The Past, Present and Future Survival of Radio

The mediageek radioshow’s informal multi-week focus on the medium of radio wraps up this Thursday with guest Jerry Del Colliano. For 28 years he published the radio industry newsletter Inside Radio, was clinical professor of the music industry at the University of Southern California and now publishes the blog Inside Music Media. Del Colliano had a unique vantage point to watch the consolidation and downfall of commercial radio, and he saw it coming. Now on his blog he documents the foundering of Clear Channel and other major broadcasters while forecasting the future of music media, with or without radio.

Tune in this Thursday June 18 at 9 PM CDT to 89.3 FM WNUR in Chicago on your analog radio or listen online at wnur.org. Of course the show will be available for podcast and download by Sunday at midnight at the radioshow site.

Continuing on the radio tip, I would like to now announce that I’ve embarked on a new group blog project focused on radio, along with two other collaborators who are both astute observers of the medium. The new blog is RadioSurvivor.com. My collaborators are the dogged FCC watcher, media historian and Ars Technica writer Matthew Lasar and Jennifer Waits, the woman behind the Spinning Indie blog and an expert on the history and vital role of college radio.

Our goal with the RadioSurvivor is to provide comprehensive coverage of radio from a variety of perspectives, from policy and regulation to technology and programming. We’re fans of radio and believe strongly in its viability as a medium with a future, despite the major commercial owners doing their best to run their stations into the ground.

Taking on RadioSurvivor doesn’t mean I’ll post here less. In fact, I think this will spur me to incorporate some new topics into the mediageek blog while I publish my more radio-centric material at RadioSurvivor.

Being a group blog our plan is to make sure RadioSurvivor has lots of fresh content every week — more than any one of us can do on our own. I hope you’ll check it out. Your comments are welcome!

Sometimes the Grassroots Wins: KRXQ Hosts Apologize for Defaming Transgendered Children

What a couple of weeks it’s been for Sacramento radio station KRXQ and its wacky morning show hosts Rob, Arnie & Dawn. Their travails in meeting the wrath of outraged supporters of transgendered adults and children ended this morning when the hosts apologized on air and engaged in an open conversation with transgendered people and advocates. But it took quite a bit of pressure to get them to see the light.

Last week I told you about their May 28 broadcast wherein Arnie States talked about how he would hit his son with a shoe if he found him crossdressing, as part of a half-hour discussion generally defaming transgendered children. When word of this disgusting broadcast started to get around folks like myself who found good reason to be outraged at the broadcast took aim at the station.

Of course, as I noted, there was nothing particularly illegal about the broadcast, failing to meet the standard of being indecent. So FCC action was out of the question. Instead folks took aim at KRXQ’s advertisers, asking them to listen to archives of the May 28 program and judge for themselves if that’s the sort of intolerant rhetoric they want to sponsor.

For a large portion of the station’s national sponsors, the answer was a resounding “no.” By June 4, about 4 days into national publicity of the program, major advertisers Chipotle Grill, Snapple and Sonic Drive-In pulled their accounts from the station in response to it. The count was up to ten lost accounts by the next day following a wholly unrepentant broadcast on June 4 when Rob and Arnie attempted to defend themselves by explaining that the May 28 broadcast was just a joke.

Not long thereafter KRXQ pulled its list of advertisers from the station’s website as more local and national sponsors got wind of not only how awful the May 28 broadcast was but how boneheaded Arnie and Rob were in defending themselves on air rather than thoughtfully considering the concerns of listeners, transgendered people and their supporters. Just like the June 4 show where the hosts were supposed to be seriously taking up the ramifications of their May 28 broadcast, pulling the advertiser list was another example of too-little, too-late, since lists of the station’s advertisers had been circulating freely across twitter, facebook and blogs for days.

