EAS and Anonymous

The timing is undoubtedly due to the publicity given the National EAS Test earlier this month, but now the hacker group Anonymous is claiming that they plan to "take over" radio stations via EAS, by exploiting the lack of security inherent to the system.   The attitude seems to be half showing solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movements, half trying to call attention to a glaring security hole.

FEMA is responding that the system is secure enough, thank you very much.

Who's correct?  Read on...

EAS: Politics vs. Engineering

Was the November 9th National EAS Test a qualified success or a total failure?

Like most things in life, it kinda depends on your point of view.

First, the system itself did indeed fail during the test.  The final tally will take weeks, but there are tons of anecdotal reports that most stations did receive the data tones, but did not receive proper audio.   Early reports indicate that a loop of the audio (including the data tones) played over itself, delayed by several seconds.   The second airing of the data tones caused many stations' EAS encoders/decoders (aka "endecs") to stop outright and mute the test audio until the "End of Message" (EOM) data tones were sent at the end of the test, 30 seconds later.   Other endecs just played the whole thing, looped audio playing over the main audio like a bizarre version of "row-row-row your boat".   Given the widespread nature of this effect, the thinking is that it must've happened at the national level (FEMA) somehow.

The TV side of things, including satellite TV, may have had a similar issue in play, just with different effects: namely a Lady Gaga video playing across DirecTV, for example.

There's also reports that some stations didn't get anything at all due to equipment failures at the state and local levels.  Fortunately these seem relatively uncommon.

Go Away Kid, Yer Botherin' Me...

So Jesse Thorn, host of The Sound of Young America, has some uncomfortable truths and he's not afraid to say them pretty bluntly. The "hot tape" in those transcripts? Check this out:

My situation is that if I had to choose between losing my (public radio affiliate) stations and losing my direct podcast fundraising, I’d pick the one that would allow me to continue to pay my rent and I would lose the stations.

Ouch.

Well, I'll get the disclosure out of the way, first. I run a public radio station, and maybe a year ago someone (I think my PRI rep) sent me a TSOYA demo CD and asked if I'd run it on WEOS. Well, since I'm 32, and thus in the demo that NPR is, allegedly, so desperate to attract, I figured I'd give it a serious listen and see if it was any good.

I can't lie, I thought it was boring as hell. I forced myself to listen to the entire hour, and couldn't really find anything worth listening to again. At first I thought maybe I'd try and find a second hour, just in case this hour was a dud. But I figured that they'd put the best show out there on the demo, so theoretically the other shows weren't likely to be any better. (shrugs)

Am I being a little harsh? Perhaps, but you could argue I'm just practicing Thorn's own form of "honesty". (evil grin)

In all seriousness, though...reading Thorn's missive about the virtues of going small / Do-It-Yourself / shoestring budgets brought a few things to mind:

FIRST: It's all well and good that Thorn does practically every aspect of the show: host, producer, technical director, marketer, fundraiser, accountant, etc etc etc. But what happens when Thorn can't produce a show? It's not really a question of "if", only "when". At some point he'll be unable to produce the podcast for an extended period...and his entire business model comes apart. And I don't just mean getting old and sick, what if he gets married and has a kid? I don't think he'll have quite the oft-celebrated "studio in his bedroom" access anymore.

Thorn makes no bones about how he's pretty young (27) and this really strikes as an "ignorance of youth" attitude. It's great to have that enthusiasm and time to devote to it...but as one gets older (not much older than 27, either) usually devoting your entire life to a project starts getting unpleasant and, in some cases, physiologically impossible.

These are the sorts of worries that make Program Directors refuse to carry a show. They don't want to take a risk on a show that has an awful lot riding on the current health and life situation of one man.


SECOND: Thorn seems to have a lot of disdain for public radio affiliate stations. I'm sure they appreciate paying him for his disdain, but we'll put that aside for a moment. My point is that if TSOYA had a lot of affiliates, I don't think he'd be nearly so disdainful...because it's not just about the paltry affiliation fees that stations pay. It's about the access you have when you've got a ton of radio listeners to your show...and, lemme tell ya, there are lots of folks that are quite willing to pay you nicely for that access.

By Thorn's own admission, he thinks his show probably has at least 30,000 listeners on WNYC alone (and he's got WHYY in Philadelphia, too, not to mention a half-dozen or so other affiliates) but that his regular podcast audience is perhaps 12,000. I know that it's certainly possible to monetize podcast listeners more than radio listeners, but it strikes me as a little odd that he'd be so dismissive of his radio audience given how much larger it is.


THIRD: I mentioned before that I thought TSOYA was pretty boring. One thing that immediately comes to mind is that since Thorn has to do all the business work involved with producing a show, by definition he's got less time to devote to producing the show. Now obviously one man's opinion of whether a show is boring/interesting is not statistically significant...but as a station manager, my thought process immediately assumes that it's because he's not putting enough time into producing a quality product. Right or wrong, that's going to be a hard image to shake in the minds of many Program Directors.


