Re: Censorship at WTKK

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Howard Glazer wrote:
>Oddly, WFAN New York will give credit to WABC when it runs a John
>Sterling home run call during an update, but will never mention the call
>letters of a station airing a live event that 'FAN can't take due to a
>conflict.
<snip>

        That could be a requirement in the permission to rebroadcast it.
That's often the case with TV and radio play-by-play highlights released to
others.

        As to why play-by-play networks, like WEEI-Red Sox, put the
flagship call letters on the affiliates, why not? It gets a plug for WEEI
in the voice of the play-by-play people on every half inning. It makes the
station sound important and spreads its name throughout the hinterlands of
Red Sox Nation, which helps it in many ways, such as with advertisers, etc.


        But the overall thread on this "censorship" of not mentioning other
call letters reminded me that you hear all sorts of things both ways.
Sometime around March of 1998, the late-evening talk host of the time on
WRKO interviewed Arnie Ginsberg and it's was hilarious because the guy
warned him not to say "Ones." Now, this was a couple years before those
call letters came back on 1060. You could gather that the ground rules were
supposed to be they could say "Wimmex" but not the call letters and Arena
kept slipping up. And the guy was going on, seriously, like he would lose
his job if they didn't go by that.

        OTOH, I'm pretty sure that when Larry Glick was on WBZ with Steve
Leveille a few months ago, call letters were being mentioned all over the
place. And that goes against what WBZ does now, as someone mentioned. All
the time on the talk shows you hear callers bleeped (not bleeped actually,
you just get dead air) and it's obvious they said call letters. Lucky that
no station uses WNBA, or the sports shows would have a problem :). Someone
posted that he's heard David Brudnow reference "begins with W, ends with
RKO," but how recently? They seem to have one of these all-out bans now
that can lead to foolishness, like not mentioning stations like WHDH that
don't exist anymore. I presume that for Glick they suspended the rule.

        I agree with the comments, such as Chuck Igo's, that you don't want
to give your audience a notion to tune to another station or otherwise
promote the competition. But, when you're doing a talk show or news or a
context like that, and it's historical or you're talking about a
controversy, or the whole subject of the discussion is something like the
latest trends in radio programming (like the splintering of music formats),
then you either need to mention call letters or don't do it. Does WBZ
really think that 99.99999999 percent of Brudnow listeners are not already
familiar with WRKO? (And the other listeners never heard of it because they
live in Kentucky.) While I also agree that regular listeners don't usually
care that much about the inside-baseball stuff about radio, heavy radio
listeners, like a lot of talk-show listeners, do  care about things like,
just as an example, Charles Laquidara leaving. It's odd that TV covers
stories such as that, related to radio stations and radio personalities,
while other radio stations usually won't.

        My $0.02, plus serious inflation :)