I spent much of my childhood in the 70s-80s driving around Los Angeles every afternoon with my mom, going on auditions all over the city.
Because we spent a lot of time on the freeways, getting traffic reports was pretty important. For that, we turned to KFWB News Radio, which was called "News 98" back in those days.
It became part of the background noise of my childhood, and whenever there was a significant news event we would race to the radio and tune in, to stay updated on the latest developments. In the aftermath of the '92 and '94 earthquakes, I left the radio in my bedroom on all the time, tuned to KFWB.
There's a huge fire burning close enough to my parents' house right now that I want to know where it's going and how it's moving, so I went to KFWB.com to get an update, and was horrified to discover that the news station I've listened to and relied upon my entire life is about to switch format from news radio to right wing hate talk radio in just two weeks.
The first thing I saw was a huge graphic proclaiming that on September 8, KFWB becomes the home of Laura Ingraham. Then the graphic changed, and I saw that they'd also be adding Dr. Laura. Because that wasn't bad enough, Michael Smerconish was also on the schedule, and then to solidify KFWB's descent into the depths of failure, it will be the radio home of the Los Angeles Clippers.
I looked all over the site to see if there was a press release or something about the change, but I couldn't find anything. I went to Google, and found this at Huffington Post:
The CBS-owned KFWB-AM has jumped the shark. Finding that news doesn't pay any better on the radio than it does in print, KFWB has gone all talk all the time.
The headline here, of course, is that straight news just doesn't pay. There's no faulting a business from pursuing profit. That's what a business has to do. But really, do we need more hate?
The Los Angeles Times adds:
"Dr. Laura is one of the crown jewels in all of talk radio, and now she's the centerpiece of our radio station," said Ed Krampf, senior vice president and Los Angeles market manager for CBS Radio, KFWB's parent company.
"Crown jewels?" Seriously? What's the crown made of? Crap?
On an episode of Leverage this season, the crew took down a crazy cable "news" reporter who was an awful lot like Nancy Grace. In the episode, she told someone that she just sold fear, because fear was easy to sell and it kept people tuning in.
That seems to be all the wingers have: fear. Their audience, worked into a frenzy by years of outright lies and misinformation, can't get enough of it, and are too ignorant to even realize how badly they're being manipulated and used. It's incredibly sad, but not surprising, that selling fear is the best way to turn a profit for these companies.
Radio stations change formats all the time, especially in a large market like Los Angeles - hell, a lot of us are still upset that KMET switched from rock to lite jazz in the late 80s - but to have the news radio station in Los Angeles switch formats from 24 hour news and information to 24 hour hate and misinformation is just depressing.
I will switch to KNX 1070 on AM, and continue to listen to KPCC on FM, but losing KFWB will be like losing a part of my childhood, and part of my city's history. That we are losing it for even more right wing hate radio is like watching a beautiful building get torn down so they can build another WalMart.