We don't get Howard Stern here in the Sanitary State of Oklahoma, and I don't feel particularly put out about it: it's always seemed to me that the more the envelope is pushed, the weaker it becomes, and eventually everyone is going to be disgusted.

So I didn't shed quite so many tears over the demise of Opie and Anthony as did the OmbudsGod, and while the God's conclusion ("It's high time for the FCC to get out of the business of abridging freedom of speech on the airwaves") seems fairly inarguable, I still tend to believe that if anything goes, the audience goes — elsewhere.

As usual, James Lileks is on the case:

And I don't think you have to be suffering from creeping oldfarthood to believe this, either.

There's a progress report at BlogCritics on over-the-air digital radio, for which the FCC is expected to declare an official standard tomorrow.

I, for one, don't care. Radio in this country has become far more of a vast wasteland than Newton Minow ever imagined for television; the Same Old Crap in crisp digital sound is still, well, the Same Old Crap. And it probably won't be all that crisp, either; the vast majority of FM stations, at least near me, compress their signal beyond all understanding in a desperate attempt to push a couple miles farther into the sticks, and I have no reason to think they're going to mend their ways. And even if you think that digital will bring music back to the AM band, which it very well may, how much Clear Channel-approved music is even worth listening to these days?

So I pass until it's mandatory. I got to my middle twenties without ever owning a color TV; assuming I don't drop dead from overwork and/or boredom in the interim, I can get to my middle fifties without ever owning a digital radio.

Chip Kelley has finally retired from 100000watts.com, perhaps the most extensive guide to AM, FM and TV broadcast stations in the US. I am happy to report that the site is now in the capable hands of Scott Fybush, keeper of NorthEast Radio Watch and publisher of the annual Tower Site Calendar for true radio obsessives. (The change apparently took place during the summer, but Kelley's email box was still taking updates from the field, and the Official Announcement is only just now appearing.) For those of us for whom the minutiae of broadcasting are actually more interesting than the programming, this is good news indeed.

Well, of course, there isn't any hip-hop shortage — basically, I think we're up to our aching ears in the stuff — but Russell Perry, who owns the only "urban"-formatted radio station in this market, a 1000-watt AM daytimer, has been wanting to add an FM facility for ages. There is, however, no room on the dial.

Now OKCityRadio.com reports that Perry has acquired a small string of stations in the southwest part of the state, and that the northernmost of those stations, KRPT-FM in Anadarko, has applied for a power boost from 75kw to 100kw and a tower move to south of Weatherford. This, I don't think, is enough to make much of an improvement in the station's Oklahoma City metro coverage; the existing FM facility in Weatherford, with 69kw, barely makes it in. Extreme audio compression might help, but not much. It should be interesting to see how this develops.

Last weekend I mentioned that local AM-station operator Russell Perry was acquiring a group of stations in the southwest portion of the state, and opined that moving the nearest one closer to the Oklahoma City market, as Perry has requested, would probably not work.

The guys at RadioEmporium.net have developed a coverage map for the proposed new facility, and it looks to me like reception on the east side of Oklahoma City, presumably the target audience for an urban-formatted station (Perry's specialty), will be marginal at best. Then again, it is probably not wise to bet against Russell Perry; he is, after all, making money from a 1,000-watt AM daytimer.

And they were right.

Renaissance Radio moved a faltering AM station out of Wichita Falls and into Farmersville, pointed it towards the Dallas/Fort Worth MetroWhatever, renamed it KCAF — "Café 990" — and instituted something previously unheard, maybe even unheard of: a talk format aimed specifically at women.

That was Monday. Thursday KCAF was dead, loans to finance the station's immediate post-startup period having fallen through, and now if you tune into 990, you get the satellite feed from Radio America.

Perhaps it's a good thing this station was in Texas. Had it been located in, say, California, there might have been lawsuits filed by anguished listeners demanding that the station remain on the air, money or no money.

(12:20 pm: Fixed some sloppy syntax.)

The Tylers never give up.

Having successfully relocated FM stations from Ada to Newcastle (KKNG, 93.3) and from Clinton to Okarche (KTUZ, 106.7) to reach the Oklahoma City market, the Tyler group had up to now been stymied in its efforts to move its Tishomingo station (KTSH, 99.7) to Tuttle.

The FCC, noting that there is now adequate service to Tishomingo from another station, has given its tentative blessing [link to Adobe Acrobat file] to the KTSH move, with a couple of kickers: Tyler must bear the expense of moving two other stations to other frequencies. KXLS in Alva will jump slightly, from 99.7 to 99.9, and KWFX in Woodward will move from 100.1 to 106.3. And Tyler will be allowed to operate in Tuttle with only 10,500 watts, less than half the power authorized in Tishomingo. This action dooms K259AM, a 75-watt translator on 99.7 rebroadcasting KLVV in Ponca City, though this is probably no big deal since the same programming is carried by Oklahoma City's KYLV at 88.9 with 4400 watts.

No, I don't know what format Tyler is planning, though it's likely not the sort-of-classical format they've been running down by the Red River the last couple of years. And while I've been railing against this sort of thing for years now, the FCC apparently feels that if these stations aren't allowed to play Musical Frequencies now and then, some of them will wither and die. Meanwhile, local radio continues its inexorable march to Metro Radio, shedding every last vestige of community in a desperate search for an audience that is mostly bored with existing offerings. No way can this be a Good Thing.

Christmas music is bad enough on the 24th of December. On the 14th of November it is an abomination. Now add three dollops of synthetic Nashville twang, and you have "The Bull's Country Christmas", the Bull in question being radio station KQBL. There's just one catch: this isn't airing on KQBL, but on KMMZ, the erstwhile "Memories 96.9".

This much I know: Citadel, one of three major group owners in town (the others being Renda and — gag — Clear Channel), has negotiated a Local Marketing Agreement with Chisholm Trail Broadcasting, the smallish state chain which owns KMMZ. Under the LMA, Citadel will assume responsibility for programming the station, in exchange for an undisclosed percentage of revenues.

This much is speculation: Citadel will move KQBL's programming to 96.9 on or about 26 December. The alt-rock "Spy" stuff, currently heard at night on WWLS-FM (105.3), will take over at 104.9. Evenings on WWLS-FM will return to simulcasting its AM facility, known familiarly as "The Sports Animal".

Why is this happening? I suppose it's another splash in the ongoing pissing contest between Citadel and Clear Channel. And it gets better: The Oklahoma Publishing Company has agreed to sell WKY, the oldest AM in town (it goes back 80 years or so, and OPUBCO has owned it for 74 of those years), to (wait for it) Citadel. WKY is currently programmed under an LMA by, you guessed it, Clear Channel.

In the meantime, Renda's three stations are all comfortably perched in the top six, and they couldn't care less about any of this stuff. Nor do I, really, except for its amusement value, since most of my radio listening is to that weird NPR and PRI stuff.

The Citadel/Clear Channel pissing contest goes on.

I mistyped the URL for KQBL, Citadel's country station in Oklahoma City, which is www.1049kbull.com, as www.kbull1049.com, and got sent to KTST, one of Clear Channel's two country stations in the market.

Incidentally, neither kqbl.com nor ktst.com will take you to either station site.

Dave Mandl asks How Awful Is the Radio in Your City?, and provides a handy checklist.

No, I haven't done the math. One of the prerequisites is actually listening to the radio for four consecutive hours. This is simply not done in Oklahoma City, except by those who have nothing to lose by brain damage.

My cable company, and probably also yours, is doing the hard-sell on the Digital Cable package, which doesn't actually carry digital television but which does contain about 400 channels, some of which you wouldn't watch if they put a gun to your head.

Hmmm....

