Two bits of news from talk radio that tie into a larger industry-wide trend.

Brain Maloney notes that Citadel Radio – one of the chains of broadcasters that has led the way in trying to jam left-leaning programming down the listeners throats, and largely failing (judging by their stock, which has gone from a solid hold to a penny stock in the past two years), is running the pointless Joe Scarborough and the execrable Mika Brezinski on their flagship station WABC in New York.

Maloney:

In fact, the decision to insert MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski into WABC’s midmorning slot is exactly how Citadel – ABC Radio got into this mess in the first place.Since the ill-fated merger of [Citadel and the old ABC Radio], Citadel’s upper management has struggled to grasp news-talk and what drives listenership. Instead of learning more about this highly-successful medium’s audience characteristics, CEO Farid Suleman has compelled stations to comply with a series of increasingly-bizarre programming edicts, of which this is merely the latest.

It’s nothing new, of course.  Since the aftermath of the 2004 elections, a lot of high-power consultants – the ones whom Rush Limbaugh caught by surprise – have been saying “conservative talk is dead”, and doing their best to prove it by killing off the stations they program.

This is manifested in ways small (the ongoing morphing of KSTP-AM into WCCO) and, in WABC’s case, big:

[Suleman’s] latest fiasco debuted yesterday, made possible by the recent removal of longtime WABC honcho Phil Boyce. One longtime major market radio programmer who monitored the broadcast told your Radio Equalizer that it “sounds like a train wreck on the air. Maybe this is the making of a new horror movie: When CEOs Program.” He further called it “just MSNBC on the radio.”

Without a skilled programming coach to guide Joe and Mika, both rank amateurs when it comes to talk radio, the program lacked focus. It skipped around haphazardly between topics and guests, which included MSNBC insiders such as David Gregory and Tom Brokaw.

Perhaps Suleman knows something we don’t.

Perhaps Harry Reid tipped him off that the Fairness Doctrine will not only be re-enacted immediately after inauguration, but enforced brutally, and it’s best to get ahead of the curve by filling your lineup with innocuous center-left talking heads who won’t offend the new regime and its mass of informants (who will be the engine driving the Doctrine).

In a related matter: while KSTP-AM has been floating aimlessly down this road for years, since the departure of Rush Limbaugh and Jason Lewis, programming innocuous hamsters like Willie and Jay, innocuous drive-time sportstalk with Matt Thomas, and mostly-apolitical social-curmudgeon with a thin veneer of “crusty reactionary” Joe Soucheray, who has been doing the same show to the same audience for (counts in his head) around fifteen years.

Now, “TBD” is replacing Mischke in the noon-2pm slot.  Yesterday, TBD was Jim Souhan, sports reporter at the Strib.  It was a bit of deja vu, going back to the days when KSTP seemed to think that any newspaper reporter could run a talk show; Nick Coleman, Catherine Lanpher, Jim Klobuchar and scads of other Strib and PiPress reporters and sportswriters paraded through the studio (including, to be fair, James Lileks).

Deja vu, also, in that it was just plain awful – like most newspaper (and TV) people are when they try talk radio.  It wandered aimlessly.  It skimmed past stories without giving anyone (in the forty-five or so minutes I wasted) a reason to pay it any attention.

It sounded, I thought, like pre-1987 talk radio.

I’m just gonna let that hang there for a while.