Pressure got high enough that by Friday June 5 station management reached out to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to try and find a resolution to the situation. On the following Monday, June 7, the Rob, Arnie and Dawn show didn’t air in its usual timeslot. Instead, Rob Williams, who actually owns and produces the show, posted a statement on the show’s and on the station’s website saying the program would be off air until today, June 11. In his statement Williams acknowledged, (in original all caps):

WE HAVE FAILED YOU. AS A SHOW, AS PEOPLE, AS BROADCASTERS, WE HAVE SIMPLY FAILED ON ALMOST EVERY LEVEL.

WE PRESENTED OUR OPINIONS ON A VERY SENSITIVE SUBJECT IN A HATEFUL, CHILDISH AND CRUDE FASHION; AND THEN, GIVEN THE OPPORTUNITY TO RETRACT THOSE REMARKS, WE DEFENDED THEM. …

By the time Rob Williams and Arnie States publicly apologized on their show this morning, their dehumanizing statements and arrogant and ignorant attempts to defend themselves had cost the biggest station carrying their program over thirteen local and national advertisers. Their co-host Dawn Rossi owed no personal apology for the broadcast because she actively tried to both defend transgendered people during the May 28 show and made other reasonable on air arguments against Arnie and Rob’s defaming tirade and ignorant defense.

I’d like to hope that both Arnie States and Rob Williams have truly acknowledged the damage that their words inflicted, I also have no doubt that the financial strike of so many advertisers pulling their accounts did much to change their attitudes. In an era when the public service obligations of broadcasters is a lip-service joke rather than a real an enforceable requirement, hitting stations in the pocketbook is a very effective tool for making them acknowledge the rights of minorities of all stripes.

In the corporate radio world Rob Williams and Arnie States are tiny players. And while their forced about-face on the issue of transgendered children is a victory, it’s still a small one. Unfortunately other radio hosts who deal in hatred towards minorities like Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh have a much stronger base of support both in terms of advertisers, listeners and mainstream credibility. But I don’t think they’re immune either.

Demonstrating just how vulnerable they might be, Rockstar energy drink has threatened Alternet with a defamation lawsuit for publicizing the hard-to-deny connection between right-wing insane hate-spewing radio host Michael Savage and his son, Russell Weiner, who is the founder and CEO of the company. It’s not just a father-son connection, however. According to Alternet, “Savage’s wife serves as director of energy drink company, and Savage Productions shares an address with Rockstar(!).”

Apparently at the behest of Rockstar, facebook took down a group encouraging a boycott of Rockstar, which recently established a lucrative distribution deal with Pepsi.

Seems like even Savage’s own son’s company is a little nervous about its connection to the right-wing violent hate spewed on the Michael Savage show. I wonder how nervous Pepsi might be with the connection, too?

KRXQ Loses National Advertisers For Broadcast Defaming Transgendered Children

Two days of contacting Sacramento rock station KRXQ’s advertisers regarding the station’s May 28 broadcast defaming and advocating abuse of transgendered children has gotten results. Chipotle Grill, Snapple and Sonic Drive-In have all pulled their ads from the station in response to the broadcast.

KRXQ general manager Jim Fox acknowledged to the Sacramento Bee that there have been some ad accounts canceled, but he wouldn’t say what the station would be doing in response. Well, one thing the station did was pull the list of advertisers that was on their website just a day ago. In this case, it’s Google Cache to the rescue (in case the cache expires, see the list after the jump).

I do have to thank Chipotle, Snapple and Sonic for doing the right thing by not ignoring this disgusting example of homophobia. But there are more advertisers who are still bankrolling this kind of defamation on KRXQ and elsewhere. And while these three companies decided to do the right thing, there is an economic element, too. My guess is that these three companies wisely realized that they would benefit by doing the right thing, earning or retaining more loyal customers. Perhaps more companies can be made to realize that continuing to fund hateful racist, misogynistic and homophobic programming on the radio will lose them customers and money.

While this broadcast of the Rob, Arnie & Dawn in the Morning stands out as particularly egregious because the target for the abuse was children, how many of the same advertisers sponsor Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage and Glenn Beck, to name just a few? How uncomfortable can their advertisers be made?