I should point out that while I'm being mostly critical of Thorn, I'm being that way about specific points in that interview. There's a lot Thorn says that I wholeheartedly agree with. There's stuff that I don't agree with, too...but that doesn't mean it's not probably correct. (no doubt to my ultimate chagrin)

The Problem with National-Level NPR Pledge Drives

So it was leaked by the Washington Post that NPR hosts Susan Stamberg and Melissa Block are strongly advocating that NPR conduct national-level fund drives. Soon after, NPR President Vivian Schiller downplayed the report...no doubt recognizing the tremendous anger that such a move would cause amongst NPR affiliate stations. Thanks to Current.org for calling attention to the amusingly brief and wholly accurate Twitter post by former Weekend America host John Moe: "NPR thinking of having its own network pledge drive. Stations thinking of taking up pitchforks, torches, battering rams, those peasant hats."

Speaking as a station manager of a NPR affiliate station, I'd say John Moe is spot on: while a fundraiser at the national level for NPR is not unprecedented (it happened once in 1983), it would be a giant slap in the face of every one of NPR's affiliates. Not to mention require a change of NPR's charter, a waiver from the FCC, and need approval by NPR's board...the majority of whom are, AFAIK, managers of NPR affiliate stations. So I don't think this idea will have much legs.

But I want to comment on why this is such a bad idea. It's not just because the rules prohibit it. Nor is it strictly because affiliate stations are, proportionally, struggling so much more with their finances than NPR is. I mean, at least NPR has a $200 million endowment to fall back on if things get really hairy...even though I fully recognize how "bad" that would be to do that.

No, the reason why it's so bad is A.I.G.

A.I.G.??? Yes, A.I.G. And I'll explain:

A.I.G.: AIG took our money and promised us that all their ridiculous amounts of growth would be good for everyone and have no downside. Instead, they set things up for the entire system to fail and take everyone down with them. Now the very people that make tons of money and are not answerable to any of the "real people" are demanding that not only should we continue to give them tons of money (bailout) but they want their bonuses, too! Hell, they're still whining about how much they've had to give up to the New York Times, ignoring how millions are being tossed out of their homes and into the street. Mind you, this is from a company that potentially has access to piles of cash from all the filthy rich people working there that could be used if really necessary.

NPR: NPR took our money (affiliate fees) and promised us that all their ridiculous amounts of growth (multiple foreign bureaus, NPR West facility, new NPR HQ building, Day to Day, Bryant Park Project, News & Notes, etc) would be good for all affiliate stations and was necessary to do. And we had to do it because the consequences were too big a downside to risk not doing it. (Sounds suspiciously like "too big to fail" to me) Now the very hosts that make a lot of money (I've heard that ATC host Robert Siegel makes over $300,000 annually. I don't know what Block and Stamberg make but I'll bet it's well over six figures.) and aren't answerable to us affiliate stations...we don't dare not carry the shows Stamberg (WESAT) and Block (ATC) are on, they're too popular with listeners...are demanding that not only should we continue to pay the expensive affiliate fees, but now we should have to give up our fundraising dollars to NPR as well?!?! Hell, they're still whining about how they had to cut Day 2 Day and News & Notes when many affiliate stations are facing 10, 20 or 50% cuts in their budget due to state legislature and parent college cutbacks. Mind you, this is from a company that technically has a $200 million dollar endowment from Joan Kroc to fall back on if really necessary.

See what I mean? It's not a perfect analogy by any means; many of my interpretations are very debatable. Hell even I don't agree with many of them. But I think that on a visceral level, that's what people are thinking...and thus the parallels are very strong.

And it rather drastically implies that Stamberg and Block (and God knows who else) just don't "get it"...that there's still a lot of populist anger out there. And they really need to understand that just because they work for NPR doesn't mean they're immune from becoming the broadcast equivalent of Leona Helmsley, who famously said "only the little people pay taxes." I don't begrudge any NPR host their salary (frankly, I think they all earn it and then some) but you can't deny that it smacks of imperialism when a host who makes five or six (or 10 or 20) times as much as most affiliate stations' employees is demanding they give up the goose that lays the golden eggs.

I'm well aware that the funding model that exists between NPR national and NPR affiliates does not work terribly well, and is likely in need of an overhaul. And maybe this starts a long-overdue dialogue on the subject. But talk about the wrong way to approach it! Yeesh. This guarantees that every affiliate is automatically going to be highly on the defensive.

UPDATE 04/02/09: I've also been posting related thoughts at John Sutton's RadioSutton blog, see here and here.

ATC = All Things Considered. WESAT = Weekend Edition, Saturday
Disclaimer: all opinions are my own, they do not necessarily reflect those of WEOS, Hobart & William Smith Colleges or affiliated persons.

Why Are So Many Libertarians Hypocrites When it Comes to NPR?

If the service pubcasting provided "was indeed so valuable that we, the American people, could not do without it," writes libertarian blogger J.J. Jackson, "they would not need to beg their government benefactors for a single dime. "

God I'm tired of hearing this same, tired, bullcrap argument from the right.

First, if "the American people" didn't want their tax dollars...a tiny percentage of them, I might add...going to fund public broadcasting, then they wouldn't scream and howl every time the right tries to slash funding for NPR and PBS. And the right tries it every other year (at least) and always gets the same results. What was that saying about insanity being defined as doing the same thing every time and expecting a different result?

