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.

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If your email inbox is full of frantic pitches for money today from politicians approaching the quarterly FEC filing deadline, consider Harold Camping. He’s found an even more compelling deadline. The rapture, followed by the end of the world.

Camping’s “Family Radio” network owns at least 50 radio stations, many of them commercial outlets with considerable ability to serve the public, backed up with at least a hundred smaller “translator” stations. He’s using those stations to claim that the rapture is scheduled for May 21, 2011, with the end of the world to follow later that year on October 21. Perhaps Camping is right this time (I say “this time” because he tried this once before, predicting a world’s end in September, 1994.)

Our country licenses broadcast stations to folks who will operate them in the public interest, convenience and necessity. While we’ve never found an ironclad definition for that, the repeated prediction of an end of the world that scares the hell out of people and then doesn’t materialize doesn’t fit the definition.

So I respectfully suggest that on May 22, 2011, providing that the devout Christians haven’t been called heavenward leaving us ground-dwelling heathens scratching our heads, the Federal Communications Commission start accepting license applications for Family Radio’s frequencies. On October 22nd, the FCC reassigns them to people who will operate local stations in the local markets and not import a pack of lies via satellite.

If Camping is right, he won’t be needing his stations. If Camping is wrong again, I don’t think we’ll be needing him broadcasting on them.

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From 1945 to 1989, KFAC brought classical music to Southern California. During its glory years, its announcing staff was second to none. Most of its program hosts, like chief announcer Carl Princi, were sought-after narrators for television,  documentary and industrial films. Among the station’s best was Tom Dixon, who passed away last Saturday at age 95.

Tom Dixon was also present when political history was made. In the early campaigns of Richard Nixon (the “pink right down to her underwear” campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas, for instance), he was Nixon’s announcer.

It wasn’t that he had a political affinity for Nixon (unlike Adolphe Menjou and others), he was chosen by the man who would later become the 37th president because he liked the sound of, “I’m Tom Dixon for Richard Nixon.”

I had the pleasure to talk with Mr. Dixon on the phone several years ago about that period. He shared that he came to dislike Nixon because of the way Nixon treated his wife, Pat. One time in a radio studio after a broadcast speech, he launched into a tirade humiliating her for no reason. Dixon traveled California with the campaign. He told me many stories with great wit and charm.

We’ve lost not only an important man in LA radio history, but a part of political history as well.

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When John Paul I sloughed off that mortal coil, it was reported on automated country station KGBS-FM, Los Angeles as a live interrupt in a program generated by a machine that played musical selections from a series of tapes intermixed in real time.

When the somber announcement of the pontiff’s death ended, the next song played was Bobby Bare’s “Drop kick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life.” There’s subtlety in the way words and images are put together, and we have a long way to go before machines have enough rules that they’re even good at it.

Google news has had tremendous problems with determining snark from straight reportage; their answer was to limit the sources they scanned.  But Google Ads still puts their netfoot in it with regularity.

The best I’ve seen recently is the google ads insertion (at least in my browser) in a great piece on scientists being driven to laughter and/or tears when they dropped by the Creation Museum.

The ad inserted:

Biola University 100%

Biblically centered education in an all-Christian community. Apply…

Even though all the words are right, and the context is perfect, the best place for an ad for a hundred-percenter Christian university is NOT in the middle of a piece about what stupid douchebags they are.

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When cable and high power satellite suddenly gave the media and the media consumer as many pathways as they could use to stream content and the 2000-channel universe began, something very important died. The ability to create and broadcast more worthy programming than there was room for in the pipe had an upside.

Before the FCC threw open the floodgates and granted new station licenses with abandon in the 1980s, there were relatively few outlets. Radio stations could employ whole staffs to produce shows that aired once. Sometimes they weren’t aired at all, and their production costs written off.

In the golden days of radio, KFI employed an orchestra whose job was to sit in the studio and be ready to play on a moment’s notice if called upon by the local announcer who was himself standing by in case the network feed failed. News departments at the early television and major full-service radio stations, even into the 80s, were large enough they could take over and feed content 24/7 if a new story caught the public’s attention.

Nothing saves energy like shutting down 2 days/week.

In mid 20th century Los Angeles, brush fires, floods, even a little girl down a well, commanded 24/7 coverage. The stations realized that was a part of their service commitment, and the licenses were so valuable and the renewal process so onerous, that overtime got authorized and journalists went without sleep.

Somehow, we’ve lost that. As Iran explodes in anger, MSNBC cries poor and runs Lockup:Indiana and Sex Slaves-The Teen Trade. Ten years ago that might have flown, but in the face of Twitter and Facebook’s minute by minute coverage, MSNBC looks out of touch. CNN cycles old programming, even though CNN International could be switched live to US Domestic viewers, but that brings up commercial concerns.

But last night, an isolated live CNN origination of Larry King Live with Christiane Amanpour crackles across twitter, and numbers soar. Today, CNN is in high gear doing live focused coverage. Perhaps this will convince MSNBC that news is important, even if its not something you can easily cover at a time when you don’t want to spend money. Or perhaps, like radio, NBC/Universal realizes the golden days of cable are numbered and you’re best to take every last dime out before the roof falls in.

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When Randi Rhodes returned to the air today, now syndicated by Clear Channel’s Premiere division, she didn’t get her old timeslot back at her old hometown WJNO.  Sean Hannity replaced her when her relationship with now-defunct syndicator Nova-M radio blew up.

Hannity’s numbers in her old timeslot at the station where she actually originated her show are beating her, according to John Hunt, market manager for Clear Channel West Palm Beach.  So Rhodes will return, timeshifted to 6-9 PM, where uber-reactionary Mark Levin was previously heard.

