RE: My Research on Minot, ND

["Pete Ferrand" <petef@sprynet.com>]

Laurence Glavin writes:
>local officials called area radio stations to warn the populace, but
EVERY FM station was >owned by clear Channel, which voice-tracks during
off-peak-hours). 


No matter how the ownership limitations regulations are set up, someone,
somewhere, is going to get what looks like disproportionate share. And
by this time most of the audience doesn't seem to care that much about
being informed.

As with most things of this nature, the remedy is legislative, and if a
non-response to an emergency situation bothers a lot of people such that
they make stink in Congress perhaps some action would be taken.

I suspect that the next step would be the broadcast owners attempt to
limit their costs, and support some alternative scheme, like ringing
everyone's cellphone at once, rather than augment staffing and
facilities. 

The Minot incident was in January 2002, and there was testimony by Lowry
Mays before congress (few months ago) about it - he said that someone
was indeed on duty, but did not answer the phone and various other
things went wrong as regards EAS, etc. It is an old broadcasting
tradition to blame the part-timer.

This has little to do with monopolistic group owners; there have for
years been many independently owned stations that have no staffing or
means of contact during off hours. Some that I have been associated with
did give principal's phone numbers to the police, mutual aid, etc., much
as any business would in case of emergency.

I've also seen situations where the station policy was not to answer the
phone on the main number off hours; however there should be an emergency
number that authorities have. Since any correctly run business has set
up some security arrangements with mutual aid and so on, these agencies
are totally set up to call the special numbers, usually the company
management.

Worth researching would be whether Clear Channel took advantage of this
situation. If the local safety and political establishment cares, it
certainly had a very large target to attack and make its point known. If
local safety authorities consider radio stations important in informing
the public, it's up to them (to a point) to bug the radio stations for
contact info as well.

In turn, CC could have made a big point of saying that they had indeed
mismanaged and proceeded to inform authorities of the cognizant
personnel and keep them updated and thus respond appropriately.

I wonder if any of this happened and there's any expectation of a better
future.

-Pete
Enfield, NH