Second, and more pertinent to Jackson's hypocrisy, is that the vast majority of NPR and PBS affiliate stations are non-commercial licenses. That means they cannot, by FCC law, sell advertising. They're restricted to what's called "underwriting", which is basically advertising but with very, very strict limitations on what can be said. Limitations that make it all but impossible to attract the most common advertisers you see on commercial radio and TV: car dealers, beer ads, etc. The advertisers willing to pay serious money for ad time.

If Jackson were really a libertarian, he'd be clamoring for the FCC to remove the underwriting restrictions from non-commercial radio and TV licenses....thus opening them up to the more lucrative advertisers, and allowing them to become more fiscally self-sustaining. Instead, he just doesn't like what NPR/PBS have to say, so he cloaks his indignation in a self-righteous spiel about wasted taxpayer money.

Of course, I personally would aghast if the FCC lifted those restrictions. One of the biggest reasons I like listening to, and working in, public radio is that there actually is almost a full hour of content for every hour...unlike commercial radio where there's 20 minutes (at least) of ads from every hour.

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Reading Paul Krugman's barely-contained, seething rant that Obama simply must hold inquiries into the (admittedly many) failures and outright abuses by the Bush administration, I had a couple of diametrically-opposed thoughts:

1. Krugman is largely right. If you don't put the smackdown on administrations for pulling this crap, future ones will only get worse. A lot of people forgot that Reagan was mighty bad on the civil rights front, because Bush the Elder was even worse, and then we forgot Clinton was hands-down the worst President for civil rights since Jim Crow...only because Dubya was ten times worse than all of them put together. Sometimes you gotta shove the king under the guillotine to remind the royalty that there's a line they can't cross.
2. Krugman may be right, but the inability to forgive and forget...mostly forget...is a big reason why war-torn countries in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa are so notoriously war-torn. Those are the same people who, as Mark Bowden so aptly put it in Black Hawk Down, they cry that they must have peace, they absolutely need peace...and then when informed that having peace means giving up some power to rival clans, will turn around and say "Give power to those dogs?!? I'd rather die!"

I think there's something to the idea that Americans' incredibly short memories are part of the reason why, despite making the same retarded mistakes over and over, we generally are a prosperous country. We're constantly reinventing ourselves as a nation, and letting go of the past...even to the point of foolishness. (Remember Enron?)

As a person who considers himself fairly intelligent and capable of heavy thinking...it bothers the crap out of me that Americans' stupidity might be the biggest reason why the country continues being generally better than most other countries. (recent economic issues notwithstanding) Certainly after eight years of being shoved aside by conservatives, I - as a liberal/libertarian - am not ready to just forgive and forget.

In fact, I often feel that we need eight years of hardcore liberalism (or at least serious progressiveness) just to drag everything in government back towards the center. As in, that's an indicator of just how far-right everything became under Bush. I have no idea if it really works that way...but I won't lie that I find "healing the country" bipartisanship verrrrrry hard to swallow after the last eight years.

Sadly, I Don't Think Anyone is Really Surprised By This...

Well, the long-embattled Massachusetts state senator Dianne Wilkerson was arrested as part of an FBI sting operation that caught her taking over $23,000 in bribes.

Admittedly, this news isn't as big as deal as it nearly was, since Wilkerson lost the primary to Sonya Chang-Diaz in early October...so Wilkerson's only hope to continue her decade-long stint as Roxbury's senator was a long-shot write-in campaign. A campaign that had about a snowball's chance in hell of working, given how disgusted most of the state was with her seeming inability to remember to pay income taxes.

Frankly, given Wilkerson's reputation as a hack's hack, and her repeated attitude of being "above the rules" that only the little people must follow....the only real tragedy I see in this is that Wilkerson was the lone African-American elected official in the Massachusetts State Senate. I'm not going to begin to claim that race should be a deciding factor in whether or not a candidate deserves to be in public office. But being a minority gives a person a valuable perspective on life that cannot be had by a member of another race. Given Roxbury's high African-American population, I would be inclined to view that perspective as all the more relevant.

Getting back on point, a scandal like this breaking a week before election day would ordinarily be huge news. Even for just a state senator, it could've gotten national play. But it won't. And in two days I doubt anyone will even care. Because Wilkerson's relevance had been fading for years and ended abruptly a month ago in the primaries. And that's a sad thing for her, for her district, and for the Massachusetts State Senate as a whole.

An Epiphany for the Weak Minded

It's late so I don't have time to really flesh this out properly, but I was reading the esteemed Dan Kennedy's MediaNation media-criticism blog, specifically a post about how the town of Nantucket in Massachusetts somewhat inexplicably wanted to suppress details about a severance package a court granted a terminated employee. I'd already commented over there and someone else responded as well, and I had an epiphany of sorts.

I don't think this is really an epiphany, though. I suspect media veterans have been grousing about this for at least five or ten years, probably more like twenty. But hey, I'm not a real journalist - I just play one at my job. :-)

So here it is: it used to be that the media was the fourth estate. Newspapers especially, but radio and TV, too. It was to be feared, and respected. You could use the media to your advantage, but you had to be deferential and you had to treat the media right, or it'd utterly destroy you. But anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to this sort of thing knows that those days are long, long gone.

