Glenn Beck and WOR… Glenn doesn’t talk a lot about ratings, so it caught my notice that he mentioned he is beating WABC in New York… (he’s up against Zbigniew Brzezinski’s daughter and some guy named Joe something. The reason it was on the front of his mind is WOR will change their schedule to carry the entire 3 hours starting June 22nd. WABC was always the obvious place for Beck to be in New York, but for some reason they have resisted that move. WABC’s stubborness is WOR’s gain.
After all the schedule shuffle is completed, the loser is Joey Reynolds, who loses the first hour of his program, at least on WOR. I’m sure he’s going to rant for weeks about the right wing conspiracy out to get him, but frankly at 1 am, nobody really cares. {this morning’s show Joey Reynolds had a “best of” show. I don’t remember ever hearing one of those before.
If you look at Joey’s website, he has a post about his being “passed over” for the drive-time slot by Steve Malzberg. “If he wins an award, I’ll trip his ass as he walks up to get it! I’ve become the Susan Lucci of radio!” Losing an hour to Glenn will really anger him.
I’m guessing he and WOR are about to have a big fight, and Joey doesn’t realize how few cards he is holding in his hand. His program is syndicated on the WOR Radio Network, so either he will be on the network for an hour without being on WOR, or they’ll cut back his network show by an hour – the announcement didn’t really say. WOR’s syndication is umm…. not financially significant. WOR has been owned for a few years by a small radio company in Connecticut, after the prior owner was forced to divest it… (the Buckley Broadcasting profile has some of the details – it’s a long interesting story). The prior programming director (whose political views are similar to Joey Reynolds) left WOR a while back to work for Air America. Since then WOR has added Beck, Lou Dobbs, Steve Malzberg and brought over John Gambling from WABC (John’s father and grandfather were legends on WOR).