Late Night - Early AM on WBZ-AM is now Mr. Computer

[Rob Landry]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2020, Ron wrote:

> Wasn't Gannett, Westinghouse, Hearst, CBS, NBC, ABC, Metromedia and the rest
> "publicly held companies driven, as usual, by short-term financial goals"?

They were publicly held companies, sure enough, but up until about 1980 
the focus in such companies used to be the long term. Remember when AT&T 
had Bell Labs, and other companies like IBM had similar divisions, 
experimenting with new technologies and the like?

> I'm sure stock price, dividends and such drove all those companies as well,
> yet somehow they were able to service their communities, right?

The narrow focus on "maximizing shareholder value" was originally 
proposed, if I remember right, at Harvard Business School in the mid 
seventies. It didn't catch on generally until about a decade later, and 
the deregulation of the radio industry during the 80s and 90s allowed it 
free reign in our industry.

> Smaller, privately owned stations aren't doing much better.

We are all blown by the same economic winds.

> I think this has to do with the realities of the financial world, where once
> valuable properties (assets) are now worth a pittance of what they were
> purchased for.  Blaming "publicly held companies" driven by their fiduciary
> responsibilities is an easy excuse.

Publicly held companies have obligations that privately held companies 
don't have; everything they do has to be reationalized in terms of 
shareholder value. A publicly held company can't, for instance, build a 
big rocket and send its CEO's car to Mars, as Elon Musk's privately-held 
SpaceX can. Nor can it employ people for their own sake, the sake of the 
communites they live in, or anyone else's sake but shareholders.

> I think when the FCC allowed and Congress removed the ownership caps
> (through the "Omnibus Telecommunications Act") set the stage.  (Always watch
> out for anything with the adjective "Omnibus" attached.)

That is true, but the pressure on Congress and the FCC to change those 
laws and regulations was applied by Wall Street.


Rob