Why?

I mean, we've never lived in a more media-soaked landscape. Where anyone can bring a scandal to the limelight within minutes. We learned a right-wing Christian conservative governor was actually quite forgiving of unwed motherhood and premarital sex...solely because a hateful (and overall pretty stupid) rumor swept the series of tubes within hours of Palin being named McCain's Veep pick.

And yet, the press has never been more whipped and useless than during the eight years of the Bush administration. Used to be if a president stonewalled, lied and bullshitted the press as blatantly as Bush & company have...every newspaper in America would've turned on them so hard, there would've been impeachment hearings back in 2003. Obviously this isn't the case.

I have to think the obvious answer is that the press is so whipped precisely because we live in such a media-soaked landscape. When every yahoo and bonehead can have a blog and reach a national audience...like myself...then the meaning of "media" is diluted to virtually nothing. Can you imagine a President saying "If I've lost Cronkite" about anyone in the media anymore?

Couple that with the other side, that the "big media" have been so thoroughly bought and paid for. How can we truly expect anyone at the New York Times, the big three networks (CBS, ABC, NBC, or any radio news source...yes, even NPR...to keep the big & powerful honest? To do that, you must be willing to attack and destroy them. Assuming you even could destroy one of these mega-billion-dollar corporations (or the government) these days...in virtually every case, the big & powerful are the same people signing your paychecks. As a journalist, you can only get fired so many times before you stop biting the hand that feeds you.

I still consider NPR to be one of the most objective sources of news out there. That's part of the reason why I can manage an NPR station and sleep soundly at night. But it is rather dismaying how NPR so often steadfastly refuses to ever really smack around a news source. To insist on taking the high road at all costs. Nobody's really afraid of NPR...and with 20+ million listeners, if some corporate fatcat isn't afraid of NPR, then who? Who's going to keep them honest?

I'll end this with a call to action: I would like very much to see NPR get more commentators that aren't afraid to rip some jerk a new one. Who ask questions and expect a real answer because if they don't get one, they'll make you sorry you didn't give them one. Perhaps a Daniel Schorr for the modern age. I like Dan a lot, but he's just too genteel...give him some young, fiery interns who're out for blood and train them on how to sharpen their fangs.

Granted, thanks to the FCC making it next to impossible for non-commercial radio stations (as most NPR affiliates are) to endorse/detract against politicians, this task may not be easy. But I don't pay NPR fees because I want to be handed the low-hanging fruit. I pay them because I want them to give me the real story, even if it means it's speckled with a few drops of blood.

Flipflopping in the Modern Media Age

Baby talk floods 'RKO

A funny thing happened when WRKO conservative talk host Reese Hopkins (inset) told listeners 17-year-old Bristol Palin's pregnancy makes him question VP hopeful Sarah Palin's parenting skills. Angry Republican listeners blew up his e-mail box, claiming Bristol's condition is family business. And Hopkins, who talked extensively on-air about the suspicious Gloucester teen pregnancy pact, was a little shocked. "You called these girls sluts, you said their parents were horrible," he said of his listeners. "But in 125 e-mails I have stacked in front of me, you're telling me [Bristol Palin's pregnancy] is not a big deal." Hopkins went back to the e-mails he received on the Gloucester story and compared them to his Palin e-mails. He found 70 listeners who flip-flopped on the teen pregnancy issue and invited them to explain. On Monday, Hopkins will broadcast live from George's Coffee Shop in Gloucester with Gloucester Daily Times reporter Patrick Anderson and editor Raymond Lamont.

WRKO is the local conserva-talker to the Boston area. Now I've made a general promise that I won't get into politics on this blog. Given what a political animal I am, this has not been an easy promise to keep! So instead of the inherent political angle of the above quote, I'd like indeed to point out something: flip-flopping isn't as easy as it used to be.

John Kerry got hammered, and perhaps rightly so, for being a "flip flopper" in the 2004 election. For whatever reason, nobody could easily turn that around on the Republicans. But avoiding the flipflop charge seems to be getting harder and harder in the modern media age. Jon Stewart and The Daily Show have used this to GREAT effect over the years, especially lately.

But if it's creeping into a usually-reliable mouthpiece for the right, against its own party, then it strikes me that pretty anything that anyone says can - and will - come back to haunt them, and before much time has passed, either.

An optimist might think this would encourage people to put more thought into their invective, but realist that I am, I fear this will ultimately force public speakers to scrub anything they say to have even less content than it does now.

Here's the question, though...what happens when the technology advances to the point where anything someone says can be fact-checked so quickly...as in, within seconds...that if they're contradicting themselves, you can show a video of it while the real-time speech is still going on. I mean, context is key in everything we say, and it's so easy to take things out of context when you're just talking 10 or 20 second video clips.

When, not if, that happens...who exactly decides what clips to air?

Everybody Makes Mistakes?

