Radio... What Would Life Be Without It?

As a radio scholar, it's pretty exciting when a lot of radio-related stories come down in the span of a week. Of course, the medium doesn't make the same waves it used to, so when a variety of different news items arise involving different aspects of the radio industry, I don't hesitate to get my commentary out there.

There was a lot of hubbub last week on the 2nd Circuit's decision to toss the FCC's "fleeting expletives" policy. In case you didn't see it, the judges said the FCC was being "arbitrary" about what constitutes indecency and what doesn't. In other words, the FCC decides what gets fined not based on content, but based on how many uptight prudes at the American Family Association complain. And of course they LOVE to fine radio stations even though most of the noteworthy incidents (including the ones that spawned this case) happen on television. Anyway, the 2nd Circuit rightly saw that this was (pardon the fleeting expletive) bullshit. Of course, the FCC will promptly appeal this to the Supreme Court of the United States, which I predicted last year when the SCOTUS originally punted this case back to the appellate level on technical grounds.

Ultimately, the SCOTUS will decide whether or not FCC v. Pacifica still holds up today or needs to be modified based on a station's conscious decision not to have a delay running at all times. Of course, delays sometimes don't work (take it from one who knows), but that's not the FCC's problem. Naturally, the American Family Association had kittens when the 2nd Circuit ruling went down, because they fear the television assaulting their innocent children because they the parents are apparently paralyzed from being able to change the station or turn the TV OFF. And with this decision will be established policy that all TV and radio stations will have to follow in the future to avoid the 6-figure fines that Congress approved after the Janet Jackson incident (which, by the way, is also being appealed through the federal courts right now... the SCOTUS might just choose to take both cases at the same time and rule concurrently).

There's a lot on the line here, not just in terms of how stations police themselves and their on-air content in the future, but also financially for stations and networks that have recently had to deal with some fleeting expletives. The FCC had to stop enforcing their indecency policy because of this case; after all, no sense in handing down a fine that the Supreme Court may deem unconstitutional. But if the SCOTUS tells the 2nd Circuit where they can stick their ruling and upholds the FCC's fines, the floodgates will open and there's gonna be a lot of dollars being ponied up by America's broadcasters. Every Philadelphia TV station that aired Chase Utley's "World F---ing Champions" remark in '08 will get sacked with stiff fines. NBC stands to get smacked not once, but twice for the "c-word" being dropped on the Today Show recently, one of those expletives being said by a 13-year old girl. In her case, thank goodness that rule change holding the utterer liable for the fine never went through, because where is a 13-year old girl going to come up with $300,000 to pay for the 4-letter bomb she dropped on national television? In the meantime, a lot of people got to make a lot of jokes about bad language being allowed on the air, and few things are better for a quick cheap laugh than a nice bleeped-out swear word.

And speaking of the FCC... they are currently reviewing the limits on how many radio stations can be owned by a company. Most people you talk to would likely tell you that the limits should be stiffened because radio has clearly suffered under the reign of bloated corporate owners that overleveraged themselves to the point of bankruptcy. However, Clear Channel does not agree. The nation's largest radio owner actually wrote a letter to the FCC saying ownership limits should be RELAXED. They think they should be allowed to own MORE stations. Their rationale? A new round of mergers would make Wall Street happy and get investors back into radio stocks. Thus proving that CC and the private equity firm that owns them care about one thing and one thing only... making WALL STREET happy. Not their listeners, not their employees, and certainly not all their ex-employees who have been laid off over the years because they were nothing more than lines on a balance sheet.

They claim that since XM and Sirius were allowed to merge into a satellite monopoly in order to compete not with other satellite companies but with other forms of media, Clear Channel should be allowed to amass a near-monopoly in terrestrial radio for the same reason. What they obviously fail to recognize is that XM/Sirius and all the new media have hurt radio's market share in recent years mostly because OF THE CRAPPY RADIO THAT COMPANIES LIKE CLEAR CHANNEL PUT OUT! What makes them think that further destruction of the things that work for the radio medium will help them compete?!? Hopefully, the FCC will see these people for the greedy morons that they are and lay the smackdown on them, forcing them to divest holdings and get some REAL owners back in the game, owners who care about the communities that they serve and who care about the content being brought to the public.

Of course you don't have to be owned by a huge conglomerate to screw up your radio station. As I was driving up I-81 last weekend, I flipped around the dial as I normally do, hoping for a good song or two at a time from one station or another. I do listen to CDs when I travel, but I like to listen to the radio as often as possible. However, one particular radio station made it impossible for me to do that. I flip to a certain Binghamton rock station, and they are going into a commercial break. I surf down the dial, pick up a decent song, listen to that, then back to the rock station. Still in commercials... going on 4 minutes now. Finally, after 5 minutes of commercials, the DJ comes on and announces, "And now we go into Shuffle Mode!"

