Talk-radio comic Pat Cashman, one of the airwaves’ last stalwarts of good ol’ Northwest Quirk humor, was fired from his third station. He’s shown above left, preparing greet a couple dozen of his loyal “Pat Pack” fans who stood outside the Tower Building on his last airshift today. (He’s accompanied by a frequent guest on his show, street musician Richard Peterson.) At least he’s being replaced by a local-news block, rather than by a syndicated bad boy or a right-wing demagogue.
This reminder of commercial radio’s ever-increasing vacuity, here and around the country, comes as the National Association of Broadcasters prepares to hold its big national convention in Seattle the week of Sept. 9-14. As you might expect, the anti-corporate folks are planning protests and counter-convention activities; you can learn about some of these at Reclaim the Media.org.
Certainly there’s much to complain about with the current radio-TV industry. Today’s hundreds of cable and broadcast TV channels are increasingly controlled by just a dozen big corporations. These firms, in turn, are increasingly obsessed wit. Broadcast news coverage has become an unquestioning lapdog for conservative and corporate views.
And the radio? Even worse. Even more tightly controlled by even fewer major players (led by the contemptable Clear Channel Communications, about whom we’ve previously ranted). Companies that care naught for local communities or for responsible broadcasting, and don’t even care much for drawing or entertaining audiences. Their obsessions are with further consolidating their stranglehold on the biz, with cross-division “synergies” and stock-price manipulations, with ruthless cost-cutting and centrally-planned station formats, with payola skimming, and with crushing any would-be challengers to their empires (such as independent Internet radio).
The result of all this manipulation? Not profits–Clear Channel’s bleeding cash, and the other giants (Viacom, Entercom, AOL Time Warner) aren’t doing much better.
No, it’s all about the big power grab, about the creation of an authoritarian, anti-freedom culture in which everyone will be isolated into advertiser-friendly sub-segments, all obediently viewing/reading/listening to their demographically-segmented branches of the same media combines.
It’s way past time to take back the airwaves, to bring locality and responsibility back to broadcasting. If not to make this country safe for democracy, at least to make it safe for the likes of Cashman.