From the New York Times

At a reception for educators at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Sandra Ross, a special-needs high school teacher from Orlando, Fla, said, “She’s going to be a good role model for the country.” Of Bristol’s pregnancy, Ms. Ross added, “Everybody makes mistakes.”

I know this is a cheap shot, and I'm sure that's why the Times put the quote in there, but dammit...is this what we, as a nation, find acceptable in a potential Vice President? I don't care what your political party is...when your office is in 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, I don't want you to make any mistakes. Too much is always at stake!

I fully understand that this is an unobtainable goal, but nevertheless it is a goal worth striving for! If McCain becomes incapacitated or dies, and Palin becomes President (a distinct possibility), are you comfortable knowing that (she) "makes mistakes"?

Look, I don't mind elected officials being idiots just like the rest of us. Yes, they are human. But does it have to be so obvious? As far as I'm concerned, I want an elitist in the West Wing, not Joe Six Pack. Shouldn't the very best people hold the most important jobs in the country? Don't we, as voters, deserve the very best? Or at least people trying to be the very best? Or least people smart and clever enough to fool us all that they're trying to be the very best?

I know it's cynical but I'll settle for that last one - and be comforted that you've gotta be pretty smart and clever to accomplish that level of fooling.

The Future of Crossing the Street...is not to Cross at all

I read this article about managing pedestrian street crossing in the Boston Globe today. It's a pretty good article. I like that people are finally starting to realize that it's a losing game to try and make a city be as efficient as possible for cars to the exclusion of pedestrians, buses, bikes, etc.

But there's a gigantic element missing from this article: namely, the elements. Can we stop living in denial that the weather in Boston just plain sucks? It always sucks. It always WILL suck. For at least four solid months of every year, there will be snow on the ground that you can measure in feet. For three months beyond that, you can count on frigid, hurricane-force winds...like as not with driving rain. And for good measure, don't forget July and August when it's typically hot as hell and humid to match.

So if you really want to improve the pedestrian experience in Boston, don't make people walk on the street at all. Make them walk above it, or below it. I'm talking about a system like the Minneapolis Skyway, the Montreal Underground City, or any one of a dozen other systems across the globe. A system of walkways and public areas that are in fully-enclosed spaces.

Boston already has a small version of this in the connecting walkways between the Prudential Mall, the Copley Mall, and the Westin Hotel. It's a very handy and pleasant way to walk about five or six blocks in total comfort. Similarly, the system of tunnels under MIT's campus, (PDF) while inherently limited to just serving the MIT area, is also very handy during the winter.

And it's also has the potential to be a prime driver of commerce. Not so much in a true "mall" sense, but you could easily have lots of little news-stand and Dunkin' Donuts kiosks (perfect for commuting times) and some CVS's sprinkled around. Maybe even some mini-supermarkets so you could shop for your dinner ingredients on your way home.

I don't deny this is would not be an inexpensive system to implement. But I would argue that it's probably less expensive than many would think. There's a tremendous amount of public interior space in many buildings that is poorly leveraged at the moment, but could be (relatively easily) connected via a skywalk. Or just renovate the miles of tunnels under Boston that are often just sitting abandoned at the moment.

These tunnels wouldn't even necessarily have to be open 24/7, either. Minneapolis's is not and it works fine. All they have to be is well-lit, well-ventilated (but not open-air) and reasonably clean, and people will use them in droves.

FCC approves XM & Sirius merger. World to end at high noon.

Recently I accused FCC commissioner Jonathan Edelstein of "selling out" his normally-left-leaning values, in that he was willing to approve the XM-Sirius merger if various conditions were met. Conditions that were stricter than what had been originally proposed, but frankly, were ultimately meaningless in the face of a government-sanctioned monopoly...which is what XM/Sirius are.

I personally feel this merger is bad news no matter what conditions are imposed, hence my feelings about Edelstein.

Well, I give Edelstein some credit back. When it became apparent that fellow Commissioner Tate was the real sellout and cast the swing vote in favor of the merger...WITHOUT the extra conditions...Edelstein voted against it, after all.

This is still horrible news, but at least Edelstein gets some street cred back.

Quick reminder: both XM and Sirius have been paying quite a lot of money to NPR and other public radio content providers for the rights to air said pubradio programming. With a monopoly in place, you can bet that gravy train will be coming to an abrupt end pretty soon. This is bad news since that revenue was helping a lot to pay for other new initiatives, and it couldn't come at a worse time overall-economy-wise.

BTW, technically this is not over just yet. Various factions - like the NAB and NPR - can and no doubt will sue to block the merger. The merger will almost certainly be frozen until the court case is resolved, which will take months or years. In other words, long enough to see a new President into office. If Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama wins, by law that will shift the makeup of the five FCC commissioners, from three Republicans and two Democrats, to the reverse of that. It might even force the current FCC commissioner/chairman, right-wing, secrecy-obsessed, and under-Congressional-investigation Kevin Martin, out entirely.

Needless to say, an FCC commission with a Democratic makeup might be a lot more inclined to block the XM-Sirius merger. Even with Obama in the White House, I wouldn't take it to the bank, but it could happen. We'll see...

