20s Archive

We first licensed AM radio stations in the 1920s, we were always mindful of a top tier of stations, the I-A clear frequencies with either one station holding a national monopoly on that frequency, or having a clear dominance against other stations that were very distant and usually daytime only. While this concept is gone, its legacy remains in high powered stations like KFI, Los Angeles and  WGN, Chicago.

The idea behind the nationally cleared channels was that the small rural communities would have a wide range of program choices, particularly at night which was prime time for radio during its first golden age. But we’ve moved so far away from that, that maybe our next policy should be to license a huge number of extremely small stations to encourage localism down to the city block level.

It would be a shame to shut down a service that has such a huge installed base of receivers, but it doesn’t look like the future for AM is very bright under the old model. Amplitude modulation (or AM) radio is the simplest most direct way to send a radio signal; its so simple that everything from car alternators to microwave ovens create unwanted static that is almost impossible to discern from the desired signal.

Stations were originally licensed to serve cities that now include hundreds of square miles of suburbs, so the noise problem got greater as the areas they need to serve got larger. This week, broadcast consultant Richard Arsenault floated a trial balloon: he wants to let AM stations increase their powers 4 to 10-fold. That’s just nuts. When you have too many people shouting in a room, the answer isn’t for them to all shout louder.

As a part of our digital conversion of television, we’re now considering paying TV stations to consolidate bandwidth, and do more with less. TV broadcasters generally don’t like it, but its not really their spectrum to start with. I think we should do the same thing with AM radio. Its already unlistenable in many areas; we’ve reached what the late FCC-commissioner James Quello called “one huge buzz.”

Let’s offer to pay AM stations to go dark. Lots of them are in a financial hole they can never emerge from, anyway. Then we license a whole host of small stations: 30-100 watts, with at least 50 miles between them; low-power stations that are the equivalent of the parking-help stations at airports.

The standard broadcast band isn’t worth much when it comes to transmitting data; its bandwidth is terrible, which is why audio broadcast on it sounds like a 25kbps mp3. Arsenault is right, we need a do-over, but not one that just makes the problem worse.

I Don’t Read The Newspaper

There I’ve said it!  I am officially a heretic.  I teach journalism, but I don’t read a newspaper.

And I doubt that most people reading this blog or others do either. — Blog post from @Teach_J

The 1920s saw an amazing change. The automobile was overtaking the horse, the telephone was becoming an appliance for more than the rich and early adopters, and the radio was replacing word of mouth and the evening newspaper as the method the public first learned of a new important event. Instantaneous communication changed everything, and the radio has lived on its laurels ever since.

Voltmeter on 1922 Ware Neutrodyne Radio

That is, until the Internet crept in on little cat feet and slowly inserted itself first as an alternative for text communication, growing to a distribution medium so robust that it is easier to distribute high definition images–even moving ones–on the net than through adapted legacy media.

That has brought us to a crisis. We will, over the next few years, see the total decimation of the very technology that changed us in the first place. The change is going to appear far swifter than it really is, because its been going on for a long time, and instead of legacy media using its power to move forward, its used that power to be recalcitrant and reactionary. The best example is the RIAA, which was successful for many years in keeping the status quo through lawsuits and threats of suits, and through rent seeking–ie gaming the system instead of adapting to it.

The NAB has tried the same thing, and for years has been successful because no congresscritter wants to go against their local TV or radio station. But the Internet is a game changer, not only because YouTube can bring you a Macaca Moment, it lets you walk around those local gatekeepers and speak directly to your constituents: even about how your local broadcaster is gaming the system to make you think you’re being served by media that is really self-serving.

Take the Local Radio Freedom Act, which was named by the NAB to try and disguise what it really is: congressional affirmation that radio and television stations don’t have to pay performers when they play their songs. There’s always been an inequity in broadcasting. It had to pay the rights holders for the words and music, but not the performer who actually performed it in recorded form. When paying the talent was at issue for net-only radio stations and audio sources, the NAB was not interested in standing up against performance “fees and taxes.” Thousands, probably tens of thousands, of internet radio stations shut down.

But paying performers is a whole different animal when its legacy media. Its a tax. A bailout, screams the NAB, and they’re blaming the RIAA for it. In fact the only “freedom” in the local radio freedom act is to reaffirm in law the freedom of broadcasters to rip off musicians and artists, which they’ve been doing for years.

While these scorpions challenge each other in the bottle that is a shrinking space occupied by legacy media, we will see more and more of those of us who think about and write about a business we grew up in, no longer be consumers of it, because the new alternatives are just too enticing especially to those of us who follow them closely.

And I’m guilty just like the journalism teacher who eschews the pulpy rag. When I was writing about Randi Rhodes the other day, at a time her show was on, I wanted to make sure she wasn’t on the air but not on the net. I had to go out to my car to do it. I don’t have a radio in the house hooked up to receive an over the air signal.

I’ve been mainlining Ted Haggard of late. He’s on the stump to promote Alexandra Pelosi’s The Trials of Ted Haggard, now playing in power rotation on HBO. Our appetite for spiritual leaders with a downlow sexual side has been around at least since Aimee Semple McPherson.

Sister Aimee was the talk of the nation in the 20s when she claimed she’d been drugged, kidnapped and held in Mexico for ransom. But it was far more likely that she was having an affair with her radio engineer in Carmel-By-The-Sea. Nearly ninety years later, you need to kick it up a notch. Substitute same-sex gigolo for radio engineer so the affair goes gay, and make the preacher ask for and pay for the drugs, and its 21st Century ready.

