be honest. they went to Macalester, Saint Olaf, Carlton or the U of M journo proglram. Right?
- When you refer to “angry white men on radio”, I’m kind of curious how one includes the dryly funny, constantly-wisecracking Tomczak (and the incisive, cynical Mitch Berg) but not the eternally red-faced Ed Schultz, the toxic Mike Malloy, the just-plain-wierd Nick Coleman, Matt “Who’s He?” McNeil, the incoherent Mike McFeely, or pretty much every other liberal talk show host?
Why, it’s always almost like a chanting point I’m on our unimaginative lefty friends; they referred should talk radio as “angry white male radio” with almost the exact same geometric precision as which they referred to Donald trumps speech as “dark”.
Of course, Tomczak’s departure highlights the elephant in the room for conservative talk radio. While conservative talk is one of three formats in all of terrestrial radio that still can make money (sports and Spanish radio also make a buck or two), the industry ate its proverbial seed corn over the past 20 years; the local stations in smaller markets where young talk radio talent used to come from mostly went all-network decades ago – a process that accelerated as the bottom fell out of the revenue pool around 2008. The likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Levin and the rest wiped out a generation of conservative talk radio’s “farm team”. And as the likes of Rush, Hewitt, Prager and Beck start to age out, who’s going to replace them – whether on the radio or online?
IHeart Radio – formerly Clear Channel, which owns “Twin Cities NewsTalk” – has been a key player in this; they’ve relentlessly pushed their properties to cut costs; with talk stations, that means “go network”.
“Does the business model for any terrestrial radio work?” is a legitimate question – but it’s a moot point if there is nothing to broadcast after Rush retires.
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