The FCC sells out to Mel

I guess we know where Jonathan Adelstein's bread is really buttered. Adelstein, a Democrat appointee to the five-member FCC board of commissioners, is usually known for being a rather "liberal" member, often taking any stance that opposes "big media" from getting any bigger.

Well today he sold out. Oh sure, he's trying to extract a bunch of conditions of the deal...and I give him props for one of the conditions being that any satradio receiver has to include an AM/FM tuner (no word on if that tuner has be HD Radio-compatible as well...that'd be nice if it were).

But ultimately this is still two big companies becoming a sanctioned monopoly. Our government has a bad history of "regulating" monopolies. And I don't care what price restrictions or channel reservations you insist a merged XM-Sirius have...ultimately the consumer is going to get screwed. You'll see more ads. You'll see lower programming quality. You'll see cheap, disposable talent. And, yes, eventually you will see higher monthly subscription fees.

In essence, you'll see what happened to AM and FM radio when the FCC lifted the ownership restrictions on that: the entire industry went to hell. Well, okay, the industry was already in hell...but it went from the third circle straight to the tenth, ya know?

Congratulations, Mr. Adelstein...you just made a deal with the devil. Now go wash your hands.

Boston Roommates : Five's a Crowd

So Boston finally decided to do something about slumlord converting 2 bedroom apartments into six bed places by changing every single room into a bedroom, shoving as many students in there as possible, and jacking up the rent. New rule is: no more than four non-family members to a place.

Slumlords are, not surprisingly, frantically shoveling the bulls**t trying to fight the measure. Fortunately they lost and it looks like the rule is now the law in Boston, but check out this gem in the Boston Globe article on the issue:

Some property owners denounced the plan as unenforceable and said it would backfire by deepening a housing shortage that would drive up rents.

They urged the city to focus on enforcing other occupancy codes and on cracking down on absentee landlords, rather than restricting their property rights and ability to turn a profit.

"If you reduce my five-bedroom to four, I'll just raise the rent to what I would have gotten," said Greg Hummel, a Brighton property owner. "And if students can't afford it, do you think the Starbucks crowd will pay any less?"

How do you know if a landlord with student renters is lying? His lips are moving.

Let's take a slightly closer look at Mr. Hummel's assertion, marked in bold (my emphasis) above. A look at Boston Craigslist on Thursday March 13th, with search term "Allston" (a somewhat-grungy neighborhood, popular with students) and set to 5 beds yields many entries. The average seems to be around $3800/month.

So that's $760/mo per roommate....$3800 divided by five.

Now let's reduce it to only four roommates; $3800 divided by four means it's $950/month.

!!!!!!

Yeah, you really think anyone's going to pay almost a grand a month for that craphole in Allston?!?! Good luck on that, pal. That much per month gets you a place in generally-much-nicer Central Square or Cambridgeport in Cambridge...or even Coolidge Corner in Brookline.

Is Chris Lydon a McCain fan?

Today on my regular blog trawling I checked out Christopher Lydon's Radio Open Source site and got a bit of a surprise: an ad for John McCain For President. Click the image to the right to see a full size version.

I'm hardly a bosum buddy of Chris, but I have worked with him a bit here and there. I wouldn't have pegged him as a McCain supporter, but neither would I guess that he wouldn't be, either. Hell, Chris might not even know about the ad...at the bottom it says "Ads by Google" and, IIRC, the individual blog has little control over those ads.

Regardless, my initial reaction was that it was pretty inappropriate for a journalist/talk-show host's site to have a political ad for any candidate. Impartiality and all that, you know?

Then I mused a bit more and wondered really if it was all that inappropriate. Chris certainly has a long history as a traditional journalist, but technically he's not a radio or TV journalist anyone - he's purely on the web, and like it or not, the rules are somewhat different for web journalists. Primarily because of the odd phenomena where you have so little control over what ads are delivered on your site, and yet most people know that and are, consciously at least, reasonably comfortable divorcing their opinion of your ads and their opinion of your work. Of course, how successful at unconsciously divorcing those two issues is open to debate, and that's why I think most journalists lean towards avoiding the issue entirely.

Why the Media is Failing

So apparently Mitt Romney has won the Michigan primaries. sigh

From 1996 until 2007, I lived in Boston...capital of Massachusetts. From 2003 to 2007, Romney was Governor of Massachusetts. Massachusetts is often referred to as not just a "Blue State", but the "Bluest State"...mostly because of the whole gay marriage thing, but it is generally a pretty liberal state, even if Bush got 37% of the vote in 2004 there.

So as you might imagine, Romney didn't exactly win the gubernatorial race by being a right wing "Christian" conservative. He won it essentially by saying he was a centrist and by support for abortion rights, gay rights, and by "raising taxes" (technically it's jacking the fees, but if you have to pay it either way, does it matter). It didn't hurt that his opponent was Shannon O'Brien (who?)

Now for us Bostonians, and Massachusetts denizens as a whole, from day one we all knew Romney was a slick-haired used-car salesman who would say and do anything to get elected so he could springboard from Beacon Hill to the US Presidency. He muscled sitting (and "Acting") Governor Jane Swift, also a Republican, out of the way so he could run. Pretty nasty stuff. And he proceeded to spend the next four years putting style way the hell over substance on everything from gay marriage to the Big Dig. This man would say ANYTHING he wanted to win whatever battle he was fighting at the moment, no matter how blatantly it contradicted anything he'd said before. See folks, flip-flopping isn't only a Democrat thing when it comes to major Massachusetts politicians.

