Cancer Surgery for AM Radio

[mrschuyler@aol.com]

I doubt there's a single person on this board who doesn't feel a twinge of sadness whenever an AM?radio station goes dark, no matter how lousy a station it may have been in recent decades.? I feel that twinge myself; the feeling of "what might have been, if only it weren't for...." (too much deregulation in the 80s, the Telecommunications Act of '96, the FCC's analog AM stereo fiasco, interference from ExxonMobile's Speed Pass gas pumps, iPods, Wall Street, etc.).

But it's time to set aside nostalgia and get practical.? It's time to thin the herd.

AM Radio has two problems: audio quality (for which HD may or may not be the answer), and programming content.? And there's no point in fixing the sound if there's nothing worthwhile to be heard.

No one wants the government to regulate programming, except a few people who go nuclear whenever a Howard Stern wannabe acts up.? The FCC is entitled to regulate the way in which business is conducted, and in that way exert some influence over what is broadcast.? But since 1996, a new era of laissez-faire business and near monopolization has enabled today's broadcast corporations to become modern day robber barons and small-time broadcast owners to be as?unethical and irresponsible as they like.

No, I don't want a return to the way things were before Mark Fowler's FCC chairmanship.? Not entirely, at least.? But the time has come to thin the herd.? The handful of AM stations still attempting to do a credible job of at least sounding like yesterday's pillars of the community are surrounded by schlock:? non-stop infomercials, paid religion (most of it fundamentalist and some of it political), and wall-to-wall national talk shows (mostly ultra-right) with no local information whatsoever.? The stations who don't engage in these acts of desperation who benefit greatly if the "junk" stations would just curl up and die.? So I say, let's pull the plug.

With the exception of some ethnic programs, the practice of selling blocks of time for program-length commercials is not in the public interest, convenience or necessity.? There's no justification for it beyond keeping?ailing stations afloat.? Let them sink.? What is the point of keeping these pseudo-stations on the air when not only does no one tune in, but their mere presence discourages people from tuning into AM at all?? Let's save the electricity and free up the spectrum space for someone somewhere who aspires to be a broadcaster, not a charlatan.? There are people in small communities all over the country who want to put new stations on the air, but there's no room.? Clear them a path.

Here are some proposals to this end:

1)? No radio station may devote more than one-third of its total weekly broadcast hours to leased time arrangements.

2)? Make license renewal more difficult for stations that can't or won't devote at least one hour a week to a locally-originated news or public affairs program of some type (broadcast on day pattern!).

3)? Provide whopping tax breaks to owners who sell their dried-up cash cows to first time buyers who are either non-profit civic organizations or minority-owned entities.? (I'd love to stop them from selling to any more churches but that'll never fly.)

4)? Establish more publicly responsible ownership limits.? We can debate endlessly over what those limits might be.? To me, 50 AMs, 50 FMs, and 50 TV stations nationally, with no more than two of each in any given market, sounds reasonable.? I used to opposed newspaper cross-ownership, but give modern realities I think some accomodation can be made for that as well.? These limits will prevent small-time schlockmeisters from selling out to bigger schlockmeisters.

Let the games begin.

---schuyler