It’s fundamentally a commercial system. But when we demonstrate that we won’t buy what the commercials are selling when they sponsor the continuation of on-air bigotry, maybe it won’t be so profitable.

Read more »

The Empty Hypocrisy of Protecting Children

You might have heard that the Supreme Court recently made a very narrow decision refusing to strike down the FCC’s enforcement of fleeting expletives on TV, such as when U2’s Bono dropped an f-bomb on a live Golden Globes broadcast a few years back. The justification always given for prohibiting so-called indecent words like “fuck” and “shit” on the broadcast airwaves between 6 AM and 10 PM is that we must protect the children from these horrible, brain-altering, growth-stunting, cancer-causing dirty words.

So what about the children who might have been listening to Sacramento, CA station KRXQ on May 28 when morning show hosts Rob Williams and Arnie States went on a hate-filled bigoted tirade against children who question their gender? Anyone, including children, tuning in would have heard that if States’ son ever put on high heels, he would beat him, saying

“If my son, God forbid, if my son put on a pair of high heels, I would probably hit him with one of my shoes. I would throw a shoe at him. Because you know what? Boys don’t wear high heels. And in my house, they definitely don’t wear high heels.”

States went on to advocate and encourage the humiliation and abuse that transgendered young people experience:

“You got a boy saying, ‘I wanna wear dresses.’ I’m going to look at him and go, ‘You know what? You’re a little idiot! You little dumbass! Look, you are a boy! Boys don’t wear dresses.’…

“You know, my favorite part about hearing these stories about the kids in high school, who the entire high school caters around, lets the boy wear the dress. I look forward to when they go out into society and society beats them down. And they end up in therapy.”

If you happened to be a young person or teenager hearing this, you might actually laugh, given the degree of uncertainty most young people feel about their sexuality and gender identity. It might also contribute to feeling justified in having disdain for other children who are gay or transgendered. And, unfortunately, it might also make you feel entitled to act violently towards someone whose sexual identity differs from yours, to hit a person with a shoe, or worse.

And what of the child who is questioning his or her own sexuality or gender who hears this? The message she or he will receive is that according to the show’s two most prominent hosts that child is a “freak” or “abnormal,” worthy of ridicule and deserving of violence. Given that suicide is a real pervasive problem amongst transgendered teens, this is a truly destructive message to broadcast at 9 AM in the morning.

In the reaction to this story I’ve read many people on social networks questioning how this station can keep its license. Of course the answer is simple: nothing legally qualifying as indecent was said on the program. Now, if Arnie States had said that he’d “throw a fucking shoe” at his son, or called transgendered children “fucking freaks,” well then a $15,000 fine would be on its way to KRXQ right now. That’s because that “fuck” would have destroyed the children listening in ways that the advocacy of violence and ridicule could never do, at least in the eyes of the FCC.

In the usual lame defense that comes from talentless, ignorant morning DJs, Arnie States said on air that “I know a lot of people don’t understand this…. That’s a joke.”

In the comment sections of Sacramento news sites the debate over this incident generally devolves into a shallow debate over supposed calls for free speech. Defenders of KRXQ and the hosts call detractors “politically correct” and lament that there’s no tolerance for free speech. Myself, I’m leery of having the FCC step in to regulate speech, also. Yet, the Commission already does step in to protect children from speech, but only if the speech is about fucking or shitting. Speech about beating up people who are different than you is A-OK, even if the people being rhetorically beat up are children.

The real issue is not free speech but the responsibility broadcasters have to local communities as the quid pro quo for having a monopoly over a particular frequency of the airwaves. Not everyone can have an FM station in Sacramento, and therefore KRXQ and Arnie States have a bully pulpit that still outclasses most people in Sac, even in this age of blogs, Twitter and podcasts. The real question is: is this the kind of broadcast the people of Sacramento would want if they actually had a choice or any control over what is broadcast over their airwaves?