So when Romney announced he was running for Prez, most of us merely groaned and wondered why he waited as long as he did to officially announce it since he'd essentially been telling us since January of 2003, and shouting it since 2005 in his constant attacks on Massachusetts while still Governor (classy, Mitt)

Yet while I know all this as a matter of routine, my co-worker...a radio news reporter here in upstate New York...tells me that generally he didn't know anything about Romney until about six or eight months ago when the national media started picking up on him, and even now knows virtually nothing about his record as a Massachusetts politician; much less what most Massachusetts residents actually think of Romney. Namely, that he sucked so bad that his hand-picked successor (Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey) got her ass whipped by a political neophyte who's proven very inept in office.

So why the hell isn't Romney's record, or lack thereof, being dissected on the national stage? Why aren't news organizations showing how Mitt's "business leadership" killed a woman through pathetic mismanagement. Why hasn't the media shown that you can't trust a word Mitt says??

sigh I suppose this is true of all Presidential contenders. I imagine Obama's foes in Illinois are shaking their heads about his success and wondering how the country doesn't know about X, Y or Z. Perhaps that's why Hillary gets such vitriol; she's already been in the White House for eight years; we know exactly what she'll do in there and it scares the crap out of most of us. With everyone else, we can tell ourselves comforting little white lies because we don't know them well enough to know better.

Clear Channel's Minot Story Just Won't Die

This post by esteemed media critic Dan Kennedy references the infamous poison gas event in Minot, N.D. in 2002. I like Dan's blog a lot, so I was glad to see that at least he was thorough enough to link to a site that explains why Minot was the result of a poorly-implemented and -executed state/local emergency plan moreso than because Clear Channel owned all the commercial stations in Minot.

But good God, man...will this story ever DIE?? It's been five years and we're still beating this dead horse; and I for one find it interesting that nobody attacks Prairie Public Radio, the local NPR outlet, for not providing any real-time information about the event. But I digress...

My point here is that Dan was lamenting FCC Dark Lord Chairman Kevin Martin rammed through deregulation of newspaper and TV/radio station ownership, and that supposedly Minot was an example of the bad things that happen with deregulation. Frankly, Minot is a poor example to cite here. Clear Channel's cost savings from consolidation is probably what let them afford to have at least one token air staff person in the studio that fateful night. The rest were unattended not because of consolidation, but because of computer technology doing the same job for a lot less money. Even independent/local-owned stations make extensive use of computers to replace DJ's...look at uber-local WJIB 740AM, which is often cited as a "good example" of a local station. WJIB has no DJ's at all...it's all just computer automation set up by the owner, Bob Bittner. Before computers, it was Bob's "famous" VCR tapes and cart machines. I don't begrudge Bob that at all, mind you. I'm just pointing out the facts.

Frankly, a better example about how consolidation has hurt localism is the $10,000 fines that WCHC (College of the Holy Cross) and WERS (Emerson College) received from the FCC for public file violations during the most recent round of FCC license renewal.

Sound odd? I'll explain:

The FCC requires all radio stations to file for renewal of their licenses from the FCC every seven or eight years (it keeps changing). As part of that renewal, you must certify that your station has followed all FCC rules during the previous license period. You're supposed to tell the truth, because if you lie on a federal form, it's a felony...something your license holder (the parent college) does not like being put at risk of. But many, MANY college radio stations...even those with their act together like WERS...often have screwed up something in their public file at some point over a seven year period. It's pretty easy to do - the public file rules are rather arcane.

So many stations did tell the truth and admitted some violation of the public file rules. Many then explained what they'd done to correct the problem (sometimes years ago). And the FCC went ahead and fined them $10,000 for their honesty. Mind you, the context here is that the FCC never went after the dozens of stations (some were commercial conglomerates, some commercial independents, some non-commercial...it wasn't just Clear Channel) that lied on their forms and got away with it and never got any fine at all. Great example to set there, Mr. FCC.

Here's where this gets interesting: the renewals are staggered over five years, with stations in different clusters of States, so as not to overwhelm the system. During the first round, the public uproar over deregulation had not taken hold as much as it did by the later rounds...so the FCC kept upping the ante with these public file violation fines. In the first round, stations that admitted to violations got a $4000 fine. Later rounds got a $5000 or $7000 fine. By the time we got to stations in Massachusetts (the fourth round) it was $10,000. It's not like the stations in later rounds could do anything to "fix" the problem in the face of higher fines; the problems all occurred years before the renewals started.

No, the fines just kept getting higher because the FCC was facing more and more criticism about media deregulation...and this was their "solution" for it, since the FCC feels the public file is how they judge stations on localism.

