equal time controversy

[Scott Fybush]

On 6/4/2012 10:32 PM, Alan Tolz wrote:

> Now, should radio be obligated to offer equal time as the Commission
> used to mandate? I would say within 30 days of an election, yes. Should
> the Fairness Doctrine be put back into place? I don't think so. There
> are far more outlets in the internet age and frankly, the power of talk
> radio to sway an election has diminished in large part due to the
> overall fragmentation of the audience and the ham-handed way that
> partisan talk has taken over what's left of the talk radio landscape.

Alan's last line here puts me in mind of a certain well-known station in 
a medium-small midwestern market with which I've become quite familiar.

Back in the day (and "the day" in this case was as recent as 15 years or 
so ago), the station in question was "everybody's best friend." It was 
the place everyone in town (and everyone within a hundred miles or so, 
for that matter) would go to find out what was happening, from farm 
prices to news headlines to the hits of the day. Think of it as the WBZ 
of this market (and if you've guessed the station in question, you know 
that's a very, very precise analogy indeed.)

Then things changed - the market fragmented, the era of full-service 
radio went into decline, music left the AM dial behind, and the station 
that once spoke to everyone decided, under new ownership, that the right 
direction for survival was to become a talk station of the kind we see 
everywhere: big-name syndicated hosts (all marching to the same 
ideological drum) sandwiched between a local morning show and a local 
afternoon show.

The afternoon show, in particular, became very tied not only to one 
political party but to one particularly polarized wing of that 
party...which became a niche too far, apparently, when it became 
increasingly difficult to sell ad time during that show. The host was 
replaced with an out-of-towner who's still very political - but 
apparently not quite enough to satisfy that very polarized arm of his 
party, which is in turn filling the letters-to-the-editor columns and 
local blogs with all sorts of internecine squabbling that's no doubt 
deadly serious to those engaged in the fight, but utterly off-putting to 
anyone else (especially, one presumes, to advertisers who have little 
stomach for associating themselves with one side or the other and would 
just as soon put their dollars in less controversial fare.)

And in the meantime, the station everyone listened to somehow became the 
station that a big chunk of the market wouldn't ever tune to anymore.

Competition? Not hardly...because the group that bought this station 
also ended up owning most of the rest of the dial, including the other 
viable AM signal and four big FMs.

I don't know what the end of this story looks like. I'm sure the station 
in question did better with political talk in the short term than it 
would have done with just about any other format that would have been 
cost-effective on a big AM signal in its smallish market. But in the 
long term, if there even is a long term, has it been good for radio as a 
whole? I don't know the answer to that question.

(One more thought before I sign off for the night: to the extent I've 
been reading up on the Wisconsin complaint with which Dr. Donna started 
this thread, my understanding is that it's more than just an equal-time 
complaint. The question raised in the complaint is a bigger one: by 
hitching themselves so relentlessly and so exclusively to one side in a 
political campaign, have those hosts and stations gone beyond covering a 
race and become an active part of the campaign? Even in the 
anything-goes wake of Citizens United, there are still some significant 
questions being raised there that go beyond the FCC and perhaps into the 
jurisdiction of the FEC. I don't think those questions are as easily 
dismissed with the "it's just entertainment" argument as some might 
think - especially because the FCC's own rules, even after the end of 
the Fairness Doctrine, still put a particularly high barrier between 
entertainment programming and on-air political activism.)

s