Ya know, "Shuffle Mode"! Like an iPod! Cuz we know you all like to listen to iPods and we have to compete with iPods, so we'll try to make you think that we can do all the things your iPod can do! Of course, there were two major problems with this statement. First (and most obvious), you just got done playing FIVE MINUTES OF COMMERCIALS. Correct me if I'm wrong, but iPods don't play commercials. When I punch up a station on my Blackberry as I also like to do when I'm on the road, I might get one advertisement before the station starts playing (and of course any local ads the station chooses to stream but those are still minimal, plus the station is better so you don't mind as much). And secondly, the station that just put itself into "Shuffle Mode" proceeded to play the SAME Whitesnake song I can hear on ANY OTHER CLASSIC ROCK STATION ANYWHERE. Thus reminding me that most iPod users have more than just the obligatory one or two biggest hits from the rock bands they like. They probably have a much more diverse and deep collection of music in that MP3 player than the consultant-controlled rock station with its 300-song library of obvious hits.

Therefore, the lesson here is: DO NOT TRY TO COMPARE YOUR STATION WITH AN IPOD!!! Particularly if you are adept at giving listeners reason after reason to turn off your station and listen exclusively to their iPods. Whomever thought this was actually a good idea should be beaten senseless with a Denon CD Cart Player. Preferably the DN-951FA model.

Lastly, word got out yesterday that Glenn Beck may be going blind. He announced that he has a form of macular dystrophy and his doctors have said there's a possibility he could lose his vision. I don't wish that on anyone. I have a friend who has slowly lost her sight in recent years, and I cannot even imagine how difficult that must be to go through. As such, it completely disgusts me that ANYONE, much less a sizable number of "anyones" would find this to be a reason to rejoice. But there it is, in comments sections, in Twitter postings, people saying that it's "good" that Beck might lose his vision, or that it's "karma", or worse still, that he's faking his medical issues to draw attention to his political views. It's easy to spout off crap like this online when you don't have to tell anyone who you are, but it's times like this that we are reminded that for some in this country, it's TOO easy, and that's just repulsive. You can disagree with a man's politics all you want, but cheering medical maladies makes you a despicable human being. I could call you far worse things... but the FCC is rumored to be seeking jurisdiction over the Internet, so I don't want to subject myself to a possible future indecency fine...

Sports Shorts

This is going to be another of those random thoughts collections I have from time to time, mostly dealing with sports so it's convenient to put them all together. Also, my summer teaching job is leaving me mentally exhausted so this is probably gonna devolve into rambling... and likely full of grammatical errors.

We have reached the baseball All-Star break, and it's as good a time as any to review the picks I made... since I only made them about 3 weeks ago. No seriously, I was late on this, and I proved once again why I have to predict the baseball season before it starts, rather than take a snapshot in May and think that things won't change. In short, I may have been wrong about the Braves. In fact, as Jim Joyce would say, I kicked the sh-- out of that call. I said (with much confidence) that they were a last-place team, mailing it in for their lame-duck manager, and they would put it together and play hard next year when they had a new guy at the helm. Instead, Atlanta decided to rally for the soon-to-retire Bobby Cox, and despite the fact that their roster screams "last-place team" (hence, my prediction), they have the best record in the National League and are reminding Mets fans like myself what 1999 and 2000 were like. Although, I agree with many who think that Braves utility man Omar Infante did not deserve to make the All-Star team. I dub him the "Accidental All-Star"... he doesn't even have a regular position, does not have enough at-bats to qualify for the batting title, and apparently only made the team because of a stupid new rule that says one player on either side can re-enter the game if need be (like back in Little League). The rule doesn't belong, and neither does Infante.

Meanwhile, the Mets are fading out of the picture. An optimist would look at Sunday's win over the Braves and say, "Well, we're only 4 games out, we could trade for someone at the deadline and make a run." I look at it and see that we almost got swept by Atlanta (as usual), we played our best baseball of the year in June and never caught the Braves because they kept on winning, and we just dropped 4 of 6 at home. Also, Carlos Beltran is about to come back. He's certainly a gifted player, no doubt, he can help us offensively, but he is a clubhouse cancer. Remember in 2008 when Willie Randolph got fired, the media looked for someone to rally the team together, and nobody stood up and took the role. Yeah, that was Beltran's Mets, that was Carlos Delgado's Mets. If we're playing great, we just cruise. If we're playing poorly, we shrug and let things spiral downward. No leadership. David Wright has become the leader now in Beltran's absence, Jeff Francoeur has become a leader for this team, and Angel Pagan is 5th in the NL in batting right now. Are we really going to tell Pagan to take a seat now? Are we really going to tell Frenchy that he has to sit so that Mr. "I Never Hustle After a Fly Ball Because I Knocked Heads With Mike Cameron in '05" can go back to loafing around the cavernous Citi Field outfield?