Top Ten Least Popular Cable Channels

  10. VH3
    9. Assyrian Movie Classics
    8. ESPN for Dwarves
    7. Tragedy Central
    6. CNMSNBFDNBC
    5. Traffic Court TV
    4. Vegetable Planet
    3. Narc at Nite
    2. The Yahtzee Channel
    1. SCM (Sandler Classic Movies)

Nothing essential here, I should think.

The evolution (or maybe "mutation") of Citadel Radio's KQBL continues apace. In a move that surprises absolutely no one, "104.9 The Bull" will move after Christmas to 96.9, which is currently running something called "The Bull's Oklahoma Christmas" 24/7. What is yet unknown is the fate of the 104.9 facility. Will Citadel revive its K-Spy alt-rock format, last heard (barely) at 105.3? Will the Sports Animal return with a simulcast of WWLS-AM 640? Is something entirely different in the works? Nobody is saying for sure — yet.

As expected, Citadel Broadcasting bounced around some of its FM facilities over the holiday. The K-Bull country format at KQBL 104.9 has relocated to 96.9, previously the home of soft-rock KMMZ. The slot at 104.9 has been filled with a simulcast of WWLS AM 640, the Sports Animal, which vacates 105.3. And 105.3 is now the full-time home of The Spy, playing alt-rock, which had been sharing space with the Sports Animal.

What was not expected was that Citadel would fill all its FM slots, including all of the above plus hot-AC KYIS 98.9 and active-rock KATT 100.5, with the first full day of The Spy, before the new lineup kicked in this morning.

I'm not sure what to make of all this, though anything that annoys Clear Channel has to be a Good Thing.

Radio station KOMA has been vending oldies for some time now, both on FM and on AM. It's not purely a simulcast: the AM breaks away for five minutes of CBS news at the top of the hour, something the FM listeners presumably don't want. (The AM also carries Bill O'Reilly's Radio Factor weekdays.) None of this presents a problem, except that the AM breakaway is abrupt; if there happens to be a song playing, too bad. And five minutes later, when the FM simulcast is restored, it's just as abrupt.

Now when I was growing up, some actual thought was put into how to segue into the news. Most of my listening in the early-to-middle-Sixties was straight Top 40 stuff, informed (this being South Carolina) by heavy R&B influences, and what was usually chosen as a suitable Last Song of the Segment was something with a fairly ornate outro that could be talked over during its last couple of seconds. The archetype, I'd say, might be "Summer in the City" by the Lovin' Spoonful, which gathers its forces for one final blast of electrified ferocity before settling into a quick fade. Cold endings usually did not work well in this context.

None of this matters particularly in 2003, I suppose. And the FM facility probably draws four or five times the listeners of the AM outlet — at least within the market area. But KOMA pumps out 50,000 watts due west and north. With much of the AM band given over to talkers and sports, it's one of the few actual music stations you can pick up in the middle of nowhere at four in the morning, and I suspect someone else, hundreds of miles away, is just as annoyed by this station's sloppy practices as I am.

The radio-listing site 100000watts.com reports a minor Texas contretemps: the Spanish-language simulcast of KESS (AM) Fort Worth/KDXX (FM) Lewisville, inaugurated this past Wednesday as "La Raza 107.9", was abruptly rebranded on Thursday as "La Que Buena".

Somehow, I find it hard to believe that Hispanic Broadcasting, which operates these stations (the company is not actually owned by persons of Hispanic extraction, but someone should have known this), wasn't aware that using the name "La Raza" might have repercussions. Or maybe they all drive Chevrolet Novas.

It's official: Renda Broadcasting's KOMA will drop the oldies on the AM side and switch to news/talk some time next month. How well they will fare is anyone's guess. KTOK, a Clear Channel station which has had this format to itself up to now, has a strong syndicated lineup (including Rush Limbaugh) but a decidedly weak news operation. And both stations' ointments have a fly to deal with: WKY, once its acquisition by Citadel is approved by the Feds, is also going news/talk. The Oklahoma City market (population about one million) can probably support two stations with this format, but three? The markets closest to Oklahoma City in size — Rochester (New York) and Louisville — have only one each. Then again, those stations score top ratings, which KTOK doesn't.

The radio/TV-listing site 100000watts.com reports that W52CT, a low-power TV station on channel 52 (natch) in Nashville, has become an affiliate of the America One network. Previously, the only thing the station had been showing was the usual color-bar test pattern.

For nine years.

I wonder if they beat out Donahue in the ratings.

Apparently somebody wants oldies on 1520. In the wake of KOMA's announcement that they will drop their musical programming on the AM band in favor of news-talk, WWKB in Buffalo will attempt to recreate their Top 40 glory days (when they were WKBW) as KB1520.

Directional antenna arrays, of course, still exist, so bereaved KOMA listeners will likely have no luck trying to tune in WWKB. Still, it's nice to know someone thinks the format is still viable in 2003, nearly forty years after Beatlemania.

It was last Saturday, and word had just come down the wire that Columbia was in trouble. Management at KOMA radio, which was getting ready to drop its oldies format (still carried on KOMA-FM) for news/talk the following Monday, apparently decided that if they were going to build any credibility as a news operation, they had to cover Columbia, and damn the official schedule.

And so they did, staying with the story most of the day, and when the regular schedule began on Monday morning, I suspect they had a lot more listeners on board than they'd originally anticipated.

So how did they do? The lineup hews pretty close to what you'd expect from a station of this type, and pretty close to that of rival KTOK. For some reason, KOMA thinks it takes a two-person anchor team in morning drive, but only one in the afternoon, which I attribute to lingering morning-zoo philosophy. Local personality Carole Arnold, bounced by KTOK a few years back, has the late-morning talk slot. After an hour of news at noon, Bill O'Reilly's Radio Factor slides in, two hours of which run directly opposite Rush Limbaugh on KTOK. (Bottom line: Evenly matched, bile-wise, but Rush is usually funnier.) The afternoon news block is nothing special. Early evenings are given over to Laura Ingraham, who is the answer to the question "What if there were someone like Ann Coulter, only normal?" After midnight is a bit of weirdness called The Edge, a sort of macrobiotic Art Bell.

A couple of tweaks I would suggest to KOMA as they try to build a news powerhouse on a budget:

• Is it really necessary for the guy in the traffic helicopter to read off promos for AT&T Wireless? For that matter, is it really necessary to have a guy in the traffic helicopter? This ain't New York or Los Angeles. The same intersections are clogged every day at the same time; only the accident locations are different. And hardly anyone in these parts will make a route change to avoid a wreck — most of the time, I think they actually want to see it.

• The KOMA News Web site is indistinguishable from your average fifth-grader's Tripod or Geocities page. I'm not saying you should tart it up with Clear Channel-styled bombast, but this is just hideous.
  

That's the news, as Dennis Miller would say, and I am outta here.

Tyler Broadcasting, this radio market's most avid rim-shooter, is exhuming another set of call letters from years gone by. The new KOCY (1560) supersedes the old KWCO in Chickasha, which, once the FCC signs the papers, will be moving to Del City. KWCO-FM (105.5) remains behind, probably because there's no practical way to sandwich it between existing 105.3 and 105.7 facilities. What will be programmed on the new KOCY? Nobody's saying yet.

This is the third call to be reborn in the Oklahoma City market in recent years. KKNG, now designating Tyler's classic-country station at 93.3, used to be a beautiful-music-turned-adult-contemporary station at 92.5 (now KOMA-FM). And KEBC (1340, former home of, yes, KOCY) used to (per the slogan, anyway) stand for "Keep Every Body Country" when it was used for a country station owned by (yes!) Tyler. Plus ça change and all that.

