AND THANKS ROCKO & MIKE STARK! Your "show advertisers the radio vileness" idea is great! I posted a link to your diary at our petition’s linked Yahoo Group last night.
We may use your ideas after Clear Channel throws our petition in our face tomorrow, and flips our WTPG Stephanie-Al-Rachel station to WYTS Michael Savage and Laura Ingraham on Tuesday.
In fact, I have already been showing the vileness to some. I spent much of yesterday on High St., Columbus, handing out "come sign our on-line petition" flyers, and making this spiel to all who would listen (and BLUSHING while I did it--it’s hard to repeat this stuff!). (My spiel on the flip.)
MY SPIEL
We are trying to save progressive WTPG from being flipped to another Rush-type-station. It’s only one of two progressive stations in Ohio, and in Madison Wisconsin they saved their station, but they had a month, we have only a week after the holiday...
Here comes the part that made me blush....
Have you heard of Michael Savage? No? He’s the guy who told a gay caller to "Get AIDS and die" and called black kids "ghetto slime" and says the gays, blacks, and "leaf blowers" (his term for Hispanics) are conspiring to destroy the "white race."
That’s when a lot of people backed away from me...sometimes mumbling. "I’m not interested in politics."
Assholes.
SOME PUBLIC THANKS - There are some real heroes!:
- Thank you Stephanie! Thank you for asking people to come sign our petition and linking it to your site. Thanks for announcing our Monday Rally on your program (at which we will assemble at the Ohio Statehouse and call in for a group "good-bye" during her last hour, 11-noon). And thank you for your emails of encouragement. (We NEEDED them!)
- Thank you Ed Schulz. Thanks for taking my rather incoherent call on your program. And thanks for then calling in from your vacation to make sense of it. And thanks for bringing up the subject when you got back from vacation. Your call-in got the ball rolling. The blog people started showing up immediately at our Yahoo site; even though they took you off WTPG a few weeks before, and we thought no one here could hear you.
- Thank you OTHER progressive talkers. I think Sam Seder--our Yahoo Group took it on their own to contact other programs. So I have not caught up on who all mentioned us. Maybe some one can comment here for any I missed.
- Thank you Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy for promising to make every effort to attend our rally. I think our amateurishness scared off a lot of other politicians (with one week, just try to NOT be amateur), but you understood.
- Thank you Ohio Rep. Dan Stewart for your early offer to help, and for volunteering to continue to help us when we attempt other avenues (FCC?) after the station flips.
- Thank you DKOS. When it looked like our petition was getting an organized troll attack whose source our tech guy traced to "Conservative Underground", I diaried a query here--and you calmed me down. Just a few nuts. (Our tech person had to block only about 8 IPs or whatever he calls them.)
A PUBLIC APOLOGY:
Hey! We had only a week after the holidays. If we scared some politicians with our frantic calls and emails (probably coming from different people in our blog) asking you to attend our rally, etc., and if that made us seem disorganize...we will organize on Tuesday. I promise.
(BTW: Mayor Coleman, and Cong. Kucinich. If you CAN call in the last hour of the show, 11-noon, on Monday during our rally, DON’T wait to contact us--contact Stephanie directly. Go here and email Rebekah. She will let us know.)
OUR FAST ACTION PLAN
Thanks for the show-the-vileness-to-advertisers idea. Maybe we can offer some ideas WE came up with ourselves. You might call it "How to organize a movement in about a week."
Maybe others can use it, especially if you are loosing your progressive station. (Your station may be in danger. WE had no idea. See a web site a Madison person just put up NonStopRadio.com listing stations of concern.)
Here’s the plan:
- ONE - Put up a central web site with an action. (Our petition page.)
- TWO - Link it to a new Yahoo Group. Tell them NOT to wait for instruction, but to go do stuff and report back. (Well, WE had to do it that way. If you have more time...)
- THREE- Get action ideas from the Yahoo Group (call the station, letters to the editor, thank the sponsors, etc.) and add them to the petition.
- FOUR - Add email feedback links from the action item to volunteers in the Yahoo Group.
The last step is how we knew to add to these words to the "Contact the Station" item on the Petition page:
If he tells you only six (or some small number) of people have called so far, tell him the OhioMajorityRadio.com blog seems to indicate otherwise.
(Also, feedback alerted us to the obvious--the not-so-subtle "WYTS only" branding.)
ONE LAST PLEA:
One last plea for signatures. Late tonight we will print out just the 43* zips to take to the station tomorrow. But all other signatures help. We can say "This has been noticed around the country." It helps us kill the Clear Channel talking point that "no one listens to progressive radio."
Please sign, and please pass on the OhioMajorityRadio.com link to your friends--especially in Ohio.
We print the petition late tonight.