Sister Aimee Semple McPherson

In concentrating on the salaciousness of evangelicals partying down in ways they condemn from the pulpit, we’re asking the wrong questions, and maybe that’s why Haggard’s description of his therapy seems like he hasn’t really done much deep thinking about it.

Perhaps that’s because some of his counselors were of the ex-gay type that typically get tossed out of the APA (the HBO doc suggests there were more than one). Or maybe it was because Ted Haggard’s needs are vastly different and a real documentary about him wouldn’t be very enthralling.

Ted Haggard talks about same-sex relationships using addiction words, and that has pissed off the gay community that sees him as disingenuous and someone who should know better. But consider the latest revelation: Haggard had sex with others, at least one of whom came forward and told the story of the preacher putting on a masturbation show for him.

When Ted Haggard talks about being who he is, and doing what his god intended for him, consider, instead of Ted Haggard as evangelical, Ted Haggard as media whore. He’s doing what he’s always done: performing. The only thing that’s changed is that Time/Warner (which controls CNN & HBO) has replaced the four old white men who legitimize New Life Church in Colorado Springs.

When Sister Aimee took us from Billy Sunday style tent revival to Azusa Street Pentecostal broadcast-enhanced ministry she created a new job description. Somebody who is so much larger than life that when squeezed through a radio transmitter or TV camera, they still emerge life-sized. She was someone a lot more like a Clara Bow “It Girl” than itinerant preacher. As anybody who’s been around media knows, people who jump off the screen often are a little hard to take in real life.

And that may be the real questions Ted Haggard has been asking himself. Its why he asked to show off having sex with himself instead of asking someone to join him. And its why the most perceptive thing he said wasn’t about sex but about how the evangelicals are missing out on leveraging his real assets. But to do that they’d have to get over themselves. In fact we’d all have to get over ourselves, me included, and start asking the right questions, not the ones that titilate.

On this day 128 years ago,  was born Earle C. Anthony, a pioneer in some of the arts and sciences that began during his lifetime that are now dead or dying. The Packard distributor for all of California; one in seven Packards was sold by his companies.

ECA was a renaissance man born with a mechanical aptitude in the age of the great engineers who leveraged his abilities and his moment in time to not only profit from the rise of the automobile, but through building one of the first radio stations in the west. From money earned in his dealership he improved his station until it became the most powerful on the west coast.

A QSL card from ECAs KFI

Through the thirties, forties and fifties, KFI 640 was the powerhouse that brought the NBC Radio Network to most of the Southwest. With his other station, KECA (now KABC), he was a constant source of frustration to NBC. He’d no more sell his station than sell his wife, he told them.

While KFI is still a powerhouse (now a Clear Channel moneymaker in a sad radio environment), Packard preceded him in death (he died in 1961),  and each year AM radio becomes less important in a changing media world.

In 1930, Anthony was one of the elite in Los Angeles. He rode horses with the Warner Brothers and the other moguls in the early mornings in Griffith Park, from his lavish estate (now a Catholic Church retreat) to the Breakfast Club he helped found. He put one of the first television stations on the air (now KCBS).

He traveled the country in his private rail car, listening to his station and sending telegrams back. He helped build Los Angeles from a cowtown to a metropolis with arts and culture. Surely his name would be known forever.

Today, the Packard is about to be joined in death by other once-great American carmakers, the private rail car is a museum piece, AM radio is practicing its death rattle, and Earle C. Anthony’s place in history is a disappearing footnote.

This weekend, its the premier event of Parkerfest in New York, the yearly homage to New York’s most wittily sarcastic historical figure, Dorothy Parker. This year, its a jazz-age lawn party on Governor’s Island. In Los Angeles, there’s a guided tour. Dorothy Parker’s Hollywood, which begins at the Washington Mutual/McDonald’s center at 8152 Sunset in West Hollywood.

Mrs. Parker was a fan of neither banks nor fast food, but the site has a rather rich history, because Mrs. Parker and Robert Benchley lived there for a while (as did Orson Welles and a host of other notables,) when it was the Garden of Allah which then was made famous again to a new generation by Joni Mitchell who sang “they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The parking lot was soon followed by a two-story savings and loan which today is a multi-story LA-style office building.

The Algonquin Hotel of Roundtable fame

Mrs. Parker was one of the early larger-than-life characters that shone through modern media. To those who saw her in glimpses and short texts she was brilliance personified, but in too hefty a dose, she was tart and bitter, and it may be why she never had a hit play or novel; her forte was the review, the poem and the short story.

She was one of the early celebrities who gained and kept fame by feeding free content to the daily press. Franklin Pierce Adams’ New York Times column “The Conning Tower,” made use of quips from the witty and famous, often gathered at a “roundtable” held at New York’s Algonquin hotel. One wag said FPA (Franklin Pierce Adams was an early adopter of initials-as-name) raised Parker from a couplet.

But like many talented people whose intensity makes a few words shine, a full dose overwhelms, and today she’s remembered mostly for her oneliners. Asked to use horticulture in a sentence, she quipped, “You can lead a whore to culture, but you can’t make her think.” Deferred to at a doorway with the phrase, “Age before beauty,” she walked through and retorted: “No, pearls before swine.”

But like so many rapscallions, she was quickly forgotten in death. Her friend Lillian Hellman didn’t pick her ashes up from the crematorium for 10 years. They languished another 15 in her lawyer’s office, where her intellectual property was more important than her physical remains. She finally found a home at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore (she gave the MLK foundation her estate at her death).

Dorothy Parker is perfect for the days of the 30 second soundbyte and the Internet sigline, so when the Dorothy Parker Society brought her to the web in the late 90s, she might actually have liked it (though she never would let on.) She was adamant that she not be lionized in death. But then she was adamant about a lot of things. That was her curse and her salvation.