How ironic that one of the only two things I remember from my high school social studies class was this: "Taxation Without Representation is Tyranny." The OTHER thing I remember from social studies class was a message from our teacher, Mr. Berryman, always on the blackboard: "Don't forget! String Band practice Monday at 3!" This was important because I played the clarinet. These days, politics and their pundits have made it impossible for to me to use television as a means to keep up on anything except the likes of CSI reruns and Medical Mystery shows; hell, the Real Housewives of New York make more sense than most of “news deliverers.” I feel like I'm watching a hockey game on TV (which I can't stand either) because there's so much zig-zagging and sliding and it's all so super fast, I CAN NEVER SEE THE PUCK! Watching the news, I can only see the PUTZ!
We’ve been heading to hell in an iPad ever since the broadcast industry was deregulated. The disastrous deregulation the Reagan administration brought upon us as consumers of information in the early 1980’s meant that large entities could now come into a radio/TV market and own more than one AM, FM and TV outlet; gobbling up huge chunks of by now numerous outlets (remember FM?). Prior to this point, corporations were strictly limited in their ownership of broadcast outlets because, it had been thought, this would preserve our ability as listeners to access different opinions, music, personalities, etc. and it would keep competition alive.
After deregulation took hold, almost all of the broadcast outlets in almost all of the major markets were owned by a couple of humongous companies. Radio was shot in the head; so was TV, since shortly thereafter came the invention of “Top-40 News,” which was a format designed strictly to keep the listener listening (i.e., Top 40 radio); what no one listening then knew (nor do they now because you can’t feel manipulation as your brain’s shrinking and shrinking and shrinking so badly from lack of food and water and air and freedom to move around the cabin) was that the real motivation of the broadcaster was the bottom line (no surprise there).
Radio and TV lived and breathed according to ratings, and the ratings companies (Neilsen, Arbitron and the like) were the gods they worshipped; their bottom lines were divvied up in the amount of people listening/watching in a given quarter hour, and the goal of every radio/TV executive was to gather up those quarter hours like diamonds. Diamonds they were, because there was a monetary value and life or death attached to those quarter hours. Whoever had the most won (wins – this practice is still practiced today – they obviously haven’t gotten it right yet). Promotion was the key. "Fudging" the time check – the time given to the radio audience by the announcer - wasn’t frowned upon – it was perfectly acceptable to round a time check forward, on the chance that this “fudged” time would be the time a listener wrote down in their ratings diary, and it would mean an extra quarter hour from that one person in Podunk, Wherever. This was called "quarter-hour maintenance," and it was vital to a radio station's ratings; a subject chosen in a random survey group was given a diary and they were expected to write down the exact times and the exact stations to which they listened. If you were finished listening to a station say, at 6:03, and for some reason, maybe a “bogus” time check for instance, or maybe your kitchen clock was running fast, you wrote down in your Arbitron diary that you stopped listening to station X at 6:06, station X gets credit for the entire quarter hour; the goal is to keep the listener or viewer with you five whole minutes into the new quarter hour, because you get immediate credit for that person listening for an extra ten minutes – you get the entire quarter hour. It was life or death in 15-minute increments.
The way listener/viewers are led by the nose (or ear) in this fashion is to promote, promote, promote! Tease them into staying just a little longer, no matter how low you have to sink to do it. I should know, because I am a recovering "evil manipulators," having worked as a DJ at almost every station in my major market, so “pimping” was my order from on high: "Hey, stick around, ok? 'cuz I've got Michael Bolton on the way for Elkins Park next! (commercials)!" I was a radio personality, but I also did lots of commercials in my off-the-radio-hours, and was often witness to one of our city’s major television O & O’s (TV stations owned & operated by a network) creating “topicals,” to promote whatever titillating story they’d come up with for sweeps (the month-long periods they were rated four times a year). They needed to press every one of your buttons in these radio commercials (promoting the 6 or 11 o-clock news) to get you to tune in and boost their ratings. I swear I once was witness to a topical being recorded promoting a story coming up on the 11 o-clock news: “Do Bras Cause Cancer?” It was the ultimate homerun of a story tease (the answer, of course, was no) because in 30 seconds this topical evoked fear of our death, mental images of breasts, mental images of breasts in bras, mental images of bras, and DANGER DANGER DANGER everywhere! So you’d better tune into Channel 5 and find out tonight at 11!
