And for years now, they've been able to settle down comfortably into a nice safe little whites-only bubble world, with their own hate-radio networks and their own cable TV outlet that parrots and repeats the CONservative world view, as cockeyed as it is. So they have LOTS of reinforcement for their own cockeyed views. Hell, they've even got flat-out conspiracy wackos like Alex Jones with their own outlets to spread their shit. And nobody telling them what they have to do or broadcast or genuinely-honestly balance their coverage and give equal time - because their good buddy ronald reagan did away with protections like the Fairness Doctrine and the Equal Time provisions, and then also - the limitations on the number of broadcast properties any one owner could own.
Wonder why - nowadays - there are basically SIX big broadcasting/information-brokering conglomerates that own everything? Didn't used to be that way. In the late 80s at the end of reagan, all those protections and regulations were done away with. Used to be the ownership of stations - both radio and TV - numbered in the THOUSANDS. But with the rules changes came this orgy of mergers and acquisitions where all the little Mom&Pop stations got bought up by bigger corporations that found syndication a lot cheaper than having to hire all those thousands of local jocks, news folk, engineers, and management teams. You could just sit one big famous guy down in a studio in Midtown Manhattan and spout some generic morning show or afternoon show or midday show and pipe it out to your hundreds and hundreds of radio stations. Screw the local community!
Indeed. There used to be a rule that I personally had to follow as a news director at several local stations here in L.A. It was called "ascertainment."
It was often viewed at the front-line level as kind of a pain in the ass. But it MATTERED!!!
What management at any given station was legally bound to do was OUTREACH - actively and directly to community leaders and officials, to get their views of what the local issues and concerns were. We had forms to fill out - who, what, when, where, and why, plus comments. And then WE as station people were legally bound to devise programming to address those local issues and concerns we'd learned about in our own personal individual outreach efforts. I used to do it with interview subjects, all the time. Tape the public affairs show with the local or marquee-name official and then after you finished, quick, whip out the ascertainment form and do an additional two or three minutes' worth with them, ask them all the questions, and fill out the form accordingly. And then turn it in. The public affairs director kept them logged and in a big binder. Those binders were public property (as was the station, btw). ANYBODY could come in and ask to see them and leaf through the pages of ascertainment interviews. Stations HAD TO keep that material to prove how worthy they were to keep their broadcast licenses - which came up for renewal every few years, and could (and often were) challenged by various people or citizen groups that sought to hold stations' feet to the fire and work for more than just their advertisers. It was the way your station proved that you were generating programming that addressed the needs and concerns of the community YOU were serving as holder of a broadcast license in the public trust.
All of management was supposed to do this, but the GM and sales manager and chief engineer and so forth always farmed it out to us news directors and public affairs directors. I personally must have done hundreds of them.
reagan did away with all that. Never mind that you were licensed to use those airwaves THAT THE PUBLIC OWNS. You didn't have to prove you were worthy of it, any longer. Anybody even slightly younger than I am might remember when their local morning jock got laid off, and suddenly Howard Stern took over. From New York. By syndication. And he didn't know or care what the hell was going on in YOUR neighborhood or your community. Because he did the one show every morning that was piped out to maybe a thousand other stations all over everywhere. But for local management - just think of the money they saved, NOT having to hire all that local talent! Of course, soon enough, some of those local management teams discovered themselves unemployed, too. Instead, the giant owner-conglomerates could get by with "management cluster" people - who handled maybe the entire Southeast. Or the Northwest. Big cities like L.A. usually were clusters all by themselves. But you'd have ONE guy with designer jeans and a carefully barbered beard (rarely any women got hired for this kind of job) determining what 20 or 30 stations (or more) in the region were playing and saying. Far too many of my friends at the local level lost their jobs and sometimes wound up leaving the business altogether. Some REALLY good and talented ones, too. SUCKED!
JUST FREAKIN' SUCKED. As did the business, before long, too. Ever wonder why so many stations all sound alike? Well, that's the reason.
= new reply since forum marked as read