Ergo, thanks to the sins of deregulation, two good college radio stations got shafted for being honest whereas some big commercial conglomerates got away with lying through their teeth. Taken more broadly, because deregulation has led to such huge corporate entities, the FCC has been forced to up the ante on its penalties for them to have any teeth with these billion-dollar companies. Unfortunately it means that a slap on the wrist to Clear Channel could be a death knell to a small college or public radio station...and these stations are self-censoring themselves heavily as a result.

That's the real problem with deregulation - the greater regulation of ideas.

Speaking of Overly-Cutesy Marketing

My blog posts are getting prescient! I just talked about how marketing for our soon-to-be-new station, WITH, could easily drive off a cliff by being too "clever".

Then last night, my wife shows me a flyer confirming her voter registration in Monroe County, New York. At the top of the flyer, in a big bold logo, it says "You're Right to Vote"

My wife was an English major at a very liberal arts University. And trust me, once that stuff gets in your blood, you never get it out. She was completely confused and fairly convinced that they'd made a giant typo with "You're" (as in, it should've been "Your").

I, being a political junkie (another thing that gets in your blood) immediately saw what I thought was inappropriate political bias by using the phrase "right" in an electoral mailing (as in, "right-wing" conservative).

Even if both of us are completely wrong...a distinct possibility...this is clearly a case of marketing running amok by trying to be "too clever". I suspect someone thought it'd be cool to send a message that it's both your God-given right to exercise voter choice and also tell people it's a good thing to vote (aka "you're on the right/correct side of things").

I suppose it is clever, but it's trying too hard. I think there's two layers of cleverness and that destroys the logic too much to make it easy to recognize the cleverness. For example, the clever misspelling of "You're" changes the meaning of "right" so much that it makes hard to reconcile. I don't think you can have only one layer of cleverness in this particular phrase, so I don't have a real way to "fix" this slogan without discarding it entirely...which admittedly I'm loathe to do since I respect thoughtful attempts at cleverness.

But either way, this one just didn't work for me or my wife. God only knows how many other people it didn't work for, either.

Kucinich Just Got My Vote

Okay, maybe not for real...but after seeing Kucinich's appearance on the Colbert Report, and his proof that Stephen Colbert is literally in his pocket...hell, it's gonna be tough not to vote for him. Regardless of her political skills or anything else about her...I'd like to Clinton or Edwards pull off this amazingly classy act of self-depreciation as well as Dennis just did. I just don't see her capable of it. Obama, maybe, or Huckabee for sure, but nobody else.

I'll post a video clip as soon as I can find one; the whole bit is chuckle-worthy but there's two parts that had me bust-a-gut laughing.

UPDATE: As promised, here's a YouTube link to the clip.

Keep the politicians out of PBS, please

(see update at bottom)

From today's Current.org"Elsewhere on the Web" roundup...

Leaders of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with public TV executives on Tuesday to discuss their concerns about the absence of Latino-American veterans in The War, Ken Burns' 14-hour World War II documentary series slated for a PBS debut in September. Lawmakers may try to restrict pubTV's federal funding if PBS doesn't address their concerns, according to Politico, a newspaper and website covering the Washington, D.C., political scene. "The bottom line is we also have the right to do what we can economically with PBS to show our displeasure," said Rep. Ciro Rodriguez (D-Texas). "I hope it won't come to that."

(emphasis added)

I try to stay away from politics in this blog. Certainly anyone who knows me knows I'm obnoxiously political enough in person...I don't need to infect the blogosphere, too. But this hits close to home so I'll allow myself the indulgence.

Anyways, my simple retort to Rep. Rodriguez is: No, you don't have that right.

One of the founding principles of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was to isolate PBS and NPR from political influence. In other words, you can't let politicians decide what gets on the air. Because when the pol you like gets his/her way this week on the air... the pol you hate gets it next week.

Generally speaking I don't like the idea of Congress managing anything (yes, even wars) through the purse strings. Either pass a law regulating something a certain way or just leave it the hell alone. Legislating through budgeting might be politically proper...but there's just something about it that feels wishy-washy to me. Like avoiding responsibility by adding a layer of deniability to the whole thing. "We're not REALLY telling you what to put on the air, we're just telling you we'll destroy your entire budget if you don't put what we want on the air." To a journalist, that's called a "chilling effect" and there's a reason why any competent news agency works hard to avoid it.

We now return to the usual blog posts that lay off the political rants. :-)

UPDATE: Current is reporting that several groups are protesting this issue, and that the Albuquerque Journal has an editorial protesting Burns' not including more Latinos in The War. This I can completely get behind. These people feel they have a legitimate gripe, and they're spreading the word about it. I welcome such things, even though I have no opinion on the subject since I really don't know enough about Latino involvement in World War II to form a coherent opinion (for the record, I'm inclined to agree with the protesters, but I also tend to think of Burns as a pretty thorough guy when it comes to documentaries).

My original chief gripe here is that people were (are?) trying to "pull an end run" around PBS by going to Congress and using scare tactics about PBS's budget. Have we learned nothing from the supposed efforts towards "balance" by Ken Tomlinson? Politicians make poor editorial gatekeepers - they're too beholden to popular public opinion. Instead, write letters to the editor. Produce your own documentary. Make complaints to PBS management and/or their ombudsman. But please, for ALL our sakes, keep Congress out of it!