I gripe a lot about local radio, but the fact is, all 15 of my automotive presets (five AM, ten FM) are filled, and usually there's a reason for each and every one of them: I normally don't have much use for talker WKY, but they've been carrying the games of the Oklahoma RedHawks baseball club, so they get a button. (Of course, I'll be at The Brick when the Albuquerque Isotopes come to town.)

It's hard to think about baseball, though, when the third batch of freezing drizzle in four days is descending upon you; it's a whole different type of slider.

LBJS Broadcasting, the six-station group in Austin controlled by the family of Lady Bird Johnson, is selling out. Emmis Communications, owner of 21 radio stations and Texas Monthly magazine, is buying the Johnson family's 50.1% interest for $105 million. (The S in LBJS, David and Bob Sinclair, retain their 49.9% equity, but Emmis has an option to buy them out after five years.)

Originally, there was just the one station: KTBC, a low-powered AM daytimer acquired by Lady Bird for $17,500 in 1943. Being married to a Congressman paid off, though; the FCC soon approved an upgrade to full-time operation and 5000 watts. KTBC-TV soon followed, and by some strange coincidence it was the only commercial VHF TV allocation for Austin; competitors were forced to the struggling UHF band. (KTBC-TV is now owned by Fox Television Stations; the allocations haven't changed, though a UPN affiliate parked itself on channel 2 out in Fredericksburg, hoping to get audience from both Austin and San Antonio.)

The sale is subject to FCC approval, though no objections are expected. Flagship stations KLBJ-AM (formerly KTBC) and KLBJ-FM will retain their call letters.

If the phrase "Clear Channel" makes you break out in hives, this is for you.

In its last couple of years before it packs up and moves to Dallas to play with the big boys, AM daytimer KJON, just about the last station in Anadarko (KRPT-FM is moving northward toward the Oklahoma City market), has decided to stick to what it likes, and screw the consultants and their Armani-suited ilk.

So KJON's country format eschews the Shanias and the Faiths and the Dixie Chicks and plays stuff from the age of 78s, when you could still have a first name like "Red", when people heard the Wabash Cannonball and knew it was a train. The station manager says he's playing for guys on tractors, and you gotta believe it's true.

The Daily Oklahoman has a piece about KJON today, and it's worth your time even if Webb Pierce and Ernest Tubb don't mean a thing to you, simply because it illustrates the point that "non-corporate" radio does not necessarily mean stuff like NPR, which is waiting on a check from Archer Daniels Midland even as we speak, nor does it inevitably imply a staff with a whiter-shade-of-pale complexion from sitting in their bedrooms for ten years playing Nick Drake records.

Just in case the events of the week have left you wondering:

You've just read the smooth, well-modulated words of National Public Radio ombudsman Godfrey Dvorak.

Well, okay, maybe you haven't.

For Saint Paul, there's no one quite like Minnesota Public Radio's Cathy Wurzer:

Diane Rehm's kid sister?

Well, the Big News/Talk War lasted barely longer than the war in Iraq: not only did KOMA, the new kid on the news block, fail to dislodge the dominant KTOK, but KTOK actually picked up almost two share points, finishing at the top of the ratings for the first time in ages. (KOMA doesn't even have two share points yet.)

It wasn't all sweetness and light for KTOK owner Clear Channel, though: their country stations are floundering and their CHR outlet isn't doing well enough to be floundering. Still, you take your points where you can, and CC's sort-of-alternative station is doing surprisingly well.

Over at rival Citadel, there's little to cheer about, what with the KATT still in the doldrums and the hotly-hyped Bull coming across like underdone veal. I give it a month before the plug is pulled and another format is slapped on the frequency. And speaking of slap, someone ought to slap Citadel's audio people, if they have any; their stations don't even sound good on crappy radios, let alone on the high-fidelity stuff. I can forgive this on The Spy, which broadcasts with 3 watts from somewhere out in Utah or something, but there's no excuse for the big boys.

Meanwhile, Renda, whose FMs are all doing decently — classic-rock KRXO dropped a notch but is still #2 — must be wondering about what it's done to KOMA, and what it's going to take to make some headway in the AM talk circus against a seemingly-revitalized KTOK and whatever the hell Citadel is doing with WKY. At the very least, it's going to take a fair amount of time: news/talk listeners, as a group, tend to be fairly loyal to their chosen stations, and KTOK has a huge head start. Add to this the fact that Clear Channel controls many of the top syndicated talk shows and is loath to give them up to a crosstown rival — I suspect the reason CC bumped the daytime Spanish-language programming on tiny KEBC and replaced it with talk was to reduce the number of programs available to KOMA — and I see a long, hard road ahead.

Meanwhile, Tyler, the only sort-of-local cluster, still hasn't announced plans for that move-in from Tishomingo, but waiting for the other shoe to drop is second nature in Oklahoma City radio.

The city of Dallas owns a prime piece of FM broadcast spectrum in north Texas: WRR-FM 101.1, currently broadcasting classical music at 100,000 watts.

How prime is it? Other broadcasters would like to get their hands on it. The city isn't considering selling WRR outright, but the possibility of a move down the dial has presented itself.

A number of proposals have been entertained, but apparently the one most likely to get past the city council is one by Susquehanna Radio, which wants to move its KDBN-FM, currently at 93.3, to 101.1, and fill 93.3 with KRNB-FM from 105.7. The city would receive the 105.7 facility, which runs 93,000 watts from a stick in Wise County, and $60 million.

Downside? Wise County is a long way away — the tower is almost 50 miles northwest of Fort Worth — and even 93 kw will barely reach into the south side of Dallas, to say nothing of the southern suburbs. Since the station is owned by the city, opponents contend, at the very least it should be able to reach the entire city without noise or interference.

The historical record shows many instances where a classical station relocated to an inferior facility in exchange for lots of money; the best-known, perhaps, was the move of Cleveland's WCLV to a 6-kw channel in exurban Lorain. It was argued at the time that the move would help secure the station's then-uncertain future, and maybe it did, but I'd hate to have to try to tune them in from the parking lot at Severance Hall.

The next voice you hear belongs to Lisa S. of Boycott Hollywood:

And, inasmuch as I happen to have a small soapbox to scream from:
Free Cam!

(Limit one Free Cam with regular purchase at participating locations. Tax not included.)

Dawn Olsen says you may as well turn off the radio:

Sounds like an argument for news/talk or classical (which, if I kept an Arbitron diary, would be almost the only things on the page).

I do take issue with one thing she says, though: Clear Channel has been in this market for almost its entire existence, and I doubt seriously they've beaten more than a handful of baby seals.

The Federal Communications Commission, on the expected 3-2 party-line vote, approved some changes to the ownership caps on Big Media, though some restrictions were retained.

Under previous rules, a single entity could own TV stations reaching 35 percent of the national audience. The cap is now 45 percent.

A single entity may own two TV stations in a market with five to seventeen stations; however, only one of them may be among the four top-rated stations in that market. If a market has 18 stations or more, the limit is raised to three. The station total includes both commercial and noncommercial stations, but does not include LPTV facilities. Under the old rule, the FCC permitted an entity to own two television stations in a market if one of the stations was not one of the top four in the ratings and there were at least eight independently owned and operated commercial or noncommercial stations remaining in the market. (Oklahoma City has 12 TV stations; Sinclair Broadcast Group owns KOKH-TV, a Fox affiliate, which is usually among the top four, and KOCB-TV, an affiliate of The WB, which isn't. No one else owns more than a single station in the area.)

Newspaper crossownership continues to be banned in markets with three or fewer TV stations, but is permitted in markets with nine or more. (OPUBCO may now bid to acquire KWTV from the Griffin family.) In markets with four to eight stations, it depends on how many broadcast stations are already owned by the entity.

