Richard Buckley has died

The Buckley Story

Buckley Radio is a small town radio owner in Connecticut.   They pride themselves on going the extra mile to serve their communities (but not streaming their signals).

You would never have heard of the Buckley family nor cared (and possible still don’t!) except for a twist of fate.

WOR-AM in New York City was one of the earliest AM radio stations on the air and is one of the 50 kW clear channel AM stations.  In the early days, it was affiliated with the Mutual Broadcasting System.  In the 1950s, the station was purchased by RKO, the movie picture company controlled by Howard Hughes.   At some point, the people in Washington DC decided they didn’t want him owning TV and radio stations.

RKO was using their power of distribution to leverage their ownership.   In 1948, the Truman DoJ was going to force a split between those who make pictures and those who run the theaters.  RKO was split into two companies:
Time Magazine – 1948

Howard  Hughes also controlled General Tire and Rubber – and in the early 1960s, the DoJ went after him for “anti-competitive” (“Dog eat dog”) practices that if you wanted to do business with General Tire, you would have to advertise on RKO’s radio and TV stations.    There was also a lot of “barter” transactions where one part of the company would advertise on the TV/Radio stations and the ads were not paid for – just an accounting book entry – not too different from when CBS TV advertises on CBS Radio or Viacom promotes their movies on CBS

That come to a head in 1981 – the FCC decided that General Tire and Howard Hughes lacked the moral character to own licenses, and forced them to be sold as they came up for renewal.   More detailed discussion

In 1987 FCC administrative law judge Edward Kuhlmann ordered that all of RKO’s licenses be revoked.  (Isn’t it great when a Government agency has its own judge?).  Knowing it would be appealed, he strongly urged RKO to sell their stations before the FCC actually cancelled the licenses.

So RKO General had to sell WOR – but the problem was almost nobody was in a position to buy it.   FCC rules since the 1930s are a company can only own one AM radio station in a market – all of the big players already had an AM station in New York  WABC(ABC), WCBS(CBS), WNBC(NBC), WINS(Westinghouse), WMCA(MCA) – so the sleepy little Buckley family from small town Connecticut ended by buying WOR.  In 1987, the station was sold to an entity called S/G communications which then sold the station to Buckley for $25 million in 1989.

Under Buckley, the station had the “Gambling family” host mornings for 3 generations (you know about the 3 generation rule) and filled the midday with cooking shows, alternative medicine, Joy Browne, a woman talking about the latests social gatherings on the Hamptons, etc..   The program director left to go work for Air America – at which point WOR picked up Michael Savage and Glenn Beck and Steve Malzberg (Glenn was dumped a few months ago by the man who just died because Beck was “all over the place”).

The WOR radio network – their attempt to syndicated WOR’s programming has gone nowhere.   Joy Browne is probably their most successful program, but WOR doesn’t even carry her show live.

Where will WOR go from here?   It’s likely the management of the company will now be taken over by the third generation of Buckleys.