Two views on Prog. Talk

[Scott Fybush]

At 06:48 PM 4/1/2005, SteveOrdinetz wrote:
>Dan Strassberg wrote:
>
>>I would say that the daytime upgrade clearly made 910 the better of the
>>two facilities, but nobody should have expected CCU to move the conservative
>>talk from 910 to 960 so it could put progressive talk on 910. If I'm not
>>mistaken, 910 picked up Savage when ABC's 560 KSFO dropped him.
>
>
>Dunno about that.  If ever there was a no-brainer market for liberal talk 
>it would be San Francisco.

You'd think - and yet that market has actually been one of the brighter 
spots for some of the rightmost of the right-wing talkers. It's Savage's 
home base, and ABC has done very well there over the years with a talk 
lineup on KSFO 560 that's about as conservative as they come. (At the 
moment, that would be Rush, Dr. Laura, Hannity, Laura Ingraham and C-T-C 
AM, along with local hosts in AM and PM drive.)

KSFO is where Savage started, and when CC got his show it was truly a 
no-brainer to take KNEW 910 (which had been the flagship of C-Net Radio - 
remember THAT?) and build a conservative talk format around him. At the 
moment, that includes a morning show simulcast with KSTE in Sacramento, 
Glenn Beck, Jeff Katz, Savage and O'Reilly. There'd be little reason to 
disrupt that building process by moving the whole thing to 960.

As for liberal talk in San Francisco, it's less of a sure bet than it might 
seem. The far left already has Pacifica's KPFA, with more than five decades 
under its belt of superserving that piece of the audience. Then there's 
KGO, the 800-pound gorilla of Bay Area talk, which is one of the few talk 
stations in America that can truly claim to be a full-service outlet, with 
hosts who cover the political spectrum and who are open to a diversity of 
views. (That's where Gene Burns is now.) So a lot of the moderate-to-left 
listeners who might go to Air America in other markets already have a home 
on the dial at KGO. Then add to that the local talk programming at KQED, 
the NPR outlet that regularly racks up some of the best ratings of any 
public broadcaster in the country, and a huge number of listeners are 
already pretty well served there.

s