Deregulation not only brought about the demise of competition, objectivity and accountability to the same FCC that deregulated it (work much?), it totally slaughtered the humanity in it. These days, if you walk into most radio stations, you will have to look hard to scare up a human being; many of the stations devote at least some large chunk of their broadcast day to a satellite feed from another city. So if there’s a tanker truck accident on our freeway, the announcer in Kansas City isn’t going to know about it, and neither are we, unless the station airs live local news headlines on the hour.
The airwaves, in my opinion, have become a wasteland; they are a venue for commercials so they can charge clients. I find radio especially heinous, since I was a major market jock in almost every format for almost 20 years. I had the most fun working at an AM Top-40 major market giant (the first woman in our city to do so - I was heard in REVERB) and at the first Power station in the country (urban/contemporary/allegedly); I was not only production director of the Power station, which meant when I got off the air, I had to either distribute or record commercials that needed to run myself. I was the little white girl on the air 10am – 3 pm, and with the exception of one other white guy, everyone else on the air was black. Hilarious, smart, talented guys who made me laugh so hard I thought I’d break a rib; and the music? It was the BEST: Luther, Parliament/Funkadelics, Sugar Hill Gang, Evelyn Champagne King, Rufus and Chaka Kahn, amazing Philly soul (the heart of it still lives in Philadelphia, and no fire will ever burn it down http://www.youtube.com/...).
My one true moment of radio bliss was the day we had a visit from Luther Vandross (I worked during the day, so I got to do most of the interviews - remind me to tell you sometime about the time George Clinton licked my hand); this day, Luther was in to sing, and I stood ten feet away and watched and listened as this gloriously gifted man sang live to tracks of "Superstar; Until You Come Back To Me" on our radio station and he borrowed MY headphones to do it! It was like watching spun silk spilling out of him as it was shaped into song.
That singular moment is still the most wonderful of my entire career. I miss Luther.
When I was in urban radio, we never talked down to our listeners; we lifted them up! We made them think; we made them laugh. We gave them hip-hop, early rap, and the best R & B and soul ever; and we lifted them UP and gave them JOY!
It breaks my heart that the owners of urban stations in particular sink so low as to drag their already burdened listening population into the gutter. And big-city gutters are no picnic.
It all boils down to this: it's a given that the corporations that own these radio and TV outlets do not give one flying rat’s ass about the human beings they serve, because they serve only themselves. They jam their agendas up our kazoos because they can. They don’t ever tell us the truth. They slant stories and lie about everything (from time checks to major news stories) as the anchor dopes tap dance 24/7. They are not serving a purpose, they are a fart from a windbag coming in our general direction.
This is why I can’t watch the news (with the exception of Stewart/Colbert/Maddow/Olbermann); most of what passes for “news” these days is overly photoshopped/graphic-bloated, slanted either red or blue bullshit delivered by pinheads just killing time.
This wonderful gift - the electronic media - is being squandered in the race to the biggest pile of ratings=money. What a surprise.
I was watching a report about the Parliamentary Hearings recently, and one of the anchors (don't anchors drag you down and keep you from going anywhere? that's a blog for another day) referred to the fact that he thought Rupert Murdoch looks like a “frail, old man.” Frail old man, MY ASS; don't stick your fingers in his cage.
Shame on you, you large, bloated broadcast corporations (and you know who you are); you could be using your power for good, to enlighten the intellect, instead of shrinking our already media-deranged minds. One day soon our CT scans will start showing images of old raisins instead of BRAINS!
Then, what will we feed the zombies?