Tom Taylor’s newsletter over at radio-info.com contains three pieces of interesting news (or more)
With Harold Camping in the nursing home and huge loans that need to be paid (since the world didn’t end), Family Radio is starting the process of selling off their major market FM stations in the commercial band, including one that covers New York City.
“Murphy in the Morning” is returning to Chicago. Murphy was the morning guy on one of the rock stations – his show was targeted at females – a lot of entertainment gossip, asking women to call up and talk about having sex, playing some music. I remember him from about a decade earlier in Charlotte NC. After he left Chicago, I have a vague memory of him maybe doing a syndicated show, perhaps voice tracking. He’s older than me – I wonder how much women will get sexually stimulated about the idea of going to a bar and drinking beer with a “bad boy” old enough to be on Social Security.
Premiere not-Radio Network is adding a new “conservative” talk host from 6-9 PM (ET) That’s up against Michael Savage on TRN. His name is Andy Dean. I have no memory of him. He supposedly worked at WSB-AM in Atlanta. He’ll be doing the show from Los Angeles. I seriously doubt the “Conservative” credentials of anyone who has worked at the flagship station of Cox Radio. That time slot on Premiere’s talk radio lineup is currently filled by Jason Lewis. I doubt Premiere will carry both of them at the same time. This might be the hand of Bob Pittman changing Clear Channel’s syndicated lineup into the new “Conservatives for Obama” format
I guess Jason Lewis is about to experience the “green shoots” of stimulus and job (un)creation?
Part of the reason I left AOL in 1996 (but not the biggest part) was as they ramped up their “content”, it was clear they had a very strong political bias and steering eyeballs in certain directions was a big part of their “mission”.
People using AOL (most of them didn’t know) were not really seeing the internet – they were behind a wall of proxy servers (for performance reasons). If AOL decided to put a barrier in the proxy firewall, the thing out on the Internet didn’t exist.
The same applied to Usenet. I was very unhappy that Art Bell seemed to be taking over overnight radio and displacing local guys and pushing his sham products like magnetic water filters…. so I used to follow alt.fan.art-bell – as most people who followed Usenet knew, alt. was the anarchist part of Usenet – a group called alt.fan.somebody was typically an anti-somebody group even if it didn’t start out that way. Out in Usenet, messages do not get deleted based on their content, and someone posting a message you find offensive doesn’t form a basis for demanding they lose their internet access (except in very limited situations, but not because of -what- they say)
At the time, Art Bell was heavily promoting AOL in his program, and he got irritated that AOL was “allowing” people to post anti Art Bell things on “his” Usenet group, so he demanded that alt.fan.art-bell be deleted from AOL. They complied and dropped the feed. That forced me to go look for another dialup ISP and I found the information was not very well organized, and realized that most of the existing ISPs were just reselling the same access numbers – hence FindAnISP.com was born. Once I was outside the walls of the AOL fort, then I realized how much I had been a prisoner of their “protection” to keep me “Safe”.
Speaking of Jason Lewis… I soon found out where he’s ending up, and quite frankly I’m quite surprised.
Genesis Communications Network. That’s right, the same company that primarily specializes in people like Alex Jones and all sorts of strange conspiracy theory hosts. It’ll be interesting to see how Lewis would fit in there…
Wow.
I had kind of forgotten about the America Now show with Andy Dean until Wednesday, so I didn’t do any testing, and nobody reported that Jason Lewis was gone.
The Premiere web site still lists the show. Is it possible that Premiere made a deal with GCN to let them also distribute the show? (Does Jason Lewis own his own program like Rush and Beck?)
I could see some people in Premiere happy to see Jason Lewis show up in Kookville as a way to marginalize him without ending his contract. This is all very strange.