Clear channel bites
In this weekend’s NY Times Magazine, Walter Kirn opines on Clear Channel.
You used to be able to do that in America: chart your course by the accents, news and songs streaming in from the nearest AM transmitter. A drawling update on midday cattle prices meant I was in Wyoming or Nebraska. A guttural rant about city-hall corruption told me I'd reach Chicago within the hour. A soaring, rhythmic sermon on fornication -- Welcome to Alabama. The music, too. Texas swing in the Southwest oil country. Polka in North Dakota. Nonstop Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs. What's more, the invisible people who introduced the songs gave the impression that they listened to them at home. They were locals, with local tastes.
I felt like a modern Walt Whitman on those drives. When I turned on the radio, I heard America singing, even in the dumb banter of ''morning zoo'' hosts. But then last summer, rolling down a highway somewhere between Montana and Wisconsin, something new happened. I lost my way, and the radio couldn't help me find it. I twirled the dial, but the music and the announcers all sounded alike, drained, disconnected from geography, reshuffling the same pop playlists and canned bad jokes.
Me and Safire seeing eye to eye?
William Safire's column in the NY Times today is a rare case of the old bastard making some sense. Check out his ramblings on the recent FCC decision.
(The FCC decision) troubles some readers, listeners and viewers who don't like homogenized news or one-size-fits-all entertainment forced down their throats. When I inveighed against this impending sellout a couple of weeks ago, thousands — no kidding, an unprecedented torrent — of e-mails came roaring in, many beginning "Though I consider you a rightwing nutcase on most issues, I'm 100% with you against this big-media power grab."
Faux news
The Weak Planet has a decent article on Fox News this week. Written by some guy in Charlotte.
...the scariest thing about Fox and Rupert Murdoch, the thing that renders them all fear and no fun in a time of national crisis, is that they channel for the Bush administration as faithfully as if they were on the White House payroll. Like no other substantial media outlet in American history, Fox serves -- voluntarily -- as the propaganda arm of a controversial, manipulative, image-obsessed government. To watch its war coverage for even a minute was to grind your teeth convulsively at each Orwellian repetition of the Newspeak mantra, "Operation Iraqi Freedom." I swear I hate to stoop to Nazi analogies; but if Joseph Goebbels had run his own cable channel, it would have been indistinguishable from Fox News.
Remember: the Planet fired all their writers several months ago, and promised that local coverage would not be affected. Yeah, right. The other big article this week is a commentary by a Washington based writer. This is like the Clear Channelization of our local alt weekly.
Here’s an old article from Cincinnati that explains simply what happens when a media conglomerate gobbles up previously locally owned radio stations. Seems to me a similar scenario is playing out at the Planet.
It's shortly after 10 a.m. in Rochester, N.Y., and Randi West is explaining to her KISS106 listeners how they can win Ricky Martin concert tickets.
At the same time, she's telling listeners in Louisville how they can win Britney Spears tickets. She's chatting with a caller to her Toledo show, promoting a lunch giveaway on her Charleston, S.C., station and promoting a free “spring break” trip to her fans in Des Moines.
She does all this while hosting the mid-morning show on Cincinnati's WKFS-FM (107.1) from the KISS107 studios in Mount Auburn, thanks to a digital computer network linking the six Clear Channel stations.
At about the same time, listeners of Cincinnati's WVMX-FM (94.1) hear MIX94.1 host Lisa Thomas promote the station's “Wheels of Fortune” BMW giveaway, unaware that she's broadcasting digitally from Clear Channel's MIX102.9 in Dallas.