Cashing out

I went to the kitchen and flipped on my “real” radio, which is tuned to WELI-AM – Clear Channel’s news/talk station in New Haven. It was just after the news, and I start hearing…. “and now, stay tuned to hear an important message about your health from Purity Products. Nothing said during the following program means anything or has any science behind it, but the government wants to make sure you know that this is a paid program and this is not reliable information – and now this important stuff you need to know”.

Oh God… it’s the weekend and it’s “fake Interview” time where an unknown make believe radio host “interviews” the “guest”, who is actually the person paying for the infomercial – with the usual smattering of “calls” from “listeners” to a prerecorded show that never gave out a phone number. Just as I’m reaching up to turn it off in disgust, I hear “Hello, this Mark Simone…”

My last glimmer of hope for the future of talk radio was just extinguished. In the unlikely event you don’t know, Mark Simone is a long time radio host in New York City, who mostly shows up at WABC, and fills in for Hannity, Mark Levin and Don Imus.  He must live very close to the station – any time there is a big storm, or someone doesn’t show up for work unexpectedly, Mark Simone is there.

Simone hosts a Saturday morning talk show on WABC, and a Saturday evening show vaguely like a 1960s pre-FM music show. He used to do an all Sinatra show – he knew Sinatra and pretty much personally knows anyone who is anyone in New York.

Radio used to matter because it was trusted.  If a guy on the radio announced that alien spacecraft from Mars had landed in a field in New Jersey, you believed it. If an EBS alert aired announcing that you needed to immediately evacuate the city, you would do it.  If the news announced that Japan had just bombed Pearl Harbor, you knew it was true or and wouldn’t need to ask why it happened.

You bought things you heard about on the radio because the host was someone you had listened to for 20 years and you trusted him based on his reputation and what he said in his booming radio voice over the years that proved to be truthful.

Because the reputation of a radio personality is so valuable, radio people with the clout in a major market or syndication would fight in their contract negotiations to have the right to refuse to endorse a sponsor or read their ads on their air. Once you start reading the copy for a company you don’t believe in, then you’re just haggling over your price.

So the big corporate entities that got radio up to its eyeballs in debt decided that weekends were a time to make a few extra silver coins by selling air time to “make money at home” schemes, “investment advisors” who would steal the money from their clients, lawyers trolling for fake slip and fall lawsuits, bogus herbal cures… paying money to access the station’s trusting audience.  When you hear crap like that on the weekends, you begin to wonder if you can believe anything you hear during the week.

People who turn the radio off get out of the habit of listening to radio  (very important to radio). Your car radio is set to play a CD instead of the radio when you hop in the car. The preset push-buttons drift over to being set to NPR and the classical music station or the Classic Rock station just playing songs chosen by a computer. It doesn’t happen on one weekend, but once it happens, the audience is never coming back. Children who don’t see mom and dad listening to the radio in the car don’t listen to it when they grow up and have a car.

WABC-AM is now owned by Cumulus Broadcasting, of couse. Mark Simone is a very obvious target to cut from the payroll when the bean counters get to New York like they just did to KGO in San Francisco. He’s working six hours on Saturdays “costing” the station money consuming valuable air time that could be sold to infomercial producers. [in the short term bean counter view of the world]

Perhaps Simone has been doing this infomercial for a while – I avoid listening to radio at all on the weekends. My suspicion is that either Cumulus told him he had to do the infomercial if he wanted to keep his job (note that I heard it on a Clear Channel station – I don’t know of any ties between Cumulus and Purity Products) or Simone sees the handwriting on the wall and is giving up his most valuable asset – his reputation…  similar to how Kim Komando is now doing endorsements of AOL’s computer protection service – a company she used to mock for being so incompetent and a cesspool of security problems.

Who will be the last honest person on radio? Or was it all a mirage all along…

Phil Boyce, former Program Director (PD) at WABC and 3 year head of programming at Talk Radio Network (TRN) has an opinion piece about the death of radio as we know it over at radio-info.com here. Instead of an insightful perspective, it really reads more like a plea for someone to hire him… pretty much every sentence is about “I”, “me”, or “my”.  Speaking at the funeral, you only have one chance to get the eulogy right.