Who knew? Andy Parks was on WWRC-AM in Washington DC because the Washington Times newspaper was paying Salem Radio. Salem needs more revenue than the Washington Times was willing to pay, so he is history. Salem doesn’t subscribe to Neilsen for ratings – they measure success by how many books they sell and subscriptions to townhall.com they sell. I wonder now if someone is paying to put Frank Gaffney on the air.
The other strange news of the day concerns Mark Levin. You probably are aware that on Wednesday he announced he was going to discuss his contract Thursday – and then was out “under the weather” on Thursday and Friday – on Thursday Westwood One (owned by Cumulus) announced Levin had signed a 5 year extension to his contract.
The news is that Cumulus is dumping Mark Levin from KABC-AM in Los Angeles. He will be moving to Salem’s KRLA-AM. While it gets Levin’s show on live, dumping your star from your second most important Owned and Operated affiliate is strange to say the least.
And Jim Bohannon just got his contract extended. That’s not strange, but indicates to me that Westwood One is operating pretty independently. Maybe someday they’ll be spun off in an IPO
And 91 year old Sumner Redstone – majority owner of CBS and Viacom was a “no show” at his own quarterly earnings call. Regime change may be in the air. Generation 2 is waiting in the wings.
Looking at KABC’s daily schedule, they have Kings Ice Hockey on almost every night during the season – which would have meant Levin rarely would be on the air half of the year. That further supports the idea that Westwood One is controlling the affiliate decisions now, not the stations.
That’s actually smart as it gives them more credibility with independent stations. Even though the purchase was allowed to happen, the DOJ still hasn’t signed off on the deal. They may well require Cumulus to divest Westwood One, in the same spirit that movie studios are not allowed to own movie theaters.
Ice Hockey is one of the worst sports to do in radio – and especially on a news/talk station. Every time Rush wants to talk about football his listeners remind him that political talk and sports talk have different types of audiences.