Radio limits were not changed, though the FCC will now use Arbitron's market research to determine the number of stations in a market. In markets with 45 or more stations, the limit for a single owner is eight, of which no more than five can be on the same band (3 AM and 5 FM would pass muster; 2 AM and 6 FM would not). In markets with from 30 to 44 stations, the limit is seven, four per band; in markets with 15 to 29 stations, it's six, four per band. In smaller markets, the limit is five, three per band. Again, the station total includes commercial and noncommercial stations, but not low-power stations or translators. Oklahoma City fits the 30-to-44 category; Clear Channel and Citadel each own four FMs (and two AMs), and Citadel programs another FM station via a local marketing agreement, but the LMA doesn't count toward Citadel's total. No other broadcast owner is close to being maxed out.

In the early-June numbers, news/talk KTOK still occupies the top slot. Not a whole lot is happening below that; Renda's three FMs are still in the top five, and the KATT continues to slump. At least we can assume Cam Edwards still has a job.

The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee has approved a measure to tighten up the Federal Communications Commission's recent loosening of media-ownership rules, though it's doubtful that the measure will make it through the full Senate, let alone the House.

The bill, sponsored by Fritz Hollings (D-SC) and Ted Stevens (R-AK), would bar newspaper/broadcast crossownership in the same market, drop the 45-percent audience-reach cap back to 35 percent, and require the largest radio station owners to divest some properties. How Hollings, generally regarded as a tool of the entertainment industry, was roped into co-sponsoring this thing is utterly beyond me.

One of the more admirable characteristics of Rocksnobs' DragonAttack is her ability to nail down a definition:

I mention this because last night someone called up KOMA-FM, a formerly-inspiring oldies station, and had the temerity to request a Barry White tune. Now I like Barry White, but Barry White ain't oldies. Yet. So I spun the dial a little further and was treated to Tanya Tucker's "Blood Red and Goin' Down", which ain't oldies either but which can pass for Classic Country.

Of course, DragonAttack is more vexed with her local Classic Rock outlet, which plays too much Zeppelin — and too much already-overplayed Zeppelin at that — but there's an explanation for that. And not the obvious explanation, either:

Which invites a question: Is there still time to change the road they're on? Or should we just change the station?

(Update, 4 July, 4:50 pm: As noted by commenters, Barry White died this morning at the age of 58. What am I bid for a posting about Fred Durst?)

The OkiePundit is displeased with what he finds on the radio dial:

I guess he must be in Tulsa.

Of course, the prevailing definition of "cutting-edge" music requires that it not be played on the radio; if it were, it wouldn't be "cutting-edge", would it?

A ten-acre parcel of land in Dakota County, NE, leased to a Sioux City, Iowa radio station, has apparently been off the county's property tax rolls since 1947.

KWSL radio, an AM sports-talk station currently owned by Clear Channel, leases the plot from the county for $7400 a year, and pays an assessment of $1153 a year which they thought was the property tax but apparently wasn't.

No, they can't go back and demand the station pay up for the past 56 years; the county can collect at most three years' worth. It's a minor snafu at worst, but people who hate Clear Channel will probably automatically assume that the giant radio chain engineered this whole scheme in an effort to pinch pennies, which of course they didn't; Clear Channel didn't even own the station at the time the property fell off the tax rolls.

(Via Fark)

After six months or so of speculation, the new KOCY AM facility at 1560 kHz is on the air, and it's gone Radio Disney.

If you've spent more than twenty minutes watching the current Disney Channel on cable or satellite, you know what this means: bouncy pop aimed just below the middle-school audience. Nothing more ambitious than, say, Avril's "Sk8terboi", but nothing as noxious, or as dripping with innuendo, as you're likely to hear at your regular Top 40 and/or dance outlets either. Having never quite outgrown the Cuff Links and "Tracy", I'll probably wind up saving a button for this station.

KWEY-FM in Weatherford would seem to have it pretty good; they're the only FM in town, they pump out 100,000 watts all over western Oklahoma, and they've got an AM facility to boot.

So why would they want to make themselves over as a lowly 6,000-watt rimshooter in Blanchard? [Adobe Acrobat Reader required; here's a Microsoft Word version.]

The easy answer is "They want a shot at those big-city bucks," but how many of those bucks will they be able to pull? Six kilowatts isn't squat from that far away; indeed, the FCC's proposed change to the FM allocation table states that "the proposed 70 dBu ["city-grade"] signal for a Channel 247A [97.3 MHz] facility at Blanchard [does not cover] any part of any urbanized area." So I'm thinking that maybe they want to sell this station, and they don't think they'll get a buyer out there in Weatherford.

The FCC will take comments on this proposal until 22 September; I'm tempted to weigh in with a simple "What are they, nuts?"

For a medium-sized market, Oklahoma City seems to have an awful lot of weird radio stories.

The latest (found at a thread at Radio-Info.com) involves Ralph Tyler, owner of KTSH in Tishomingo, mentioned before in this space because Tyler had applied to move the station to Tuttle, on the edge of the Oklahoma City metro. (A separate Tyler company, not owned by Ralph Tyler, had successfully moved other stations into the area.)

The FCC apparently discovered that Tyler's acquisition of KTSH from a small Christian broadcaster didn't go quite the way the transfer application claimed, and the resulting consent decree [requires Adobe Acrobat Reader] calls for Tyler to give up the license for the station and to divest himself of his interests in two other stations, one of which is the newly-hatched KOCY. The application to move KTSH to Tuttle will, of course, be dismissed.

Given the fact that blatant violations of so-called "decency" rules will get a station owner a stiff fine at worst, I've got to wonder just how horrendous those misrepresentations in that transfer application really are.

KTOK, the dominant news/talk outlet in this part of the world, has finally figured out how to stream audio. (Okay, they hired a third party to do the scutwork. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

You probably don't need this 24/7 — finding local outlets for Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or even Glenn Beck is a fairly simple task, unless you live thirty thousand feet under Berkeley — but you'll definitely need it for First News with Cam Edwards. (In fact, given KTOK's incredibly-weird antenna pattern, some of us locals need the audio stream sometimes.)

100000watts.com is reporting that WKXP radio in Kingston, New York has switched to an all-Christmas format.

The station recently had a call-letter change (it was previously WBPM), so this could be just a programming stunt in anticipation of a new format, but it's the first week of October, dammit.

(Update, 8 October, 8:40 pm: It was indeed a stunt.)

Well, apparently it was a stunt; WKXP radio in Kingston, New York has now booted the Christmas cheer in favor of a conventional country format. Call them "Kicks 94.3" — unless, of course, you were thinking of calling them something else entirely.

New slogan at news/talk KOMA:

More talk. No rock.

(Dear Cam: It was on a billboard. It's not like I was actually listening to them.)

Oklahoma City is served by two public-radio stations: KGOU handles NPR news programming, talk shows, and jazz in the evenings; KCSC runs classical music more or less 24/7. Culture-wise, this could be considered a boon, but there's an obvious downside to having two public-radio stations: four fundraisers every year. We're between two of them right now, and Doc Searls is contemplating what could, and should, happen in the future:

Both our local stations originate some programming, but much of what they do is the same canned stuff you can get in Tampa or Tacoma. And the fundraisers aren't the long, arduous affairs they used to be: KGOU has trimmed its beg-a-thon from seven days to four with apparently no effect on the volume of donations, which I believe is due at least partly to the fact that no matter how long the scheduled event, there is always a last minute.

