As reported in the broadcast industry trade publication Inside Radio, Fort Myers FL radio station WXNX changed call letters to WHEL last Friday, dropping the on-air branding “Trump Country” it had adopted back in September when it switched from Classic Rock.
A whopping 22 listeners have commented on Facebook, none of them favoring the change. One even misspelled Addison McTurtle’s last name in their haste to make their displeasure known. (I wonder how many more listeners just changed stations without comment.)
My thought, having been in the radio industry since 1973, is that this kind of format/branding change happens all the time. When they flipped in September my first thought was that they’d drop the Trump brand as soon as Biden was elected, not even waiting for Inauguration Day. And the fact that they dropped the Trump name a mere three days after the Electoral College vote tells me that they were planning this at least as long as it was obvious he was the loser in the election (because producing new on-air imaging takes time).
Fort Myers is almost precisely on the opposite side of the Florida peninsula from West Palm Beach, where Trump has been told he cannot live at Moron-A-Loser due to the agreement he signed converting it to a country club. Which Florida city will be next to deliver a blow to his already fragile ego?