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.<\/p>\n
Not, I suspect, for long.<\/p>\n
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”.\u00a0 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).<\/p>\n
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 <\/em>in this town”, and audibly pine for the station to edge more towards the middle of the road.\u00a0 To be all things to all people.\u00a0 To be more like…<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Make no mistake; Morris’ grandfather Stanley Hubbard the First was a true pioneer, a genius, one of the great figures in American broadcasting.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n This was back when the Twin Cities had maybe a dozen radio stations.\u00a0 This was back when people were acclimated to town that had 3-4 newspapers, eventually three TV stations, and that was it<\/em>.\u00a0 This was back when media became <\/em>community.<\/p>\n This was another era.\u00a0 It’s gone forever – except in a very narrowcast sense.\u00a0 Joe Sourcheray is to curmudgeons what Boone and Erickson were to Minnesota parents and lunchpails forty years ago.\u00a0 Rush Limbaugh is to tax-paying working stiffs what Steve Cannon was to afternoon commuters thirty years back.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n And that’s just the overall theme.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At least not at first listen.<\/p>\n Disclosure: I worked for KSTP-AM from 1985-87.\u00a0 I also came in second place for the Program Director job there in 1991, behind…current PD and former KDWB colleague Steve Konrad.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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”.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talk-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}