As of now KRXQ only has to appeal to narrow demographic of white men 18-35 in order to satisfy its advertisers. So it panders to what it perceives that audience wants, regardless of what the rest of the community might want. It can continue to do this, and will suffer very little for these sorts of incidents because the station actually has nearly zero accountability to the people of Sacramento, due to the wholesale gutting of public service requirements for broadcast stations, combined with thirteen years of industry consolidation.

The likelihood of the FCC taking any sort of effective action against KRXQ for advocating violence against transgendered children is next to zero. I won’t be surprised if one or more commissioners chooses to speak out on the subject if the outrage reaches a louder volume. But don’t expect fines or any real jeopardy to the station’s license to be forthcoming. No, that jeopardy would require an assload of shits and fucks; nothing else will do.

However, because KRXQ panders to a particularly narrow audience in order to satisfy its advertisers, that’s where the station is most vulnerable, especially in this rotten ad climate. KRXQ boasts a large slate of both local and national advertisers, including such well known brands as Sonic Drive-Ins, Snapple, State Farm Insurance, Albertson’s, Carl’s Jr, Nissan, McDonalds and Wells Fargo. I wonder what they’re ad buyers would think about the station’s advocacy of violence towards children?

Sure, it’s not as effective as real local accountability. But hitting KRXQ and its owner Entercom in the pocketbook by haranguing their sponsors is at least one tactic that has a little promise. Another is to stop listening to KRXQ and all of Entercom’s stations in 23 different markets. And, then, let local advertisers know that you’re not listening, and why you’re not listening.

Such a boycott may or may not work, though I think it’s worth trying. However, this won’t be the last incident of this type so long as commercial radio continues its sprint to the bottom, both financially and ethically. The root cause of the promotion of this sort of ignorant, homophobic bigoted advocacy is greed, pure and simple, and the selective regulations that promote this kind of reductive, destructive greed.

FCC Steps Up Pressure on Boulder Pirates

A short blog post from Monk, formerly the brains behind the first iteration of Boulder Free Radio KBFR, reports that two separate unlicensed stations in Boulder, CO were recently “shut down” by the FCC. A new KBFR with new a new crew behind it has been operating in Boulder since sometime last year. Monk has no other details on these recent shut downs.

So I set about investigating what might be going on, since Boulder has been the site of free radio innovation for quite some time. I’ve not been able to find any news reports on any bust, but a check of the FCC’s most recent enforcement actions turns up four virtually identical Notices of Unlicensed Operation (NOUO) dated May 8. Three were issued to individuals and one was issued simply to “Boulder Free Radio, Boulder, CO.” There’s no indication in the NOUOs that the FCC talked to anyone associated with the station or gained access to a transmitter. Unusually, there aren’t even any street addresses listed. Likely this means that agents didn’t mail the notices, but left them at the door.

This evening I received email confirmation from Boulder Free Radio that there was another FCC visit to a transmitter location last Friday, May 29, and that they’re off the air. They’re planning to stay off the air for the time being while they assess the situation. However, their web radio stream continues to broadcast (on the internet only, of course).

The current KBFR is operating according to a similar gameplan as the original station, using the tactic of separating the studio and transmitter using an internet audio stream as the studio-to-transmitter-link (STL). If the transmitter is visited they pack up shop there and move to a new location without the studio or the on-air talent being affected. This method ostensibly allows the station to have a sizable staff of DJs without having to divulge to them the location of the transmitter, or expose the DJs to liability for the unlicensed broadcast.

Indeed, with this method there really isn’t any need for the persons behind the web stream to even know the persons operating the transmitters. This method also has been employed during large protest actions, where a live webstream will originate from a convergence center or Independent Media Center which is then rebroadcast for the duration of the protest by anonymous, unrelated pirates.