Ultimately, I think Congress will kill the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the right wing will present the death of CPB as an ideological triumph, of course, but CPB needs to go, not because it might offend a segment of the population, but because it's an anachronism, and one which adds (albeit only slightly) to the ongoing budget deficits at that. While public radio isn't exactly awash in money, they've learned how to turn a buck just like their rivals on the commercial side of things, and with most public-broadcasting frequencies reserved by long-established FCC rules (KGOU is one of very few public stations on a normally-commercial channel), it's highly unlikely that they're going to be swallowed up by the Clear Channel juggernaut.

When someone turns up an item on my want list that's been on said want list for forty years or so — well, mere email isn't enough.

A shout-out, then, to John Quincy, program director for WTMA/WTMZ in Charleston, South Carolina (and miles around), who in his disguise as mild-mannered archivist and Webmaster Ted Tatman has a lot of stuff from the days when WTMA was the dominant Top 40 station on the Carolina coast, things which I heard zillions of times a day in the Sixties and missed a heck of a lot in the subsequent decades — including the single most elusive 45 I've ever sought, which wasn't even a commercial release in the strict sense but to this day makes for a reliable earworm.

Thanks, Ted. If I find anything in this ol' footlocker that fits your archives, it's yours.

Surely Citadel could have come up with a better slogan for their newest attempt to do something with the 96.9 frequency. (Their previous effort, The Bull, is chipped beef on toast.)

"Bob" plays Classic Hits, whatever that may be. I shall, um, grant them a button for a while and see if I can work up a definition; so far, it sounds nothing like the Canadian stations advertised as Bob. (What I really want in the way of Classic Hits is something like Chicago's The Drive.)

Paul over at Sanity's Edge is a long way (I presume) from Bob FM, but he can identify the target audience just the same:

I used to call this "music for forklift operators," until my daughter started driving a forklift. (Which she doesn't do anymore.)

And, now that I think about it, there probably isn't a radio station in the nation which would actually follow "Radar Love" with the "forgotten song" mentioned in the lyrics.

Longtime readers (both of you) will have noted the name of Todd Storz over in the "Inspirations" section, and whether or not you chose to click on the proffered link, it's probably time I came up with an explanation.

While all sorts of music get played in my house — I spent part of yesterday afternoon sorting through classical LPs, in fact — what dominated my formative years (up until 1969 or so) was the radio format known as Top 40, a concept which was essentially invented by Todd Storz.

Storz based his idea on two observations: first, that radio listeners really did like music on the air, at least as much as they did the dramas and comedy shows of the day, and that in eateries, a handful of songs got the majority of jukebox spins.

With this in mind, Storz, then in his early twenties, bought a daytimer in Omaha and built it into the top-rated non-network station in the entire country, by focusing on music programs and a local Top Ten list. (This is not to be confused with the Top Ten lists from the Home Office in Wahoo, Nebraska.) The Top Ten became the Top 40 in 1953 when Storz acquired a New Orleans station and counterprogrammed against a rival who had a weekly Top 20 show with a program twice as big and twice as long.

Storz went on to acquire other stations, in Kansas City, Minneapolis, Miami, St Louis and (yes!) Oklahoma City, and fine-tuned his format, which by then had spread to other group owners, most notably Gordon McLendon, who operated the fabled KLIF in Dallas. Storz died of a stroke in 1964, only thirty-nine years old; his father, who had been running the business side of the station group, took over the operation and continued to run it for the next twenty years, when the stations were finally sold.

Forty years after his death, Top 40 has mutated into something called Contemporary (often "Contemptible") Hit Radio, and it's time, I think, to give Todd Storz his due. Radio historian Richard Fatherley, who worked at the two Storz stations in Missouri, has proposed that the United States Postal Service honor Storz with a postage stamp. What denomination? Why, 40 cents, of course.

His real name, we are told, is Todd Clem, but the world — or at least the world which listens to shock-jock radio — knows him as Bubba the Love Sponge, and his zany antics/vulgar emissions (choose one) are going to cost his employer three-quarters of a million dollars.

I've never heard Bubba — obviously this isn't the sort of thing that is going to penetrate Oklahoma airwaves (we don't get Howard Stern either) — but I don't think my life is any poorer because of this lack.

Clear Channel Radio CEO John Hogan issued the following statement:

On one level, I'm inclined to believe Hogan; Top 40 radio and its fragmented successors have always been somewhat conservative, if only because the desire to reach the maximum number of listeners demands programming to encourage a minimum number of tune-outs. Clearly Bubba's audience sticks by him. Still, it's not like Bubba's never been in trouble before, and should the management decide he's more trouble than he's worth, they'll leave him on the shore soaking up unemployment benefits.

One aspect of Gene Stipe's guilty plea hadn't occurred to me: Stipe controlled five radio stations in southeast Oklahoma, and the Federal Communications Commission could theoretically deny license renewals to those stations because of Stipe's sentence.

Perhaps fittingly, Richard Lerblance, who was elected to fill Stipe's old Senate seat, has applied to the FCC to purchase the two Stipe companies which own the stations. (Little Dixie Radio owns KNED-AM and KMCO-FM McAlester and KESC-FM Wilburton; Bottom Line Broadcasting owns KTMC-AM-FM McAlester.)

I had just moved to Charleston, South Carolina in 1961, and being in an occupation which took up most of my time — third grade — I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to the radio beyond the Top 40 tunes (and the occasional oldie) being vended by WTMA. I knew there was radio outside the Low Country — at night, it was possible to grab stuff like Nashville's WLAC, playing the latest R&B, or St. Louis' KMOX, where I could get the Cardinals' games — but most other South Carolina stations were 5 kw or less and never made it into Charleston at all.

Which is how I managed to miss the flap over the first shock jock worthy of the description, a fellow named Charlie Walker, from WDKD in Kingstree.

Charlie Walker, by all accounts, was way over the top, considering the sanitary standards of the early Sixties. He ragged on local luminaries; he transmogrified town names (Andrews became "Ann's Drawers"); he invented straw men to trash. A sample:

And one day, when the phone calls to the station manager were running higher than usual, Charlie Walker said something like this:

The FCC hadn't defined "indecency" yet, perhaps because they couldn't imagine it. WDKD management had been blowing off the complaints, but when the Feds started making noise, the station began to sweat.

And after an investigation and a hearing, the FCC found that Walker's radio show contained "coarse, vulgar, and suggestive material susceptible of indecent double meaning[s]," and imposed the death penalty: not on Walker, but on WDKD, whose license was summarily revoked. (Does this sound familiar?)

The usual appeals followed, and a compromise of sorts was reached: WDKD was allowed to resume broadcasting, but Walker's third-class FCC license (then required for on-air personnel) was modified to specify that at no time could he broadcast live. For the rest of his career, Charlie Walker was on tape-delay.

And that career continues into the 21st century, seven seconds behind the rest of the world. The South Carolina legislature even honored him during the 2001-02 session. Today Charlie Walker writes a column for Kingstree's weekly News, and is revered as a solid citizen of the South; you'd probably never know that he'd anticipated Howard Stern by thirty or forty years.

(I am indebted to Jay Braswell, longtime SC and Georgia DJ, now a broadcast consultant in Hawkinsville, Georgia, for recounting this story at a radio message board I frequent.)

The Air America liberal radio network now has affiliates in the top three markets: WLIB New York, KBLA Los Angeles, and WNTD Chicago.

Generally, the stations will be competing with, shall we say, separate but unequal facilities: WLIB, while no 50-kw powerhouse, puts out a decent 10-kw signal in the Apple, but WNTD, which maxes out at 5 kw, is nestled between two 50-kw blowtorches, which may make finding it tricky. KBLA pumps out 50 kw, but it's down in that no-man's-land at the far end of the dial (1580) where supposedly hardly anyone goes.

