What Conspiracy? Talk Radio's Roar, From Right & Left

The Washington (Com)Post ^ | 02/112009 | Marc Fisher

[FormerLib]

Bill Press is a smart and thoughtful liberal who has had a long and successful career in the TV and radio punditry biz. Yet there he was in Sunday's Post bemoaning the loss of "Obama 1260," the left-leaning Washington talk radio station that morphed into an all-financial advice outlet this week. The way Press tells it, the loss of that format on WWRC, which had so few listeners it sometimes didn't register at all in the Arbitron ratings, amounts to an unfair allocation of the public airwaves, even a conspiracy to silence voices from the left. Press is so exercised about this--his syndicated show was, after all, the morning drivetime programming on the station--that he's even calling for the return of the Fairness Doctrine, the long-discarded regulatory scheme by which the federal government prevented radio and TV stations from airing much in the way of controversial political programming.

[Jimmy Valentine]

"Bill Press is a smart and thoughtful liberal who has had a long and successful career in the TV and radio punditry biz"

Stopped reading right there. The opening sentence is entirely wrong and compromises anything that could come later.

[fullchroma]

Seven minutes/week. That’s hilarious, sad and not at all surprising.

You know, even waaay back, before I became politically aware, NPR annoyed me. That is, when it wasn’t boring me. The soft, sanctimonious monotone rots brain matter, I’m sure.

[raccoonradio]

no problem; I am a longtime college radio DJ (since 1981)
and radio buff. Am not a ham, but know basics of AM
stations having to power down their signal or change its’
direction at sunset (example: WRKO 680 in Boston has to change to north/south only at sunset to protect stations on that frequency in Toronto, Binghamton, Baltimore,
and Raleigh...

If you get XM/Sirius radio you can hear Mark clear as a bell
(I know sounds like an ad!)