Big news day – my time and energy is limited, so here is the placeholder if you have opinions
– Buckley Broadcasting (now on the Third Generation ™) has announced it is selling WOR-AM to Clear Channel. Goodbye Joan Hamburg, Hello Rush Limbaugh (and Glenn Beck)
– Cumulus pushed senior citizen Geraldo Rivera into national syndication today after the stunning success and industry buzz from his WABC-AM debut [sa]*
– Clear Channel threw in the towel competing in talk in Boston. Rush, Beck and Jay Severin were replaced today by 24/7 “comedy”. Have you heard this one?… Bill Ayers, Bob Pittman and Jeffrey Immelt walk into a bar. Bill Ayers walks up to the bar and asks “If President Obama walked in here, would you serve him?”. The bartender answers “Sure, who is paying the bill? Bob Pittman and Jeffrey Immelt look at each other and say in unison “I knew it, you’re a racist!”
[sa]* – Sarcasm Alert!
Clear Channel will take over operations at WOR on Tuesday per a reliable source. I would expect to see Beck back on WOR right away, probably Jason Lewis, maybe Randy Rhodes. I doubt they’ll keep Savage. Joy Browne is a good liberal – I could see Premiere adding her in their syndication lineup, perhaps Arther Frommer’s travel show. WOR had no idea how to do syndication and had only a handful of affiliates, frequently as filler on stations that carry a lot of sports.
I heard Clear channel has been wanting savage off
the air for a long time.
That was actually the genesis of this directory. You may remember Savage had briefly been on MSNBC when it first started, and in fairly close order Howard Stern got booted off CBS, Savage got booted off my local Clear Channel station and then Don Imus got booted from CBS/MSNBC.
The purpose of this web site was to disempower program directors who want to use their position to censor political opinions. Radio stations are constantly changing programming and that isn’t a problem – but when Richard Buckley suddently terminated Glenn Beck saying “I have no idea what he is even talking about” (or something close to that), he made a programming decision based on his own politics, not because of ratings and/or profitability. With 200 other stations streaming Beck (plus Beck’s own free stream), WOR can “Ban” Glenn Beck from New York, but can’t stop people in New York from listening to Glenn Beck.
I’ve tried pretty hard to keep “fringe” people like Alex Jones, Free Talk Live, Tammy Bruce, Roy Masters, Al Sharpton, Mel Robbins… in the directory with stations – even Air America, back in its day. People who read regularly know my opinion of Savage has changed a lot over time, but I still want his voice heard by people who want to hear it.
Savage was burning any possible relationship with Cumulus tonight. He didn’t mention the company by name but singled out the radio group head who hired Geraldo having a 0.1 rating in New York and Huckabee – so if you know anything about radio syndication, it is obvious who he was talking about – his initials are Lew Dickey.
According to my count (which is only streaming stations), Savage is on 30 Clear Channel stations, 7 Salem, 5 Entercom, and only 4 Cumulus stations – and the rest are small operators. Only 39 (out of about 120) carry the show live.
One big mistake Savage makes is looking at the phones – he goes on a rant and then bellows “I guess you don’t want to talk about that”, when probably 2/3 of his audience won’t hear his rant for 3 hours. It’s probably due to him being used to doing a local show and getting immediate feedback.
LOL,, good one Art !
It’s going to be hard for Clear Channel to do 24 hour a day comedy without making fun of President Obama.
In another way in which Cumulus is making friends… Has anybody noticed that Cumulus stations are no longer available on the Tunein Radio app? I discovered it this morning.
I figured it was coming since I’ve been hearing them plugging iheartradio the last few weeks on our local Cumulus stations…
No worries, I’ll just use ootunes instead. I just liked that the program directories on tunein were pretty easy to search but ootunes is tied in with SRG so that won’t be too bad…
I
That’s partly my fault. I pointed them to the web site instead of the player. Now that Cumulus is on iHeartradio, I’ve been fixing then as I find them (mostly news/talk) – but there are probably 500 broken still
Also about 50 cumulus stations were sold to Townsquare and are not fixed
See: I’m moving to Chicago, time is short
Sales price for WOR is $30 million
https://licensing.fcc.gov/cdbs/CDBS_Attachment/getattachment.jsp?appn=101511363&qnum=5040©num=1&exhcnum=3
Back at the peak, Buckley turned down an offer of $200 million for WOR