Monk and the original KBFR were able to keep up this tactic for nearly five years of cat and mouse games with the unusually aggressive Denver FCC office. He finally called it a day in January, 2005. According to Monk, the FCC agent on their case

bordered on (and in talking to lawyers we know, actually crossed the line) illegal activity. He harassed private citizens at their work place (accusing them, to their bosses, of ‘breaking the law on company time’) and the aforementioned roommate of the original Monk from Five Years Ago. We’ve since learned that this ex-roomie of the original Monk actually had to hire a lawyer to protect himself from having just been the roommate of one of us. And HALF a DECADE ago. …

The reason we shut down is our fear of innocents getting blamed for things they didn’t do…

Who knows if the FCC will be that aggressive with the new KBFR, especially given that the FCC agent in question supposedly retired four years ago.

As for the second station Monk reports being shut down: I’ve found no other recent actions against unlicensed stations in Boulder in the FCC’s enforcement action list. However I have heard that another station, unrelated to Boulder Free Radio, was operating.

Missives from Deep Wireless

I wish I had the time and money to go to the Deep Wireless Festival of Radio Art and Radio Without Boundaries conference up in Toronto which wrapped up this past weekend. The Festival is “a month-long celebration of radio and transmission art including performances, installations, broadcasts, workshops, (and) a Youth Radio residency.” It’s interesting that with the meteoric decline of commercial radio there seem to be an increasing number of conferences, festivals and events celebrating forms of mostly non-commercial radio and radio art.

At least I can experience elements of Deep Wireless vicariously via blog posts from free103point9’s Tom Roe and Transom.org.
Unfortunately I missed most of free103point9’s live stream — I hope archives are posted soon.

Tom’s blog posts include (itemized because they’re otherwise not easily linked as a group):

• Andra McCartney on soundscapes
• Chris Brookes on the need (or not) for narration, “Oh, Shut Up! Who needs a narrator anyway?”
• Radio that reflects community, which Tom says “was preaching to the converted.”
• Soundscapes of the imagination: the grey area between fact and fiction

  Radio and transmission arts is something I’ve been interested in since I started in (legitimate) radio broadcasting back in 1989, and I’m really glad to see that the internet has only increased interest and helped unite and catalyze artists, rather than discouraging them. I’ve tried to cover the subject on the radioshow here and there, and hope to do more both on the show and on this here blog.

Jackbooted FCC Thugs Violating the Fourth Amendment? Hardly.

The dramatic image of jackbooted FCC agents breaking down doors and chasing down unlicensed broadcasters is an imagine that has often been exploited by the more romantic elements of the pirate community, but one that really doesn’t match up to reality. Now we have a short article on Wired’s Threat Level blog that takes a look at what writer David Singel says is the FCC’s claim that it has the right to make warrantless searches of private residences in order to inspect any sort of radio transmitter.

However, what the FCC’s spokesman David Fiske is quoted as saying is actually, “Anything using RF energy — we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference.” While I’m not one to archly defend the FCC’s enforcement regime, Fiske’s claim stops a bit short of a warrantless search-and-seizure, or even warrantless wiretapping in severity and scope.

Indeed, as experienced unlicensed broadcasters and FCC observers have known for years, while a visiting FCC agent will always claim to have the right to inspect a suspected unlicensed transmitter, that agent has no means to express that right. That is, FCC agents aren’t cops, don’t carry guns and can’t enter your house or property without your consent. You don’t have to speak with them except to tell them to go away.

If the FCC really wants to come and inspect or seize your transmitter they need to get a real warrant, requested by a real United States attorney and issued by a real federal judge. Then they need to get real cops–usually federal marshals–to actually serve the warrant. This is a big pain for the Commission and not something relished by US attorneys and marshals more interested in nabbing big criminals, so it’s pretty rare.

Still, it is true that if the Commission thinks it has a pretty good case that you’re operating an unlicensed transmitter in an illegal fashion they’ll hold it against you for not cooperating with them, adding to the fine they’ll try to collect. In a case of this vein, Wired’s Singel reports that,

In a 2007 case, a Corpus Christi, Texas, man got a visit from the FCC’s direction-finders after rebroadcasting an AM radio station through a CB radio in his home. An FCC agent tracked the signal to his house and asked to see the equipment; Donald Winton refused to let him in, but did turn off the radio. Winton was later fined $7,000 for refusing entry to the officer. The fine was reduced to $225 after he proved he had little income.

