Conscious Choice Seattle: Left on Your Dial

Katherine Lanpher chats on air at
Town Hall with Air America
morning star Al Franken

Photo by Richard A. Huston

Hybrid of the Airwaves

Push “scan” on your car radio in the Seattle-Tacoma area and you’ll hear ten-second chunks of pretty much what the rest of the country hears—except at 98.1 FM. The station sticks out like a hybrid car on a drag strip: It’s a commercial classical music radio station owned by a not-for-profit.

“KING-FM is that rare bird: a locally owned station not affiliated with any other station,” says Bob Goldfarb, program director and a Seattle radio consultant. “Our mission is to keep classical music on the air.”

KING-FM is one of the last holdouts in a dwindling number of stations nationally playing Bach, Beethoven and Brahms while trying to make a profit. And by all the laws of the radio marketplace, KING-FM should not exist. The average time a listener spends tuned to KING-FM has fallen by almost half over the past five years. And the audience for classical music is growing older; advertisers prefer younger audiences. The result: Commercial operators, always trend followers, have bailed out of classical music.

In 1994, 44 stations with a commercial radio license in the United States listed “classical” as their format, according to the trade journal Inside Radio. In August of last year, the number was 34. In April of this year, the number had fallen to 29. Only half of the 30 largest markets in the country have a commercial classical station. (Seattle is ranked 14th.)

KING-FM’s history explains its survival. KING-FM is a commercial station operated by a private company called Classic Radio, which is in turn owned by a not-for-profit called Beethoven, which was set up by the broadcast pioneer Bullitt family to keep classical music on the air in Seattle. That means KING-FM management has more flexibility to serve local audiences, and they aren’t beholden to absentee owners.

“We’re not under any pressure to generate a return for investors,” Goldfarb says. “We have a lower hurdle.”

That’s not to say KING-FM can get away with losing money. It pumps $500,000 every year into three major arts groups: the Seattle Opera, the Seattle Symphony and ArtsFund, a kind of United Way for arts groups. Those dollars come from KING-FM’s profits. Furthermore, a healthy KING-FM is an important promotional outlet for art and music groups across the metro area.
KING-FM has suffered its share of controversy. Last year, a few listeners staged a revolt when they perceived a change in programming style as a “dumbing down.” But as a business, KING-FM seems to emulate the grass-roots ideal: a locally owned, profit-making venture that serves a need and reinvests the profits back into the local community.

-—Joe Follansbee

June 2005 | Cover Story

Left on Your Dial

Can liberal talk radio save the Democrats? If so, star hosts like Air America’s Al Franken will have some surprising partners

By Joe Follansbee

The national radio talk show host on stage in a former church looked frumpy and tired, even though it was only the first stop on a weeklong road trip. His thick glasses weighed heavily beneath a big head of curly hair. Sitting at his microphone, he berated the government, sneered at politicians, lampooned his competition and rooted for the underdogs. The audience gave him a standing ovation.

“I think he’s funny and right on the money,” said fan David Locke of Seattle.

The talk show host was Al Franken, Saturday Night Live alum, author of “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot” and “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them” and star of the fledgling Air America Radio network.

He and fellow hosts like afternoon drive time’s Randi Rhodes are fresh oxygen for stale conservatism on the airwaves.

Air America is the left’s long-awaited counterpunch to the jabs of the right on talk radio. Started in 2003 with four stations, an Internet broadcast and a truckload of dismissals from critics, Air America is now heard on Sirius and XM satellite radio (only on XM after July 11) and 56 terrestrial stations, including KPTK (as in “Progressive TalK”) in Seattle.

Not technically left of center (1090 AM), but most definitely lefty in its logic.

“If you get married and divorced three times, you can’t get married again,” said Franken during the show at Town Hall while interviewing King County Executive Ron Sims about Washington state’s pending Supreme Court decision regarding marriage equality for same-gender couples. Franken said the real threat to marriage is decidedly not gays but divorce, proposing a “three strikes” marriage law.

“You need some sort of waiver,” he said. “So, Rush Limbaugh wouldn’t have been allowed to get married again.”

