‘Broadcast my radio show or you’re unfair’

Last Friday, I was invited by Radio and Records to speak at a talk radio seminar on a panel discussing the “Fairness Doctrine.”

As one of the panelists (Rep. Mike Pence) said, “I didn’t know what I was getting into here. All I heard was I was going to L.A. for some R&R!”

By the end of our session, it was very clear that free market capitalism is under attack, not only at the macro level by the Obama administration, but at the industry level (in this case, the radio industry) as well.

Moderated by the effervescent Rita Crosby, four of us on the panel (Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., and Mike Pence, R-Ind., legendary talk programmer Brian Jennings and myself) stood up for competition and giving the listening public the programming content of their choice.

Three other panel members (Thom Hartmann, Air America; Stephanie Miller, Dial Global; and Paul “Woody” Woodhull, Media Syndication Services) thought the FCC should require station ownership to be “diverse” and should require talk stations to carry liberal/progressive talk shows.

The two congressmen led off detailing their efforts in Congress to ban the liberal/progressive censorship effort known as the “Fairness Doctrine.” They noted the many Democrat representatives who had publicly championed the reimposition of the “Fairness Doctrine” specifically to muzzle critics in conservative talk radio.

I followed with more facts. Of 4,789 AM radio stations in the U.S., about 2,000 of them program some kind of talk, whether political, health, car repair, gardening, relationships, etc. These stations, together with satellite services, cable radio, the Internet, and now even iPod radio give the consumer limitless choices and eliminate the original reason for the “Fairness Doctrine” – that a few station owners could monopolize political discussion.

I quoted the Durbin Amendment (SA 591) to the D.C. voting bill (S. 160) that orders the FCC to require “diversity” in station ownership and “localism” – two code words for censoring conservative talk radio and a back-door method of reimposing the “Fairness Doctrine.”

I detailed President Obama’s history of advocating the use of the FCC to regulate which views are heard on the radio. I took the audience through the “stimulus” package (noting that the desk on which Obama signed it was the same desk where Clinton got his package stimulated) which provides $2 billion for “community groups” to help fund “community advisory committees” for every talk station so that conservative talk hosts become subject to a barrage of FCC complaints.

I pointed out that one of these “community” activist groups (National Asian-Pacific American Legal Consortium) had a pre-printed fill-in-the-blanks FCC complaint form on its website and is advocating a campaign of complaints to threaten station licenses if they don’t like what they hear.

Brian Jennings followed with his first person account of programming the big names in conservative talk radio – a successful career based on attracting listening audiences with programming that those audiences choose to listen to.

These fact-based presentations were followed by the emotional ranting of the “entitlement” mentality progressive Left.

Thom Hartmann denied there was any effort to reimpose the “Fairness Doctrine,” then proceeded to attack corporate ownership of radio stations, claiming that Air America (thrice bankrupt) was a success in ratings and with advertisers, and that he had “beat Rush” in ratings in certain cities (in selected slices of the demographic) and that he was nonetheless unable to get more stations for his show. He advocated FCC regulation to require “diversity” of ownership to open up more stations to take liberal talk shows.

Stephanie Miller also claimed her show got great ratings but could not get on enough stations because of owner bias against the Left. She also claimed it was a “myth” to say that liberal talk radio could not attract advertisers when station owners made no effort to sell the liberal shows. She recounted instances when the sales staff for a cluster of stations would sell the easier established conservative shows and ignore the newer, liberal shows.

I rebutted this fantasy argument by personal experience. My daily national radio show is home based at Clear Channel-owned KOGO AM 600, one of eight stations (out of 38) Clear Channel owns in the San Diego market. When Air America started, Clear Channel eagerly replaced a 40s music format station with Air America, changing the call letters to (I kid you not) KLSD. The Air America format was heavily promoted, its stars came to town to do shows live and a separate sales force was assigned to sell the station. After two years of heavy losses attributable to mediocre ratings and loss of advertisers, Clear Channel shifted to a sports format (which, truth told, has done even worse).

Even more inconsistent was Woody Woodhull, the man behind Air America’s Ed Schultz. He advertised himself as a “capitalist” with six kids to feed. He also co-wrote “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio” for John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, a leftist think tank for out-of-work Clintonistas. The paper blames the failure of left/liberal talk radio on the talking points we heard from Hartmann and Miller – big business doesn’t like them, and big government must force the stations to take their shows.

My experience on this panel at R&R confirms the need to build the biggest First Amendment coalition possible to fight the mentality that demands that government decide what you can hear on the radio. This mentality dominates in the Obama administration (Podesta was the Obama transition chairman and selected future FCC appointments) and has emboldened the “progressive” talk hosts who have failed in the marketplace to turn to Obama for their own “stimulus.”

 

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