An Epitaph: “Good Neighbor” Radio
It's a
very odd occurrence these days that local media talks about other local
media, particularly if there is not a shared corporate parent.
(Whereupon you can expect to hear every cross-promotion in the
book…) That's why I was a bit surprised to see this article in the Des Moines Register
noting that WHO Radio in Des Moines was discontinuing two long-running
programs: Paul Harvey's monologues and ABC News reports.
(Clear Channel had signed a five year contract with Fox Radio News to
supply news reports to radio with talk formats.)
Now,
this hasn't really affected me personally – I haven't listened to WHO
outside of Iowa Hawkeye broadcasts for years. Most of WHO's
programming is now right-wing talk radio, with few exceptions.
What was surprising was the amount of reaction in the press and
elsewhere.
However,
this shouldn't be surprising: WHO Radio is not the community-based
radio of earlier years. WHO is now another holding of a large
corporate media outlet. Long gone is the WHO that produced local
programming like the Iowa Barn Dance Frolic that reached a million listeners every Saturday night.
At the same time WHO Radio made the switch, so did another Clear Channel station (WIBA) in Madison, WI. Via CommonDreams, a writer for the Madison Times points out an article written for The Nation by Garrison Keillor lamenting the loss of “good neighbor” radio.
I
love the great artists of public radio who simulate spontaneity so
beautifully they almost fool me–Terry Gross, Ira Glass, the Car Talk
brothers–all carefully edited and shaped, but big as life on the
radio, smarter than hell, cooler than cucumbers. I love the
good-neighbor small-town radio of bake sales and Rotary meetings and
Krazy Daze and livestock reports and Barb calling in to report that
Pookie was found and thanks to everybody who was on the lookout for
her. Good-neighbor radio used to be everywhere and was especially big
in big cities–WGN in Chicago, WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul, WOR in New
York, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis, KSL in Salt Lake City–where
avuncular men chatted about fishing and home repair and other everyday
things and Library Week was observed and there was live coverage of a
tornado or a plane crash and on summer nights you heard the ball game.
Meanwhile lawn mowers were sold and skin cream and dairy goods and
flights to Acapulco.
The
deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear
Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station
in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters.
I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being
trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer
processing. They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a
microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I
tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing
next to me. Clear Channel's brand of robotics is not the future of
broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another
generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic
formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed.
Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.
Read the rest of Keillor's article here
– it's well worth a quick read to remind us what we've lost by giving
the radio spectrum to corporations that simply want to appeal to anger,
or simply try to sell us something.
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