Another Radio Lament

Nothing terribly new here, but we can't hear enough times how badly commercial radio blows chunks, nor why. And the media companies and the FCC wonder why people are upset about loosening the ownership rules even more? Blind, deaf and dumb:

I grew up glued to radio and was present at the creation of legendary album-format stations like WMMR in Philadelphia and WXRT in Chicago. These stations played rich blends of rock, pop and jazz, and sometimes featured local bands. (This wide-ranging format enriched the collective musical taste and paid dividends by producing ever more varied strains of popular music.) Commercials were typically kept to between 8 and 12 minutes per hour, and 20 minutes or more could pass before the announcer broke in to give the station's call letters.

This format was profitable, but not on the money-raining scale required since Wall Street got wise to the radio game. Faced with pressure from investors and more corporate debt than some nations, the megacompanies that acquire a hundred stations each must squeeze every cent out of every link in the chain. They do this by dismissing the local staff and loading up squalling commercials and promotional spots that can take up as much as 30 minutes per hour during morning "drive time."

The corporate owners then put pressure on their remaining rivals - and often force them to sell out - by promoting national advertising packages that allow commercials to be broadcast on several stations, or all over the country, at once. Disc jockeys are often declared expendable and let go. Where they remain in place, they are figureheads who spin a narrow and mind-numbing list of songs that have been market-tested to death, leaving stations that sound the same from coast to coast.

Critics have focused on the way corporatized radio fails to cover local news and on free-speech issues, like the one that emerged when a country band, the Dixie Chicks, was booted from corporate air for criticizing the president over the war in Iraq. If the stations find the Dixie Chicks too challenging to tolerate, it's easy to imagine them marginalizing genuinely controversial news and programming.

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Article Author: Eric Olsen

Career media professional Eric Olsen is honored to be the founder and former publisher of Blogcritics.org, and former publisher of Technorati.com, which both rule. He is now editor, co-founder, and CEO of The Morton Report.

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