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Re: Tuesday, July 10, 2007
You point out a serious problem with “robo-radio”: the concentration of radio stations in a few companies is not only a philosophical issue, but a safety issue as well. As Bill McKibben wrote in Harper’s Magazine, December, 2003, “When a train car overturned in Minot, North Dakota, last year, a large quantity of ammonia spilled out, sending up a cloud of poison gas. Local officials quickly tried to contact the town's seven radio stations to send out the alarm—only to find that there was no one actually working in six of them. They were simply relaying a satellite feed from Clear Channel headquarters in Texas—there was plenty of country music and golden oldies and Top 40 and right-wing chat, but no one to warn about the toxic cloud drifting overhead. It's true that you can hear anything from anywhere at any time, but, oddly, it's gotten a lot harder to hear much about your immediate vicinity.” Seems to me the loss of “community” is a more subtle but very real concern. McKibbon speculated that “...a local community is in some ways an exercise in inefficiency.” At least that appears to be the attitude of commercial media interests. McKibbon describes the broadcast center of Entercom Broadcasting in Kansas City as looking like a food court, with sales people in cubicles in the center and booths in a ring around them from which broadcasts originate in various formats to be fed by satellite to “local” stations. Now, that’s efficiency! Entercom, named by Forbes Magazine as one of America’s Most Trustworthy Companies, (and which recently paid $4.25M to settle payola charges), owns over 100 stations in about 20 markets nationwide (they’re constantly buying, selling and trading properties) and is the largest radio-only media company in the country. NPR’s “On the Media” has a transcript of a broadcast on automated radio that mentions the Minot incident and gives time to a Clear Channel spokesperson at http://tinyurl.com/37ya23 Thanks for the interesting topic.
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