Were I the local Clear Channel manager, I'd be tempted to work up a sub-Machiavellian scheme to land the Air America programs here in Oklahoma City — and then run them, not on KTOK, their local flagship, but on KEBC, their 1-kw daytimer at 1340. (The station does have a nighttime schedule, but it's leased to another operator.) This would make Clear Channel's claim that "We are so not in Bush's pocket" less implausible, and there's always the chance that Air America's talk shows will draw better ratings than the how-to-save-for-your-retirement stuff that airs there now.

Of course, if the FCC finally gets around to approving KGYN's move-in from Guymon to Oklahoma City, all bets are off.

We may be a deeply divided nation — Red versus Blue, Republican versus Democrat, This versus That — but there's one thing on which everyone agrees: Clear Channel sucks.

Allow me to demur ever so slightly. I have no particular fondness for America's largest radio group owner, but I don't consider them to be some sort of indestructible monolith: they can be beaten.

In Oklahoma City, they are being beaten. Routinely. Three stations finished in a virtual dead heat for the number-one spot this last book, and not one of them was an outpost of the Evil Empire; the best showing made by a Clear Channel station was #6, by news/talker KTOK, and we all know this is because of morning man Cam Edwards, who's worth two or three ratings points all by himself.

I might also point out that stations not owned by Clear Channel also tend to be less than scintillatingly brillant and/or incredibly innovative, which tells me that Clear Channel isn't the disease: it's merely a symptom.

The Federal Communications Commission frowns upon unlicensed radio stations unless they run power levels down in the milliwatt range. The rationale, of course, is to protect existing broadcasters from interference, which is a good thing, but as a side effect, existing broadcasters are also protected from competition, which is not such a good thing.

Somebody in town has been running a hip-hop/R&B station without Federal sanction, parked at 92.1 MHz, halfway between two powerhouse signals (KOSU-FM in Stillwater and KOMA-FM in Oklahoma City) and blocking access, at least in my area, to neither. (The nearest commercial 92.1 signal, if I remember correctly, is in metro Tulsa, licensed to Broken Arrow.)

Who is this guy? No one knows. And until the FCC shows up with tracking equipment and subpoenas, probably no one will. But for now, he's putting on arguably the best show in town; not having to toe the corporate line, and not saddled with the expurgated versions of recordings that are sent to "real" radio stations, he's made a format I don't particularly care for otherwise into something almost interesting. Let's hope it takes the Feds a while to home in on his signal.

For a while, anyway.

Our newest pirate station has bitten (or, more precisely, was force-fed) the dust. According to one report, the perp was wanted in Florida for some possibly unrelated offense, and was promptly FedExed to the Sunshine State.

On balance, the funniest aspect of all this was that our short-lived broadcast buccaneer often came in with better quality than Citadel's KSYY, a station licensed to Kingfisher and (uncharacteristically for rimshooters) actually transmitting therefrom with the power of approximately 10 butterfly sneezes.

National Public Radio still hasn't explained to Susanna's satisfaction why Bob Edwards is being replaced:

The fact is, Morning Edition is a two-hour show, though many stations (including the one here) do carry a four-hour feed, and I'm pretty sure there have been instances where something that was reported at, say, 6:19 had an update punched in at 8:19 — and, of course, there are five-minute news summaries on the hour and half-hour. (This being pledge week, read "five-minute" as "three-point-five-minute.")

Whatever the imagined problems with the format, they hardly seem like reason enough to blame Bob Edwards.

And a word to the wise, if any, at NPR: you don't want to cheese off Susanna:

Remind me to buy her a drink. And not a carbonated drink, either.

It's standard operating procedure for public-radio stations, during their semiannual pledge drives, to sound just as mournful and Oliver Twisted — "Please, sir, I want some more money" — as they possibly can.

Even allowing for this tendency, there seems to be a lot more desperation than usual in the voices at our local NPR station, and I'm wondering: could the listeners be responding to the reassignment of Bob Edwards by cutting back their donations?

I may be imagining things — wouldn't be the first time — but I have a feeling that NPR management is going to wind up with low-cholesterol free-range egg on their faces when all this is over.

There are good and sensible reasons why radio stations quit using cart machines, but like the 8-track decks they superficially resemble, I find them fascinating. (The world today may be digital; some of us remain unrepentantly analog in our thinking.)

Radio guy John Quincy had a spare machine and a bright idea, and he took both to a custom lamp manufacturer, with highly illuminating results:





Now is that cool or what?

Terry Keith Hammond owns a little 6,000-watt FM in Shamrock, Texas, just over the state line on I-40. MonsterFM is moving over one channel, from 92.7 to 92.9, and jumping to 50,000 watts, but if Hammond can help it, he's not staying in Shamrock. Here's why (his story starts in 2002, when he bought the station):

The FCC will not likely approve a move that removes the signal from Shamrock entirely — KBKH is the only station licensed to Shamrock — but the station might be able to relocate to, say, Sayre, Oklahoma, just inside the state line; they would still easily reach Shamrock, they'd be far enough from other stations on this frequency to avoid interference, and they might be able to pick up an audience in Elk City, fifteen miles away.

Were I this guy, I'd be sending off an application to modify the station's license this week. Texans tend to be friendly folk, but some Texans (and, for that matter, some Oklahomans) insist that you do bidness their way or else, and sometimes "else" is the better choice.

Or worse; MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting, which owns the nascent network's Chicago and Los Angeles outlets, has dropped their programming.

Wonkette (yeah, I know) reports that MultiCultural claims Air America owes them around $1 million, and bounced a check in the process, a story probably leaked to her about ten minutes after Drudge got it.

You'd think Democrats would understand deficits, wouldn't you?

(Update, 4:15 pm: Commenter Mark at Outside the Beltway explains: "They used Dean's campaign people to manage their money...")

Talk-show host Jay Severin at Boston's FM talker WTKK has been informed that he will no longer be allowed to use the euphemism "effing".

What, if anything, can we do about those corksoaking iceholes at the FCC?

(Via Jeff Jarvis)

Rich Appel's Hz So Good newsletter for the coming month opens with a seven-point plan to salvage "oldies" radio, and he has correctly identified the major issue: the core audience is way past the age that advertisers are most desperate to reach. (I turn 51 this year, and am therefore presumably of no interest to anyone except AARP and the manufacturers of Fix-O-Dent.) The fix is radical: the emphasis must be shifted away from us Persons of Mature Flatulence and toward building a new audience in the 18-34 demographic. And this means killing the ersatz Bill Drake noises in the background and abandoning the "we're the station you grew up with" imaging. If this music has lasting value, and I think it does, then it can be sold to new generations without having to pay tribute to those of us who fancy ourselves as having been there at the creation; surprisingly many of today's twenty-year-olds may be Beatles fans, as a recent Entertainment Weekly feature suggested, but it's not necessary for them to be exposed to Murray the K for them to grasp the Zeitgeist.

And given the sheer diversity of Top 40 radio in its prime — if a record charted high enough in the trade papers, it was a candidate for airplay regardless of its perceived genre — there's inevitably going to be conflict in putting together a playlist for the very model of a modern oldies station: some will prefer a heavier marbling of R&B, while others will lean towards whiter, brighter waxings, and what do you do with the country crossovers? One thing, however, is for certain: you can't encapsulate a decade and a half of incredibly diverse music by a mere 200 or 300 songs, as today's stations persist in thinking.

Maybe I shouldn't care about these things. If I have the urge to hear songs from this era, I need only walk into the next room and select stuff from the shelf. But I have just enough semi-enlightened self-interest to believe that if there's an increasing interest in material from the period, the gatekeepers will be more likely to open up the vaults and turn loose some of the things I've forgotten or I've never heard at all. And as John Lennon once said, you know that can't be bad.