Progressives overboard

Many progressives, drowning in a sea of reactionary politics and religious righteousness, are grasping at Franken as if he were the last life ring from a ship that hit the iceberg of George W. Bush’s election (if you can call it that) in 2000 and sank with his reelection (ditto) four years later. And they see Franken’s network as hope that radio, particularly commercial radio, may be the relief craft carrying them to the safety of majority politics, just as it did for conservatives in the 1980s and ’90s. For the stations and their corporate owners, however, the question may be less a matter of rescue, but who can pay a fare.

Franken visited Seattle in May to promote Air America and his fellow network hosts Marc Riley, Randi Rhodes and colleague Ed Schultz, whose show is distributed by Jones Radio Networks but heard on the same station.

Listener David Locke, an ample man of 62 with short white hair and a quarter-inch purple stud in his right earlobe, is a new Air America convert.

“I’ve become so disgusted with how the right wing has taken over the country and I will do practically anything to defeat them, including coming here and having fun,” Locke said.

Polly Hagland of Bothell brought her 15-year-old home-schooled son to the Franken event. “The ‘Rush’ end of things is just wrong,” she said.
Forty-year-old Jeff Billingsley, looking 33 in his goatee, drove all the way from Bellingham to see Franken and his guests. “They won’t sit there and say something that’s not true,” he said.

Radio junkies with a progressive bent have seethed over the direction of commercial radio since January 13, 1981, in the waning days of the Carter administration, when the Federal Communications Commission, which governs radio station licenses, relaxed rules requiring “fair and balanced” news coverage. Grasping the audience swerve to the right, programmers steered toward conservative talk radio, which broke into political consciousness with the national syndication of Rush Limbaugh on August 1, 1988. Limbaugh’s in-your-face bombast accelerated the rise of the Republican Party and forced many left-wingers to abandon the “L” word (pssstt, remember liberalism?).

Limbaugh also delivered millions of listeners to advertisers, making baskets of money for the 600 or so stations that carry him.

Mega-media movement

Paralleling the rise of Limbaugh was the rush to media consolidation. Spurred by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, mega-firms gobbled up struggling stations in local markets across the country and presented cookie-cutter programming that slashed costs while retaining advertisers.

Progressives complained the consolidation, paired with the dominance of conservative talk, reduced the opportunity for the audience to hear unpopular views. The left singled out Texas-based Clear Channel Communications, which owns nine percent of the country’s 13,000 stations, and its executives, who are close to the Bush administration. Progressives ascribed the right-wing deluge to an alleged Tory-like agenda.

“If a single company controls a lot of the media, the country runs the risk of hearing only a single set of ideas,” said Jonathan Lawson, executive director of Seattle-based Reclaim The Media ( www.reclaimthemedia.org ).

Progressives scored a key victory in February, when the White House decided not to appeal a federal court ruling that struck down new FCC rules expanding the number of stations a company could own in a single market and nationally. They also cheered the departure of FCC Chairman Michael Powell, architect of the rules and archenemy of the consolidation resistance. The growth of Air America gives more heart to the left, despite the fact that it’s carried by stations owned by the same corporations the left despises.

In fact, 24 of the 56 stations carrying Air America are owned by Clear Channel. Al Franken has some surprising partners in his rants.

In the Seattle-Tacoma radio market, 14th largest in the nation, the wonky debates in the other Washington appear incongruous. For one thing, powerhouses KOMO-AM (news) and KVI-AM (talk) are owned by a local, publicly traded company, Fisher Communications, which also owns KOMO-TV. That kind of portfolio is rare for most American cities. In addition, KCMS-FM, a popular Christian station, is owned by Crista Ministries of Seattle. Olympia-based South Sound Broadcasting owns KAYO-FM (country) and KFMY-FM (classic hits). In contrast, absentee landlord Clear Channel holds four area stations, while New York-based Infinity Radio, a unit of media giant Viacom, owns five. The market also supports two public radio stations that duplicate National Public Radio programs, though KUOW-FM is news/talk only and KPLU-FM broadcasts jazz and news.

Moreover, Puget Sound listeners can pick from several community radio stations with a “grass roots” outlook.

Steve Ramsey, general manager of KBCS-FM in Bellevue, bills his station as “the only community radio station in the Seattle metro market.” He trains local people to be radio producers, to, in his words, “become the media.” And those producers create programs that wouldn’t survive at large public (read: not-for-profit) stations, let alone commercial stations. Where else can you hear two hours every Sunday night dedicated to the Grateful Dead?

