Conscious Choice Seattle: The Ears Have It

June 2005 | From the Editor

The Ears Have It

By Bob Condor

Longtime public radio host Garrison Keillor tells this story about visiting a broadcast school last fall.

“I saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing,” he writes on www.alternet.org. “They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me.”

Keillor fully recognizes that the rise of the iPod and its competitors will take away half of the radio audience and “satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and Internet radio gets a third of the rest.” That, he says, will mean radio behemoths like Clear Channel will have to start cutting their losses and selling off frequencies.

Or maybe not all spots on the dial. Evergreen Monthly contributing writer Joe Follansbee reports in our cover story this month (Cover Story) that 24 of the 56 stations carrying progressive talk radio’s Air America programming are owned by, guess who, Clear Channel. Here in Seattle, Air America’s Al Franken in morning drive time and Randi Rhodes in afternoon rush hours are broadcast on KPTK-1090 AM, which is owned by Infinity Radio, a unit of Viacom.

No doubt, these big radio companies are carrying Air America and Democracy Radio (KPTK features Ed Schultz mid-day) because they are speculating that progressive talk radio will attract audiences much like Rush Limbaugh has posted eye-popping Arbitron numbers with his right-wing rants. So far, about nine months into it here in the Puget Sound area, KPTK has doubled its audience from its former country music format and is within striking distance of long-established talk/news stations such as KIRO.

Here’s what KPTK’s Dave McDonald told Joe and EM: “We are a commercial radio station. Without an audience, and an audience you can demonstrate to a prospective advertiser, we won’t make it. We’re in the business of collecting audiences that advertisers want to reach.”

Joe points out that Seattle listeners are fortunate to have an above-average number of independently owned stations on the dial, plus two National Public Radio outlets. Even so, lots of locals still reeling from the George Bush “election” last November are happy to have the balm of Franken, Schultz and Rhodes in their days.

What’s more, the haven of public radio might be cracking a bit—or more than a bit. NPR executives are reported to be increasingly at odds with Bush appointees who lead the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The corporation board (that would be mostly made up of the Bush leaners) is, ahem, recommending that money be redirected from national newscasts and toward music programs produced by NPR stations.

Oh, right, just what we need. More music and less in-depth reports on potential bogus war efforts or, hmm, politicians claiming to be doing the will of God. The corporation’s chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, is on record (appearing on the PBS Tucker Carlson show and in a Washington Times column) as stating his belief that public broadcasting’s reputation of “being left-leaning is a problem.”

These NPR turf battles—and my journalistic instinct has me siding with the producers, not the board—are just another reason to welcome KPTK with open arms and ears. Same goes for the community radio stations covered in our report.

We need balance on the dial, whether right, left, music or talk. Keillor calls it “neighbor radio,” and we can only hope for more of it, not less, here in Seattle. Now more than ever.

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