Here's what you do with Beltran: Start him on the West Coast trip so he can get some at-bats and show everyone he's healthy and good to go... then you TRADE HIM. Yes, it will be tough to unload his salary on another team, but what contender wouldn't want his bat in their lineup? Give us a front-line starter in return (Ted Lilly or Javier Vazquez would do just nicely) and he's yours. Let him mess up YOUR clubhouse. If we dump Beltran and make a run, I'll be quite pleased. Otherwise, it's the original goal for 2010: just finish above .500.

We lost George Steinbrenner today. Now we can certainly pin a lot of the evils of the game on Steinbrenner: the out-of-control player salaries, the corresponding inflation of ticket prices, the gulf between baseball's haves and have-nots... but there's no denying he changed the game in his over three decades as Yankees owner. He gave us the Bronx Zoo, he gave us Billy Martin as manager (5 different times), he gave us the YES network (a.k.a. Al-Yankazeera). He also made the Yankees important and relevant again on 2 different occasions, in the late 70s when the Zoo was in peak form, and again in the late 90s when the latest Yankees dynasty began. They are the most storied franchise in the game, and when they are winning, more people pay attention to baseball. During the hockey playoffs this year, I rooted for Montreal to at least make the Stanley Cup Finals, not because I particularly liked the Canadiens, but because they are the NHL's most storied franchise, they haven't won a cup in nearly 20 years, and if and when they win another, it will only be good for hockey. As it was, we had one hell of a Finals matchup and hockey's popularity continues to grow, but a Montreal championship would also be great for the sport. The same thing as the Yankees.

Steinbrenner was not the first bombastic sports owner. We had Charlie Finley in Kansas City and later in Oakland, where he was joined by Al Davis. We had Jack Kent Cooke with the Redskins and LA's Lakers and Kings, Bill Veeck with the many teams he owned, and Howard Ballard with the NHL's Toronto Maple Leafs. But it seems like Steinbrenner is the yardstick by which they are measured today. We look at Peter Angelos in Baltimore as a Steinbrenner wanna-be who was good for about 5 years but hasn't been able to get out of his own way since. We look at Daniel Snyder's Redskins and wonder if they'll ever make a Super Bowl under his constant meddling. We look at Dan Gilbert's remarks about LeBron James (more on that shortly) and immediately wonder if that's something Steinbrenner would have said had a big-name free agent bolted on him. The man hated to lose, so he did whatever he could to keep that from happening and sometimes that may have been too much, but you can't argue with the ultimate results. Someday soon, he should be enshrined in Cooperstown. RIP Boss...

Now, back to the LeBron-a-thon because unfortunately it won't end. Any casual sports fan could have taken Dan Gilbert's "letter to the fans" as petulant and outrageous and been done with it... maybe after laughing about the fact that the guy used Comic Sans (the most easily mocked font there is). But not Jesse Jackson. Apparently he felt he hadn't been relevant in a while, so it was time to say something controversial, like his remark about Barack Obama's cojones. But to say that Gilbert was acting like LeBron was a runaway slave? That is just idiotic, and I would go so far as to say what Rev. Jackson said was itself racist. I know there are those who don't believe minorities can be racist because they don't have the societal instruments of power, but that world no longer exists. If we really are a "post-racial" society in the age of Obama, then we can do without comments like Jackson's.

And the worst part about it is IT KEEPS US TALKING ABOUT LEBRON JAMES!!! It's bad enough that the last few days have seen the usual "woe is us" media hand-wringing about the ESPN special and how much media attention is too much. When the media asks, "Why do we keep talking about this?" what they fail to see is THEY'RE STILL TALKING ABOUT IT!!! There's a theory in media called "agenda-setting", which states that when the media talk about something, we the public talk about it. Well there's got to be a flip side of that... if the media just shut up and stopped talking about something, maybe we would stop talking about it too. Perhaps now would be a good time to test that out. Of course, now that anyone can be "the media" through Twitter or Facebook (or blogs), it's pretty hard to stuff the genie back in the bottle on any topic anymore once it's out there...