The on-again-off-again nature of Air America Radio has suggested a plan of action to the Interested-Participant:

It may be time to check those control boards for an adequate supply of flip-flop devices.

Over the past few years, National Public Radio received a fair chunk of change from Archer Daniels Midland, an agribusiness conglomerate which regularly comes in for criticism from the sort of people who listen to National Public Radio. I don't think that ADM was necessarily trying to buy NPR's silence, but their presence in the listing of supporters sounded somehow peculiar, and lately it seems to have disappeared.

In the absence of ADM, Wal-Mart has been kicking in some heavy dollars to NPR, which has run rather a lot of news pieces which could be construed as critical of the retail giant; even Jeffrey Dvorkin, the NPR ombudsman, has felt compelled to justify taking Wal-Mart's money to aggrieved listeners.

Now if we could just get the real story behind Jennifer and Ted Stanley.

For those of you who were wondering when Top 40 AM radio officially ended, the answer is "this past Thursday," when WQMA, licensed to Marks, Quitman County, Mississippi, ceased operations on AM and moved its programming to an FM station about 20 miles away in Clarksdale.

According to Scott Fybush, who keeps track of such things, this was the last standalone AM Top 40 outlet in the nation.

"Another evil corporation," quips Baldilocks, "mismanages its money, puts out an inferior product and goes under."

Which is how the system works. Air America Radio isn't quite dead — it won't keep still, anyway — but what's the problem here? Admittedly, these folks evidently couldn't run a roadside fruit stand, but is it all ineptitude, or is there no market for their product in the first place?

Over at coffeegrounds, the Proprietor leans toward the former:

Having been part of a few focus groups in my time, I rather expect that when the Final Judgment is read, I can count on an extended stay at One Brimstone Place.

If you live near a commercial classical music station — well, never mind, you probably don't. There are very few of them left, even in the largest cities.

And now there's going to be one fewer. KRTS in Houston is selling out: Radio One, which owns two other stations in the area, is paying $72.5 million to make it three.

If I've counted correctly, this leaves one commercial classical station in Texas: WRR in Dallas. (The last one of note in Oklahoma was KCMA, licensed to Okmulgee but based in Tulsa, which after four years of so-so business switched to "soft oldies" in 2001, a format which by all accounts is doing so-so business.)

Once again, you know the words:

Actually, Harry Chapin placed this station in Boise, Idaho, where stations whose call letters start with W are conspicuous by their absence, but no matter: the real WOLD, a daytimer in Marion, Virginia on 1330 kHz, has, according to 100000watts.com, gone silent pending a sale.

WOLD-FM (102.5 MHz) continues.

Citadel's KSYY, formerly known as "The Spy," has given up their alt-alt-rock format in favor of something vaguely Tejano. Whether this will get them so much as a 1 share remains to be seen; they're still stuck in Kingfisher with the power of a couple of fluorescent bulbs.

Then again, with the Latino population growing and only two other stations broadcasting in Spanish (KZUE, an AM daytimer in El Reno, and KTUZ-FM, licensed to Okarche — what is it with Canadian County, anyway?), maybe there's hope for them after all.

One of the "Inspirations" listed on the front page of this site is one Todd Storz. I've explained why before, and now Rich Appel, through the invaluable Hz So Good newsletter, has tossed a timely reminder my way:

The very first Top 40 countdown, before Casey Kasem, before anybody, fifty years ago this week.

(Long Distance Dedication: This goes out to Dawn in New Jersey.)

Well, maybe not you or me. But a study in Korea suggests a 70-percent increase in the incidence of leukemia in persons living near AM broadcast towers.

Before you swear off your favorite talk show, though, please note that the Korean study was limited to individuals living in the vicinity of 100,000-watt transmitting facilities; US AM stations max out at 50,000 watts, which would imply a lower risk, and where space is available, their towers tend to be located in areas with relatively low population. Further, the Koreans caution that their study does not establish a direct link between high-power AM waves and cancer.

FM stations here in the flyover zone are allowed 100,000 watts under certain circumstances, but FM waves, which differ substantially in shape and frequency from AM waves, were not implicated in the study.

(Via Fark)

San Diego's KPOP has abandoned its adult-standards (songs like Frank Fontaine used to sing) format and has picked up, along with some new call letters, the liberal Air America Radio programming.

The Timekeeper sees some cognitive dissonance in the making:

They probably haven't even noticed yet.

And a quick scan of Air America Radio's affiliate list turns up two more Clear Channel stations already carrying the network's programs in major markets.

Which suggests to me that they're less interested in ideology than in trying to make a few bucks off Young Frankenlisteners.

After seventy-two years, KOMA has disappeared from the AM dial; the blowtorch station at 1520 has decided to carry on as KOKC. (The KOMA call is retained on their affiliated FM station.)

As someone noted on a radio discussion board, "Todd Storz is spinning in his grave." At 45 rpm, no doubt.

It's the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Diane Rehm Show, which began as a local show on D.C.'s WAMU in 1979 (titled Kaleidoscope in those days) and eventually became a staple of the NPR schedule.

The voice has changed over the years — in fact, in 1998, it nearly disappeared altogether, the result of spasmodic dysphonia — but it's still one of the most distinctive voices in all of radio. Even nonfans appreciate Diane; Fraters Libertas' Saint Paul describes her as "elitely biased, icily beautiful, politely intolerant, and nasally clogged," which, given his view of public radio generally, counts as louder-than-faint praise.

Not being a policy wonk, I'm probably not part of Diane's target audience, but I do try to catch at least her first hour every day. It's an easy habit to get into, since in this area the show is carried right after the last hour of NPR's Morning Edition, and it's a habit I don't plan to break.

Thank you, Diane. I don't think either of us has twenty-five more years to run, but I'm grateful for the hours we've had.

It's a step beyond serendipity: the ability to claim credit for an innovation that requires you to do nothing at all.

Tulsa's KOTV, channel 6, is now promoting its Online Audio at its Web site, and you don't even need to be online to listen to it: just tune your FM radio to 87.7 MHz.

Under FCC rules, an analog TV channel covers a bandwidth of 6 MHz; channel 6 runs from 82 to 88 MHz. The color subcarrier is generally located 1.25 MHz from the bottom of the channel, or at 83.25 MHz.

TV video is AM. TV audio, however, is FM, and the FM subcarrier is located 4.5 MHz above the video subcarrier in all TV channels. On channel 6 in Tulsa, or indeed channel 6 anywhere in the US or Canada, this means 87.75 MHz. (Actually, some stations, including KOTV, are required by the FCC to offset their subcarriers by 0.01 MHz, so the actual FM audio from KOTV is at 87.76 MHz.) This signal is well within the reach of any FM receiver within transmitter range which can be tuned to approximately 87.7, and KOTV didn't have to do anything extra to provide it; it's a by-product of the way the spectrum is assigned. Any station on channel 6 should be similarly accessible.

On a hunch, I spot-checked three stations I knew to be on channel 6 — in Corpus Christi, Miami and Philadelphia — and none of them was promoting an FM-audio feed on the front page of its Web site.

Public radio has an impressively-diverse collection of voices, from avuncular and garrulous Garrison Keillor to studiously-pinched Diane Rehm, from cheerful yenta Susan Stamberg to gruff Carl Kasell. What they all have in common, of course, is that they're all professionals, and they all sound like it. (Don't even mention Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.)

However, not every voice on public radio is that of a professional, as Wendy reports:

There aren't any real fingernails-on-the-blackboard voices on our local public-radio stations, though KGOU manager Karen Holp comes closest: there's always the sensation that she's just gotten to the bottom of her box of Cracker Jack and inexplicably didn't find a Coupe de Ville hiding therein.