This reduction in fines is a pretty common occurrence with the FCC. An even more common occurrence is the FCC failing to collect on fines at all, as John Anderson of DIYmedia.net has pointed out continuously on his site and on the mediageek radioshow. Again, the amount of bureaucracy and inter-agency cooperation required to actually enforce the collection of fines against unlicensed broadcasters often results in the statute of limitations running out before any money is collected. For instance, reporting on the FCC’s 2006 enforcement actions, John noted,

These cases highlight instances of negative productivity in the enforcement process: the FCC spent much more in resources (personnel-time and travel, to name two) than it will recoup from the punishment meted, provided the five-year statute of limitations on each case doesn’t run out before the agency makes an effort to actually collect the fines.

So, the kerfuffle over the FCC claiming warrantless inspection powers looks like a tempest in a teapot when compared against the reality of the FCC’s powers to inspect, fine and collect. Nevertheless, we should be critical and mindful of any government agency’s claim that it has the right to make warrantless inspections of our private property. Even when it comes to licensed broadcasters the right to inspect is not absolute; the obligation to let the FCC inspect your transmitter only extends as far as your desire to keep your broadcast license. Still, I’ll be glad if an intrepid attorney or radio pirate wants to challenge the FCC’s claimed right to inspect in court.

Some Great Radioshows Coming Up

On Friday I recorded a phone interview with Jerry Del Colliano who is furiously documenting the death throes of commercial radio at his blog, Inside Music Media. However, that’s a shallow characterization of what Jerry is up to. As you’ll hear on the June 11 mediageek radioshow, Jerry has been way ahead of the curve not just on the destructive effects of consolidation, but also in seeing the need for radio to adapt to the new networked world and the generation that grew up taking the ‘net for granted.

I really enjoyed talking with Jerry. The man has a deep love for radio, but such an instinctive bullshit detector that he can’t also help but see that the medium is on the downslide. You should not miss this interview on June 11.

But first we’ll be laying some of the groundwork on June 4 with an interview with Alec Foege, author of Right of the Dial: The Rise of Clear Channel and the Decline of Commercial Radio, now out in paperback. I’ve discussed Clear Channel quite a bit here on the blog and on the radioshow over the last seven years, but Alec’s research into the history of this once-little Texas broadcast company really helps illustrate the wrong turn the entire commercial radio industry took.

On this Thursday’s show, May 28, I’m glad that Diane Farsetta from the Center for Media and Democracy will be joining me again. We’ll be talking about some of the recent lowlights perpetrated by the public relations industry, and how the industry is salivating at the opportunities it has to take advantage of the current crisis in journalism.

The mediageek radioshow airs live every Thursday at 9 PM Central on WNUR 89.3FM in Evanston-Chicago, IL, streaming live at wnur.org. The program is available every Monday for streaming and download at radio.mediagek.net and is heard on 13 other affiliate stations across North America.

On This Week’s Radioshow: German Experimental Radio

I’m excited this week to have as my guest Daniel Gilfillan, an associate professor of German studies and information literacy at Arizona State University, and author of the new book Pieces of Sound: German Experimental Radio. What’s interesting about this topic is how early German radio enthusiasts, scholars and producers sought to make that medium something more than a means for broadcasting light entertainment and, eventually, propaganda. In his book Gilfillan makes crucial connections between these early experiments and our contemporary multi-media world where we still stand in that disputed territory between producer and receiver.

This interview airs live on the mediageek radioshow this Thursday, May 21, at 9 PM Central Time on WNUR 89.FM in Chicago. You can tune in live online at wnur.org.

Before and during the program please send me your questions and comments via email (mediageek(at)gmail.com) or via Twitter, and I’ll read them on air.

My blog hates twitter so much

Like a new too cool for school stepbrother that it just wants to punch so hard. Now the blog won’t even let me post more than 140 characters