Lastly, I'm gonna talk lacrosse... specifically, lacrosse and outright government stupidity. The world lacrosse championships are about to begin across the pond in England. Nations from all over the world send their best lax players to this tournament, including the Iroquois Nation. For those not from upstate New York, the Iroquois (or Haudenosaunee, as they prefer to be called, as the former is considered a French-imposed insult) are made up of 6 Native American tribes. The Iroquois invented lacrosse hundreds of years ago, before Europeans came to this continent. All of the Iroquois tribes are considered sovereign nations. It's been a bone of contention for many when it comes to tax disputes (and I've written about that here in the past), but the fact is we show them respect that was sorely lacking when we took most of their land from them in one-sided purchase deals over 200 years ago. As such, they travel with their own passports, not U.S. passports. Well, now that the new travel rules are in effect for crossing the border, Homeland Security isn't a big fan of Iroquois passports. So they told the Iroquois National lacrosse team, in so many words, that if they went to England for this tournament, they wouldn't be allowed back in the country.

It doesn't take a genius to realize that this is RIDICULOUS. And even more so was the suggestion that the players just get U.S. passports. No, that's not insulting. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley proved a total lack of sensitivity or familiarity with Native issues by throwing his hands up and saying, "Well, we tried to help them." Then he punted follow-up questions to the nearest bureaucrat. The team has appealed to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (formerly their senator), and Janet Napolitano at Homeland to fix the situation, and as of this moment the situation has not been resolved as the team has to board their flight for England by tonight in order to make it to the tournament. This would be one time that the glacial pace and rigid nature of federal bureaucracy should be thrown out the window. The last thing this country needs is for the rest of the world to think that we don't treat our own indigenous people with proper respect, particularly when they are not allowed to compete for the world championship of the sport THEY INVENTED.

We Don't Care Anymore

So are we all done talking about LeBron James? Because I was done talking about it hours before the announcement, when it was revealed that not only had LeBron made plans to celebrate his decision in South Beach but also that LeBron, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh supposedly had planned this whole thing two years ago when they were on the U.S. Olympic team.

So no, I didn't watch the LeBron-a-thon last night on ESPN. "Wipeout" and "Rookie Blue" were on ABC, and that's appointment summer TV for me, but even if the competition came from "Big Brother" and "The Bachelorette", I wouldn't have watched. Nor will I watch the World Cup final. The U.S. was out weeks ago, I only care about soccer when the U.S. is playing, end of.

However, I DO care when we make national headlines here in Philadelphia for tragic reasons, but nobody HERE actually cares. When I heard about the duck boat crash on Wednesday, I flipped on the TV coverage and I wanted to see what was going on and if everyone was okay. Apparently, few others in this city did, because mere hours after the crash happened, "duck boat" fell off the local trending topics list on Twitter. Not to play the "American jingoism" card here, but I'm willing to bet the attention of Philadelphia fell off the moment we found out that most of the people on the boat were Hungarians. "Oh, no Americans in peril? Yeah, I don't care anymore... and besides, all those people quacking when the duck boat goes by is annoying. What else is on? Ooh, something about LeBron!"

Come on, Philadelphia, can't we pay attention to something that doesn't have to do with sports or pop culture for more than 10 minutes?!? And yes, I know, people die in this city almost everyday, but last I knew, they weren't tourists on a duck boat that stalled in the middle of the river and then got run over by a city barge. So the NTSB is going to investigate the ying-yang out of this tragedy... why there was no lookout on the barge, why some of the passengers didn't wear life jackets, whether or not the boat radioed for help before the barge hit it. I care about important news stories like this, but it is clear that I am in a shrinking minority, set against the backdrop of our world of 500 channels, 490 of which are all about cake competitions or midget wrestling or various Kardashians.

Which brings us to the larger theme of what we actually care about as a nation right now. We care about where LeBron James is playing basketball, we care about the Yankees playing "buy-a-championship" again by possibly getting Cliff Lee (although every year they do that, they seem to LOSE in the playoffs... note: they DID NOT make a deadline deal last year), and we care about who Lady GaGa pissed off this week. That's about it. Now contrast that with what people WANT us to care about. When these stories come up, we hear people say, "We should be talking about BP, we should be talking about immigration, we should be talking about the economy." That's code for "we should be blaming each other for the oil spill, the border crisis, and the economy." People are SICK of that, and the back-and-forth bitching and blaming in politics is precisely why people are tuning out and preferring to expend all their passion and energy on things like LeBron James and Lady GaGa. But once in a while, maybe we could take a few minutes to actually care when something happens that isn't political, is tragic, and (most importantly) happens in our own damn backyard.

And I also care why there is a lawyer in Philadelphia taking out full-page ads touting the fact that his name is... Justin Bieber. If I were this guy, I would be changing my name, at least for a few years to avoid the merciless ribbing he must get on a daily basis. But then again, he IS a lawyer, so he could probably sue anyone who really gave him a hard time about it, so therefore it's a ballsy move. Props to him.