Bruce at This Is Class Warfare sends along a note to the effect that public radio's This American Life with Ira Glass has a special this week on vote fraud, and the producers have made it available on the Web before its scheduled air date, in case you might be faced with examples of fraud yourself. You'll need RealAudio to hear the advance version, and you'll need a relatively-quiet listening area: historically, This American Life has always been a program which demands — and generally earns — your full attention.

After four years, Equity Broadcasting has pulled the plug on its KQOK-TV, an independent station licensed to Shawnee which never quite caught on with its mix of jewelry sales and religious programming. Back in May, Equity signed a deal to transfer the station license to Oklahoma City-based Tyler Media, which operates four radio stations here; Tyler didn't announce at the time what they planned to do with a television license.

Now they have. The call letters are changing to KTUZ-TV, which matches their Spanish-language KTUZ-FM, and the station will be affiliated with NBC's Telemundo network, the second-largest Spanish-language TV service and one which hasn't been seen on the air or on basic cable in this market before. (Rival Univision has no local affiliate but has had a continuous presence on cable.)

Equity, during the time it owned the channel 30 facility, worked diligently to get the station picked up on area cable feeds, and if I understand FCC rules, Tyler doesn't have to renegotiate with cable carriers until existing contracts run out; they'll automatically take over the existing channel (on Cox systems, it's channel 5).

With channel 30 comes the license for a digital-TV facility, which will operate on channel 29.

Apologies to Mr. Loaf, but this just shocks me:

Peter Jennings still has a job?

How about a nice cup of Shut the Fox Up?

The FOXBlocker is a line filter that attaches to your analog-cable line (no version for digital cable yet) and filters out the Fox News Channel. It's not channel-specific — it works on channels 2 through 62 — which suggests to me that it looks for Fox identifying information on line 21 of the NTSC signal, where closed captions and XDS reside.

Me, I'm waiting for a TiVo add-on that refuses to record anything mentioning Paris Hilton.

(Via Screenhead)

(Update, 4:20 pm: Submitted to Beltway Traffic Jam.)

The United Church of Christ has filed a petition with the FCC against two Miami-area television stations, WFOR-TV and WTVJ-TV, respectively CBS and NBC owned-and-operated stations, asserting that there is reason to question whether the stations' parent companies, Viacom (for WFOR) and General Electric (for WTVJ), were operating, in the FCC's catchphrase, "in the public interest." The petition stems from the networks' refusal to run the UCC's recent ad.

Andrea Harris is not impressed:

Then again, this is standard operating procedure for the UCC, which was formed through the merger of two smaller denominations in 1957; by 1964, they'd already set up an Office of Communication, and challenged the license of WLBT (Jackson, Mississippi) on the basis that it was racist. The FCC held that the church had no legal standing to challenge a broadcast license; the church took them to court, and the Supreme Court eventually overruled the FCC: "The broadcast industry," wrote Chief Justice Warren Burger, "does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty."

Of course, the Supremes' ruling in the WLBT affair made it possible for everyone up to and including Brent Bozell's boob-counters to get into the act. And in the 1960s, Jackson had a total of two television stations. Today, with half a dozen, plus cable and the Internet, it's difficult to argue with a straight face that any media operation is actually affecting the course of public discourse, let alone dominating it. The FCC answers to Congress, not to the Executive, so the President won't be taking a broom to the place any time soon; too bad, because I'd love to see a Commission with the temerity to laugh at both the UCC's "They should be forced to take our ads" stance and Fox's upcoming reality series "America's Scariest Brazilian Waxes."

(Update, 13 December, 3:45 pm: Fixed one set of call letters — see comments.)

Air America Radio is up to 40 affiliates now. The liberal network has signed Clear Channel's WSCC, a 5-kw daytimer (there is nighttime authorization, but at a meager 103 watts) in Charleston, South Carolina at 730 kHz. The calls will be switched to WSSP, and the station's tag line is "Talk Radio for the Rest of Charleston."

WSCC's previous format, featuring Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, continues on WSCC-FM (94.3 MHz), which had been simulcasting the AM programs following the demise of its R&B/hip-hop format this summer. I, of course, find it interesting that Clear Channel owns both a "liberal" and a "conservative" station in the same market. The news/talk competition is Citadel's WTMA.

If the next question is "Will there ever be an Air America station here?" the answer is a definite maybe. Clear Channel, which has a dozen or so Air America affiliates, has two AM facilities here. If the move-in of Guymon's KGYN ever comes off, I'm thinking CC will move KTOK to 1210 and set up something entirely different (like, perhaps, AA) at 1000. (KEBC, at 1340, will be unavailable; part of the move-in deal is that CC will give the 1340 slot to First Choice, owner of the daytimer KTLV at 1220, which would die once 1210 becomes an Oklahoma City channel.) The other two talk stations in town, Renda's KOKC (previously KOMA) and Citadel's WKY, are struggling in the ratings; I have to assume that they've at least considered the AA package, and turned it down.

(Courtesy of Backcountry Conservative.)

Update: Apparently it lasted less than a year.

The Oklahoma Gazette's Preston Jones is sorely vexed this week by the announcement (on the 6th) that Clear Channel has signed Fox News to produce national radio newscasts. The prospects are harrowing:

Well, okay, if you say so, but try as I may, I can't much get worked up over this Beelzebub/Moloch joint venture. For one thing, it's going to displace, in this market at least, exactly one provider of news. KTOK, Clear Channel's primary news/talk outlet here, will presumably give up its ABC affiliation; rival KOKC, owned by Renda, has recently switched from CBS to ABC. (I have seen nothing to indicate that either Clear Channel's KEBC or Citadel's WKY, the two weaker talk stations, have any changes in store.) At most, we lose a CBS station, and one which trailed badly in the ratings at that.

More to the point, KTOK, already carrying Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, can hardly lurch farther rightward by the addition of five whole minutes (minus commercials) of Fox News on the hour.

Jones does the math:

The presumed big loser in this deal is ABC Radio, which has eleven networks, five of which are targeted to news/talk stations. ABC predominates among existing Clear Channel news/talk outlets; even if they were to lose 500 affiliates, which they won't, it would hurt, but they'd still have around 2000. Westwood One, which distributes CBS, NBC and CNN Radio, services about 1500 news/talk stations. National Public Radio has 750 affiliates. That evil Fox monolith is headed straight for fourth place.

Preston Jones finishes up his article with a mention of AlterNet's ongoing Fox coverage. I figure the least I can do is post a link to it. But the amount of sleep I plan to lose over the Clear Channel/Fox deal can be measured in microseconds.

After a whole lot of nothing happened, well, something has happened.

The proposal to move Guymon's KGYN to Oklahoma City has been in the mill for a couple of years now, and it's not surprising that there would be counterapplications on the table. The rival applicants are Sharon Berlin Ingles, who wants to relocate the 1210 kHz facility to Bixby, Oklahoma, and Powell Meredith Communications, who would like to pair it with their KKHR-FM in Abilene, Texas.

Translating the announcement from FCCese, it appears that neither Ingles, nor Powell Meredith, nor TELNS, the current KGYN licensee, wins the prize for Best Overall Application. The commission, therefore, is going to throw the facility open to the highest bidder.

If nothing else, we'll see how badly Clear Channel, which has been programming KGYN under a local marketing agreement with TELNS, wants to spend money on it. I don't remember the FCC ever running an auction for an AM facility.

File this under Things I Didn't Know Existed.

Vietnamese Public Radio, based in northern Virginia, beams shortwave programs across America, and Oklahoma City, with its substantial (somewhere between 1.5 and 2 percent) Vietnamese population, provides a lot of listeners for VPR through a rebroadcast facility in Edmond.

What's more, there's a one-hour locally-originated news/talk program</