AM Radio has been dying for years, and right-wing talk slowed the inevitable, but a news story out of Pittsburgh today ties the two together with the impending demise of some of the oldest call letters in the nation.
KQV News Radio’s owner Robert W. Dickey Jr. announced today that the historic station will cease operations on New Year’s Eve after 98 years, although he is leaving open the possibility of selling the station so that a new buyer might resume operations and return it to life.
But the story of KQV has some remarkable twists, from ABC Radio’s Top 40 format to the Beatles to Rush Limbaugh and right-wing tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife.
KQV began in 1919 as special amateur station 8ZAE, almost the exact time Frank Conrad began broadcasting on another Pittsburgh experimental station — 8XK- that became KDKA. KDKA broadcast the Harding-Cox 1920 election results, in what’s considered the world’s first regularly scheduled radio broadcast. 8ZAE became KQV in 1921.
For more than a century, radio call letters have been given out in the U-S with those in the east beginning with W, and the west with K. But, for reasons still murky today, KDKA and KQV in Pittsburgh were given call letters beginning with K.
From the beginning through the mid-50’s, KQV was a local station with local ownership, broadcasting at 1380 and then it moved to 1410 on the dial. But in 1957, it was sold to the American Broadcasting Company and it became a powerhouse. Soon, they stopped broadcasting Don McNeill and his Breakfast Club, and became an iconic Top 40 station that owned the huge teenaged baby boomer market. They absolutely owned the 12-17 demographic at a time when teens were king.
The DJ’s included such guys as future game show announcer Rod Roddy, ultimate DJ gypsy Hal Murray, and local legends like Chuck Brinkman. They broadcast from picture window studios in downtown Pittsburgh, and we kids would go down and watch the DJ’s spin the records on “the corner of walk and don’t walk.” It was the soundtrack of our youth.
When the Beatles came to the ‘burgh, it was KQV who promoted the concert, and KQV DJ’s who emceed the event. And so it was with every big concert. “Colorful KQV, Audio 14.”
KQV was the be-all and end-all for the Baby Boomer set, but in the late 60’s, KQV-FM became WDVE, an album rock station, and the FM sister station started to get ratings, especially as the Baby Boomer generation became the hard rock generation. Hard rock and album rock were on the rise.
About that time, I graduated college and began a career in radio, and the first full-time job I was able to get was at a competing Pittsburgh Newstalk station — WJAS. As WJAS was in the process of being sold, our GM suggested I do some freelancing, and the ABC Radio Network needed someone to work as a stringer for a weekend sports update show called “World of Sports” that ran at six minutes past the hour on the ABC Network. KQV was among the many stations that covered that three-minute hourly show, and so the first time my friends and family ever heard me on network radio was on KQV. My work on World of Sports led to a three decade career at ABC News.
Meanwhile, we were doing News and Talk at WJAS and there was a DJ working at KQV called Jeff Christie who had an arrogant but wicked sense of humor. And one of my young colleagues, who worked part-time at both stations told me he was a real right wing fanatic in real life and his name was Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh was fired at KQV and out of a job for a while, but the Program Director who fired him was ordered to do so by a higher up who couldn’t stand Limbaugh. The PD personally felt Rush was what Rush then claimed to be: a radio entertainer. PD Jim Carnegie hated to fire Rush, but, when KQV was sold at the end of 1974, Carnegie was out on the street himself. Jim eventually got a job in Kansas City, and called Limbaugh at his mom’s house in Missouri and hired the then unemployed Rusty Limbaugh (as his mom called him) to come work at the KC station.
KQV was Limbaugh’s first major market job, and after he got canned, it was his KQV connection that got him “off the beach,” and back into work.
There’s a lot more to Limbaugh’s firing and KQV, and you might enjoy reading Jeff Roteman’s KQV Tribute page on the internet. I’m having trouble linking it, so google Jeff Roteman and KQV and go to the Limbaugh section. You’ll see he’s just as ungrateful in real life as he is on the radio.
KQV was sold by ABC to Taft in 1974 and the ratings continued to decline. Soon, they switched formats to NBC’s ill-fated “News and Information Service,” or NIS, an all-news radio network format that hemorrhaged money. NIS only lasted for two years, but when it went off the air, KQV stayed with the all-news format done locally.
In 1982, Taft had lost enough money, and put KQV on the market once again. The GM, Robert W. Dickey, wanted to avoid another format change, and so he went looking for someone with money to help him make a bid for the station. The money man was Richard Mellon Scaife, the right-wing billionaire.
For 35 years Robert W. Dickey, his sister and co-owner Cheryl Scott, and then his son kept the station afloat with Scaife money. Scaife, who had billions, poured millions into the station, which was part of his vanity media empire.
On weekends and in off-hours, they broadcast right wing drivel and packaged programs that sponsors would pay to put on the air. But during the main part of the broadcast day, they were a decent all news outlet, with traffic and weather on the 8’s and eventually ABC Radio news on the hour. AM Radio — where I made my living — has become unlistenable, but KQV remained a decent choice to the very end.
In 2011, Bob Dickey Sr died, and Dickie Scaife died on July 4, 2014. Cheryl Scott died last month, and Bob Dickey Jr. just decided that it’s time to pull the plug. The writing was on the wall since 2014, especially once Scaife’s kids wanted their share of his estate and put an end to funding Scaife’s vanity media empire.
Years ago, when one of my mentors in the business died, I called his son to express my condolences. His son, a brilliant lawyer who was a classmate of Barack Obama in law school, spoke wisely about how so many people and things in radio seemed to die a slow death. “Radio,” he said with a sad luagh, “is a sucky business.”
Yep.
Most of us — when we got canned — would get the severance package and quietly leave the station. I was one of the lucky ones, who got a buyout and senior status and a glide path into retirement.
But the medium we loved, AM Radio, has become unlistenable. And, at long last, unprofitable and unsustainable.
The radio station of my youthful dreams will die in two weeks. It will go silent.
AM Radio is all but dead, and radio IS a sucky business.