[IRCA] A tirade about a harsh dead radio reality

[John Callarman <johncallarman@xxxxxxx>]

All four of the radio links to which I subscribe have been reacting to the Ink Tank blog Randy Stewart shared, but I've been busy with other things until this morning, when I scrolled through and read all the comments. As one who grew up loving radio, as it was in the '40s into even as late as the early '80s -- particularly steady, small-town radio that combined news, public service and entertainment -- the many words that have been shared these past few days struck more than one chord.
Back in 1947, when I invented DX'ing (later learning that I had merely discovered the hobby), I fell in love with the medium. I wanted to be a radio comedian, but as network radio began to be supplanted by television, I shifted my sights to becoming a personality DJ, leaning toward zany. I was a Tin Pan Alley nut, loving big bands, ballads, Broadway, et al. Slowly, Elvis in the mid-'50s and the Beatles in the early '60s began the trend to push the music that I loved into the "Music-Of-Your-Life" niche. Luckily, I had a second calling ... sports writing, editing the high school and college sports pages while stringing for the local daily from my sophomore year in high school on ... so it wasn't too hard to shift to news.
To make a long story short, I loved radio. Note the past tense. "Loved" is the operative word. In late 1981, recognizing that radio news was diminishing in importance to radio ownership, I shifted to the local daily newspaper and managed to maintain an editorship for the last 19 years of my working life. Music radio stations, who in the '50s and '60s prided themselves on their competitive news operations, learned, when FCC's public service requirements eased, learned they could make more money with just music and, in some cases, "lip-service news." Even the all-news stations seemed to come to the conclusion that in-depth coverage of complicated issues was more of a tune-out factor than an audience-builder. Today, it seems "traffic and weather together," ambulance chasing, celebrity behavior and government scandals ranging from imaginary to, on occasion, real, seem to be the bulk of what's covered.
My wife still listens to radio. When she was a young teacher, 50 years ago, she woke up to KPDN in Pampa, Texas, and, months before she met me, my 15-minute 7:30 newscast marked the start of her day. To this day, we wake up to KRLD sometime around 6 a.m., get up after the 3-minute CBS newscast at 7:00, and she lulls herself to sleep with the KRLD syndicated talk show at night, having programmed herself to turn off the radio just as she transitions from awake to asleep. I am a captive audience. When we are riding together, the only station she'll cotton to is KRLD. When I'm on the road alone, if I forget to take along a cache of CDs of 40- to 80-year-old music, I'll tune to the classical music on WRR or, in desperation, find a country-music station (though the current, Hank-less country-music sound [Snow, Williams, Thompson, Locklin, etc.]) bores me.
Talk radio -- left, right, or sports -- annoys me at best and angers me at worst. Self-centered "stars," to whom their absolutist opinions are far more important than facts, make big money, apparently. I can only imagine their schooldays, when the jocks on the one hand and the honor students on the other ignored them; now, they can "get back" at natural leaders by depicting them as enemies of the people (politicians), overrated crybabies (athletes) or stupid tyrants (coaches.) Maybe there's someone on the air who examines issues intelligently -- I've given up trying to find him or her.
Oversimplification? Yep, I admit it. And I didn’t really make a long story short, did I?
But the bottom line for me when it comes to radio is that the broadcasters, reading the desires of the advertisers, don't want anyone born in the '30s or even in the '40s among their listenership.
As to DX'ing, when I bought my Perseus, a couple of years ago now, I thought maybe I'd regenerate my interest, with a phased antenna system, in fighting all those noise factors my fellow DX'ers have alluded to in these threads. I haven't hooked it up, probably won't, and I may try to find a market for it. I still love the hobby -- or at least the memories of it -- and I expect to be in Minneapolis during the first weekend in August, but radio as it exists today just isn't fun anymore.

John Callarman, KA9SPA, Family Genealogist, Retired Newspaper Editor, DX-oyente, Krum TX (AKA Qal R. Mann, Krumudgeon) 		 	   		  
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