But Rhodes will be live again starting June 1 on another Clear Channel AM station, according to Hunt, who won’t make the formal announcement for a couple of weeks. This new station will have a better signal than WJNO, Hunt added.

South Florida progressive radio took a hit when 940 WINZ, Miami flipped to The Sports Animal 940.  Clear Channel owns one other AM facility in Palm Beach County, 1230 WBZT now programming business and variety talk. WBZT’s signal is superior to WJNO‘s.

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Premiere Radio Networks announced today that Randi Rhodes will join the Clear Channel-owned-syndicator’s lineup of radio talk programing which includes Rush Limbaugh, Jim Rome, Casey Kasem, Ryan Seacrest, Glenn Beck, Bob & Tom, Delilah, Steve Harvey, Blair Garner, George Noory, John Boy and Billy, Big Tigger, Dr. Dean Edell, Sean Hannity and others.

Her show, which was previously produced at Clear Channel’s WJNO’s studios in West Palm Beach and syndicated by the now-defunct Nova-M networks, will begin May 11th, 2009. It will originate from Washington D.C. and be carried on most of her long-time affiliaties.

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In a nutshell today’s conservatism is one standard for me, and another for you. Here’s the world according to the typical teaparty conservative:

• When I complain its my right because its my free speech, but when you criticize back its a violation of my free speech
• The First Amendment applies to broadcasting because “congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech…” If a liberal builds a transmitter and starts broadcasting on my favorite AM talk radio blowhard’s frequency then have them arrested, because congress can make such a law after all.
• Insure my investments through the FDIC, and increase the limits so my millions are safe, but don’t touch the banks that put them in jeopardy because that’s big government at work.
• Watch me hold my “No Socialism” sign high, at least until I have to put it down to get to my medicare-reimbursed doctor’s appointment
• And make sure the streetlights are on and the roads don’t have any potholes so that I can get to the tax protest without damaging my car.

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For as long as music has been recorded, the performer has been screwed. In the earliest days of the phonograph, field producers traveled the country finding new performers and (as the law describes it) “fixed” their performances as sound recordings. Most artists, as a condition of being recorded, discovered later that they’d been hit with a one-two punch. They signed away their rights to the performance to the record company, and often the rights to their songs to the field producer.

The Carter Family found this out when they tried to release songbooks of their legendary recordings, only to find out they’d signed over exclusive rights to producer Ralph Peer; over nearly a century the music industry’s exploitation of artists has been a national disgrace. Somehow this sad fact has escaped notice by the trade association of our broadcast industry, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB).

That is, until now.

The NAB has had a sudden attack of moral conscience, occasioned by the record labels trying to shake them down to start paying the performer of a work as well as the songwriter. They’re now suddenly standing up for the poor downtrodden artist. Until stations began playing records in the 50s, most music on the radio was performed live, by artists who were paid by the stations.

When commercial records took over at the rise of “disk jockey” shows, the musicians unions forced stations to hire “record turners,” but those have now disappeared as well, and they didn’t represent the recording artist, they represented the legacy musicians who were fired because they were no longer needed.

Through the rise of internet and satellite radio, the NAB stood by mute as those new media agreed to pay performance fees, often to the record companies who had usurped the performers’ rights through work for hire contracts. So the NAB’s sudden concern rings a little hollow, but not as hollow as their attempt to misrepresent performance fees as a “tax.” Paying a performer for a song’s performance on the radio is no more a “performance tax” than paying a station to run commercials is a “marketing tax.”

The NAB is too late. The downtrodden performers have already found a way out of the mess through owning their own labels and often distributing their own music. This means that the NAB is only fighting the RIAA for the older product. Performance fees for the new product will likely go right to the performer.

But the worst thing the NAB has done with this ruse, is to prove that it will say anything to make money. That’s the wrong thing for a trade association to do when it represents the companies who claim they should be trusted to hold public licenses to use the public airwaves to bring us news and “official information.”

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The folks at ceasespin.org are angry, and they have good reason to be. The media lie and even when you catch them at it, the government seems powerless to stop them.  They’ve got a plan to change things, but like so many plans that arise from anger, they haven’t thought things through. Much of their outrage is tied to the reversal on appeal of a wrongful termination verdict in 2003 stemming from a case in which reporters for WTVT, Tampa, refused to air the statements of Monsanto employees that they personally knew to be false.

This is a sad commentary on the nature of the media, but its also a case where hard cases make good law, and the ceasespin.org site should be a great resource for journalism schools everywhere, because in just a few web pages, the site illustrates the conundrum of how objectivity can be achieved and who decides what is fair.  For instance, they’ve not yet been able to come up with a standard:

Note: this prototype is for informational and educational purposes only. It demonstrates what quality criteria might be used in an actual news quality rating system and how that translates into a quality rating score. The actual news quality standard is still in development and will be published on this and other websites further into the development cycle.

This is not surprise to any third or fourth year journalism undergraduate who has considered the difficulty of who decides. There is a clear danger in any system that places the government in control of media content, and while there are today few first amendment questions for licensed broadcast media (NBC v. United States 1943 pretty much decided that), government regulations must be reasonable and necessary.

So, after a lot of hue and cry, ceasespin winds up posting a self-policing system that is essentially what should be taking place in any good newsroom and has been taught in j-schools at least since the 1930s. Other suggestions like the fairness doctrine and media deconsolidation are much better solutions, but they’re hardly the province of ceasespin. In fact, the fairness doctrine probably is not necessary if there’s diversity of ownership, which was the original concept behind getting rid of it.

In fact, if ceasespin were to apply the standard it wants to see in others to its own coverage of the Fox news decision, it would have to check “no” to at least 6 of its criteria, and probably more. There are reasons that the FCC policies are not laws, but those aren’t cited in the ceasespin story, because it would undercut its own movement. So its own score on its own test: FAIL.

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