According to my count, there are 235 radio stations carrying mostly 24 hour a day EWTN (the audio of the cable TV channel featuring the deceased Mother Angelica). Pope John Paul II urged lay groups to buy or start radio stations, and the sheep flocked to please Rome.
Some of you may remember Charlotte was the home of PTL Club which had a Cable TV evangelization organization. At the time, there was tension between PTL and brick and mortar churches. While they were playing for the same team, dollars sent to buy Tammy Faye Bakker more jewelry was money vanishing from local offering plates, and people felt it was less necessary to go to Church on Sunday since they had 15 hours of preaching during the week.
I have the sense a similar dynamic is at work within the Catholic Radio business. Local dioceses rally to buy a radio station, have the Bishop sprinkle the transmitter with holy water and praise Mary for their blessings – but have absolutely no idea what to do with a radio station or how to run it. So it runs 24 hrs a day with EWTN for the 3 people listening to it. Maybe they air the local mass from a recording.
Two of the big operators who actually know what they are doing are merging – California based Immaculate Heart Radio and Midwest based Relevant Radio. The $30 million cost of the Merger is mostly coming from one man from Hinsdale, Illinois. Michael Birck made his money from AT&T and died about a year ago.. Once the merger is complete, the combined Relevant radio will have a bit over 100 stations.
Interesting stuff. EWTN is definitely “dry”. I test and review the Christian stations and I don’t dwell on EWTN at all. Listen – verify – click – done. I much prefer contemporary Christian or Gospel. I wonder what the ultimate name will be for the merged entity?
Both sites already have their web sites reflecting the merger. Since their donor died over a year ago, they have had time to negotiate details. It sounds like they will be using Relevant Radio. There is a Catholic company in Texas operating both an English and Spanish group of stations. They are a pain to check as they actually have distinct regional simulcasts, but it is totally unclear which station is which. Maybe they’ll do a bit more acquiring…
If anyone is curious, there are no per market caps for non-commercial stations.
Since the stations are Catholic and pay no taxes they might be called” “Our Lady of Perpetual Deduction.”
One of the mysteries is the purpose of these stations. They don’t do a lot of fundraising that I’ve heard, and the Catholic Church doesn’t try very hard to convert people to their way of thinking. Mostly the purpose seems to be to buy up secular radio stations and put them out of business (or vice Versa). But they are not alone in that – while FM below 92 MHz is restricted to only non commercial owners (religious and educational), the non-coms are free to acquire FM stations above 92 MHz. The explosion of FM translators and LPFM stations has sped up that process. AM radio has no separation between commercial and non-commercial.
The example pushing this the hardest is Bott Radio Network that operates in the lower Midwest, mostly Kansas. It is one set of programming, but maybe half the station are owned as for profit stations. Salem Radio is also out there – since they are not a 401(c) charity, they can’t beg for money, so they sell time to ministries who do. SALM is publicly traded
Oh I remember Jim and Tammy Bakker of the PTL Club and the Heritage Park scams. At one point they had a little pewter statue of David defeating Goliath and in big letters: “no weapon formed against me shall prosper.” Or something like it. The little statues were worth about $20.00 max. They would give you one for every $1000 you donated to Tammy’s make-up expenses and gold shower heads. My neighbor had seven of those statues. I tried hard to show him the waste and the misuse and even after Jim was indicted and jailed, my neighbor refused to believe he was being fleeced. He blamed it all on conspiracy theories and attacks on his beliefs. But, in retrospect, he might have been right on the conspiracy theory part.
Another common scam by Jim was to solicit $20 bill donation and he would send you back $1 “anointed with prayer to the holy spirit.” Again, my neighbor had several.
My ex-wife used to watch his TV show and on one occasion Jim was upset because people were donating coins during the show. He went back and got a wheelbarrow full of coins and dumped it on the stage and explained that they had to count and roll these by hand and it would occupy his volunteers too much time. He was quite upset and demanded people put bills and not coins in it. The guy was an incredible showman. I hear he is still preaching in Charlotte at some storefront church. Ah, the lemmings…
Wow, Jim didn’t learn from his past. He has a new scam hawking food for the apocalypse:
http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2014/09/16/disgraced-televangelists-now-selling-end-world-biscuits/
INCREDIBLE!
More incredible is he had a hot woman marry him after he left prison
Holy smokes, she is a looker.
KYAR-FM outside Waco Texas just was purchased by a Catholic lay group for $495,000 cash. The station is at 96.3 MHz and has been operating as an Air1 affiliate. It was a commercial radio station back to at least before 1979 when the FCC migrated its records to computers.
It is only a class A license at @4,100 watts, but it has a tall antenna and Texas is flat
Starboard Media (Relevant Radio) picked up two AM station in Fort Myers Florida (WMYR/WCNZ), just agreeing to assume a $385k debt. The station was a commercial station founded in 1952
EMF paid $1.25 million cash for KLXY-FM in Salinas California, previously a country music station