Tom Taylor is reporting that the owners of “The Flag” have pushed part owner Scott Hennen off the air and out of the operations.
“The Flag” is a really curious station that I’ve written about before. It was created a few years ago as a brand new 50,000 watt AM station serving Fargo North Dakota (the station is actually across the river in Minnesota).
Scott is a personal friend of Rush Limbaugh, and his own local show was similar in its politics. Since building the station, Fargo has been swamped by flooding twice, during which the station was an important source of information.
North Dakota has a very small population – a lot of it Native American tribes and military related. Fargo was the home of Ed Schultz and ND is the home state of former US Senator Tom Daschle. It’s hard to not suspect a political motive behind this change. Perhaps the Democratic “firewall” is going up.
ANY CONSERVATIVE reckless enough to let the fact be known soon left by hook or by crook the Knight-Ridder “newsroom” where I once worked. Ten years later, this is the status quo. After I left in disgust, forsaking for evermore a trade I loved, journalism, I don’t think a single conservative remained at the paper. Not one. My point is that hypocrites of the left love to put on smarmy happy faces and speak in dulcet tones of multiculturalism, inclusionism, tolerance, and all the rest of the Big Lie, while practicing vicious exclusionism, retributionism, intolerance, Big-Brotherism, controlism … and, you know, that other “Ism.” The Press deems itself anointed and superior to the Hoi Poli. So, Scott Hennen, if he’s as resilient and talented as I suspect is, will in the end be better off. And the smug, duplicitous left shall remain exposed as the nasty, manipulative tools that they are and ever have been. Nosce Inimicum.
That’s my reaction as well. From the couple times I listened to him, he’s wasting his talent in Fargo. Rush needs think about succession planning…
I am a bit confused by a couple of statements made in the story. ie: North Dakota has a very small population – a lot of it Native American tribes and military related. It turns out that the Native Population accounts for only 5.4% and the military just 1.8
% It is one thing to mis-estimate these figures but with the advent of the internet it is very easy to check out population figures. If you are “stretching” the truth on this what else are you stretching?
Yes Ed Schults was in Fargo and he was a republican till he switched and then left for the bright light and city nights! That says nothing about the rest of us in Nodakland!
The biggest oversight was about Tom Daschle, he by the way, unless he moved recently, lives in SOUTH DAKOTA! and has never represented anyone from North Dakota to my knowledge. We have our own idiots to deal with with out him.
It is not a political thing, when you build a 50,000 watt station (400 watts or something like that at night) and the signal does not go out as far as a 5,000 watt station, then you are building on a bad technical premise, not to mention a differing of opinions of the partners and of course, business. Not enough money coming in the front door, people go out the back door!
You have a nice page, but you have to be sure of your facts as that is where the opposition will hunt you down and mercilessly hound you!
You make some good points.
The Native American and military statement was not so much about counting heads – it is about what has an influence on the political and economic landscape. Minot and Grand Forks have Air Force bases that were important during the cold war. It’s probably true they are less of a force in the economy than they used to be. Grand Forks is inside the daytime coverage pattern, but Minot is just barely inside the fringe area.
North Dakota ranks 48th in population of the 50 states and 47th in population density. Am I okay on the point that the state is a very small population? About half of what I think I know about North Dakota came from watching Michael Moore’s TV show :)
Fargo – the largest city in the state is not big enough to be in the top 200 markets when combined with Moorhead. I have a vague memory of the FCC having to stretch its ownership rules by including Bismarck in the Fargo market to permit some exception to the ownership caps.
To be honest, I didn’t know there were any other owners – the original stories by Tom Taylor described Hennen as “the owner”, not one of the owners
http://www.radio-info.com/newsletter/html/tri-07102009.html
The line between “lender” and “owner” can be very thin. Looking at the FCC reports, Hennen has (or had) 51% voting power, but only 36% (equity+debt) ownership in the corporation that owns both the corporation that own WZFG-AM and KQLX AM/FM. The reports are confusing, but that’s why lawyers exist. Hennen with 51% voting power, but was pushed out suggests a debt holder made that happen.
The “who owns this?” question was part of why the story seemed so odd – that “the owner” of the station was let go. Originally, “The Flag” was an oddity, which is why I was so aware of it. Few people are building brand new 50kw AM stations in the 21st century. You’re correct that the station goes to 440 watts at night (except when it was kept at full power during the floods). It goes from covering about half the state and a chunk of Minnesota to basically a local Fargo station.
I’m not going to get into a conversation about Schultz, since I didn’t have the ability to listen to him before he started with Jones Radio. Fargo has a lot of college students, and that’s a natural audience for “progressive” radio. I know Big Eddy likes guns, which puzzles some progressives and may be the source of their suspicions about him – but then again, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara liked guns, too. John Dingell in Michigan is a Democrat who likes guns (hunting is a major business in Michigan). It’s the ivory tower big city liberals who think guns = “must be a conservative” thing, probably because they weren’t raised around them.
You’re right about Daschle. At the time, I was thinking about the connection between Air America’s Jon Elliot, the casino in Deadwood South Dakota and Tom Daschle. This fits into the category of “Fast, cheap, accurate – pick two”. I wrote the thing within a few minutes of reading the news on the TRI newsletter. There is no editor here to enforce fact checking and I don’t footnote my blog posts (some of the time). One thing I’ve discovered with a blog is one of the few ways to reliably get people to respond is if they want to tell you what you got wrong. I’ve been known to deliberately make small factual mistakes that are not germane to the main point to get a certain someone to “correct” me.
So have we all agreed now this wasn’t politically motivated?