Ramsey believes NPR is moving toward a more “corporate” model focused on gaining listeners, rather than good programs. And he compares commercial radio to fast food: “As more and more stations are getting bought out, you’re getting the whole ‘McRadio’ thing,” he said.

“We have an exceptional amount of alternative programming,” added Bob Goldfarb, a Seattle radio consultant. “That certainly enlivens the programming landscape for people who like a less conventional landscape, who like a different slant on the news.”

Most managers at corporate-owned stations argue that owners don’t advocate a political agenda or ideology, and they leave programming decisions to local people who understand the market best. That’s true at KPTK-AM, according to Dave McDonald, senior vice president and market manager for Infinity Radio Seattle. It was his understanding of a potential market for Air America that led him to sign up, dropping KPTK’s old, failed “classic country” format.

Despite Seattle’s natural and longstanding bend to the left (or at least independent radio), the early numbers indicate that Franken and his broadcast compatriots are a breath of fresh progressive air. KPTK has doubled its listenership since ejecting the country format and program director Jim Trapp said 1090 AM is “within striking distances of much more established radio stations like KIRO, and that’s very encouraging.”

One impressive number: The majority of KPTK daytime listeners spend seven hours or more each week listening to the station, making it one of the top local stations in that category.

“We are a commercial radio station,” McDonald said. “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.”
Looking out of place in a trim business suit at the Al Franken event, McDonald drew applause from the capacity jeans-and-sweater crowd when he announced that the net proceeds of the $25 ticket price would go to a Seattle not-for-profit organization.

McDonald is gambling on these people: Average age 45, split evenly male and female, middle-class and 95 percent white, with one woman sporting a Mr. Yuk button saying “Conservatives make me sick.”
McDonald has made an intelligent bet.

Star power

Franken’s liberal politics may be less important than his status as an experienced, nationally recognized entertainer. Some folks believe that if Limbaugh were liberal, he’d be just as popular, because he’s so fun to listen to, even if you hate him.

“Entertainment has a lot to do with talk radio,” McDonald said. “Just because someone has something to say doesn’t mean they are interesting to listen to. Al Franken has something to say and he has star power.”

Franken and his talk show compatriots have learned from their conservative competitors. During his Seattle show, the comedian was restrained in his delivery, though he called President Bush a “putz” and conservative talker Bill O’Reilly a “jerk.” However, he looked uncomfortable with the words.
Ed Schultz, whose voice and style have been compared to Limbaugh’s, dismisses all conservatives as “righties” without a trace of liberal guilt. Echoing Limbaugh’s legion of “dittoheads,” Schultz has an army of “Ed Heads.” Schultz, who broadcasts from Fargo, N.D., gets less attention from urbanites than New Yorker Franken. Yet Schultz may appeal more in the long run to the nation’s midsection in mind, taste and geography, just as Limbaugh did.

Back in Seattle, it’s not clear that Air America’s aping of the conservative formula will win a sustainable audience. After six months, KPTK-AM’s ratings during key portions of the day, such as midday, competed well with powerhouses KIRO and KOMO. KPTK was ranked 23rd in overall ratings at the time of the Franken event, up a notch from the previous measuring period. But long-run success is hard to predict. For one thing, KIRO and KOMO produce local programming with local hosts, something KPTK only “aspires to,” McDonald said.

“We’re in the baby-steps phase of developing those,” he said.

Seattle-area progressives searching for an unabashed, unapologetic and entertainingly poke-your-finger-in-the-other-guy’s-chest viewpoint on local issues will have to wait. Dave Ross, the KIRO radio host who ran as a Democrat against Republican Dave Reichert in the 8th Congressional District last year and lost, is too moderate and tainted by his association with media conglomerate Entercom Communications, KIRO’s owner.

The Seattle left needs a progressive version of John Carlson, former Republican gubernatorial candidate and conservative talker on KVI-AM. Even so, local listeners enjoy more choices than most Americans, if you count public radio, community radio, and Air America, not to mention satellite radio and Internet radio.

“We live in a real paradise of media,” Jonathan Lawson said. “There’s some real cool radio in Seattle.”

Joe Follansbee is a featured writer for Evergreen Monthly and a longtime contributor to local radio.

Recommend this page to a friend

Top Ten pages recommended to friends: