Friday, January 31, 2014

Cumulus Begins Its Own Corporate Purge

If you want to know what may have acculturated Friday's initial encampment in SF, this one nugget was just the beginning.


More to come later...

24 comments:

  1. Consolidating redundant areas of similarly owned companies is normal.

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  2. This is really interesting, Rich!

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  3. Hi Rich, do you have an inside source on this? Keep us updated!

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  4. How about the back-story?? How "normal" is it for a relative handful of American corporations (predominantly Cumulus and Clear Channel) to control most of the urban radio venues and snuff out opposing voices on a national level???

    Well, watcha got to say about that, you corporate mouthpiece?? Politically, the U.S. is pretty evenly split up the middle and now there are about half of us who have little or no voice left available to us in the audio media. AM radio is rapidly becoming "all fascism... all of the time," as exemplified here locally by the Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh troika of hate spewers on KNEW.

    Meanwhile, the Amerikan sheeple are more concerned about reality TV shows and sports programming, than they are about the fact that our country is being taken over by a handful of obscenely wealthy and powerful plutocrats, like the Koch's, the Dickey brother's, etc. Can you say oligarchy?? I knew you could.

    We need to make the "public airwaves" public again, not just a sounding board for fascistic conservative religious Troglodites who think the Earth is 6,000 years old and that all of life's complexities are micro-managed on a galactic scale by some gray-bearded Sky Wizard.

    DG

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    1. *roll eyes* what a maroon. Tin foil hat a little tight these days?

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    2. I would love a Crossfire-type show if the hosts were intelligent and listened to each other. Is there no market for that?

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    3. It's all about the marketplace. Liberal hosts would succeed if they were interesting to a mass audience--but they are not.

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    4. Lots of liberal hosts are interesting, John Rothmann, Stacy Taylor, Pat Thurston, Bill Press, to a lesser degree Norm Goldman and Tom Hartman and Randy Rhoades, although with last 3 you most likely have to agree with them to listen, just like if you are even a moderate liberal (as I am) you can't listen to Rush, Hannity and Savage, but can listen to Tom Sullivan. Perhaps the masses has problems with someone who has a different opinion than yours?

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    5. Disheartened Guy, I'm with you!
      The gall of the the GOP Corporate Radio big-wigs who have dropped ALL Progressive Radio is appalling!
      Did they think we all wouldn't notice???

      Democrats are obviously the majority of the Bay Area ...so they choose to do away with all Liberal Radio for our listing pleasure? (Except for Randi Rhodes, who they cut from 3 to 2 hours at 1:00-2:00 weekdays. (Listen into 910 AM, Rhodes will knock you over with what's *really* coming down!)

      The Republican Party and their Radio Sugar Daddies must be Real Bullies...what else would make sense for them to extinguish ALL Progressive Radio in the Liberal Bay Area, save for one?

      And speaking of 'BULLIES', I posted this previously, yet Rich never printed it.
      I'll try again...Because it's absolutely spot-on how Republicans think they are The Only Manly Men. Well, these manly men sure have bullied us Progressives off the Radio Dial...now haven't they?

      "Bill Maher Rips the ‘Bluster’ on the Right: ‘Bullying Isn’t a Masculine Virtue’ He's getting tired of conservatives touting their masculinity while dismissing liberals as pussies and pansies, and in his show-ending New Rule Friday night, he said that Democrats need to stop letting Republicans claim that “They’ve got the Big Balls” because, as Maher put it..."Being a bully is not a real masculine value”.
      www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjgjgQN3PR0#…

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    6. Hey, "Disheartened Guy" -- anyone moronic enough to dismiss the possibility of an intelligent force being behind this limitless universe of ours doesn't deserve the opportunity to even make idiotic comments on an internet forum.

      Kindly get lost, and take your imbecilic rantings with you.

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    7. Progressive radio. Hit the snooze button.

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  5. What kind of problem did KPIX TV have Friday morning. For at least a half hour between 6 am and 6:30 am there was no KPIX news. They ran some CBS news and promos while a crawl said they had "Technical Difficulties". What kind of technical difficulties shuts down a local newscast? If there's an earthquake or other problem I wont go looking for news from them/

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    1. anon at 5:26, the same "technical difficulties" that KTVU suffered a few Sundays ago. When the corporate suits creamed themselves when W wrecked all deregulation laws concerning media in 2001, all the companies that owned tv stations laid off tons of people. The local newscasts are now done with less than a fourth of the people, and they use an automation system like 'Ignite", or "Ross'. So, when the automation system crashes, and of course those same suits have deemed that they need less "maintenance techs", these things tend to happen.

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  6. Get a load of 4:31, the resident Angry Atheist of The Week. How's. the air way up there on your high horse? Maybe your stage name should be Don Quiote.

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    1. anon at 10:41 PM, it's actually spelled Don Quixote, but by logically figuring that you are a conservative, you are probably not used to reading books.

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  7. I have to say I agree with much of what 4:31pm has to say, and I know a lot of people that work in the media industry do as well. Our profession has been dumbed down, downsized, and turned into corporate radio to satisfy the fat cats and the wealthy shareholders they are beholden to. True broadcasters have been pushed out of the profession in favor of 'younger,' but less experienced (i.e. 'cheaper') talent, and the American people are getting short changed. But who is to blame. How about our Congress who nearly 20 years ago allowed for this
    massive deregulation and subsequent downsizing. Radio stations have an obligation to serve the public, but the people who own them are more interested in
    having them promote their corporate agenda than being responsible to the listeners. We've allowed big business and the rich to basically turn this country into their own private play pen, much as this country was run during the 'Gilded Age' of the late 20th century when robber barons such as Morgan, Rockefeller and Jay Gould ran the affairs of this country. It's sad and shameful, and yes, I agree; many Americans are too distracted and stressed and want only to relieve their angst by
    watching crap such as reality TV and tabloid shows. It's amazing how naive many of us are, but this is what we've become in the 21st century. Just one of the many reasons why this country is going to the dogs!

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  8. This is for you, 4:31PM.

    "We are the Liberals. Lower your heads and surrender your wealth. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile"

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  9. I suppose I'm "conservative" as defined by media and others, although my views are much more nuanced than to be confused with a delusional self-description as liberal or conservative. Humans are much more complex than that. The simplification and dumbing-down of America are indicative of the knee-jerk reflex to categorize into left and right, also known as winners and losers. From the left, you are a winner. From the right, you are a winner. You are all losers who define yourselves as such. Furthermore, being of a more "conservative" nature as defined by the intrinsically juvenile American pop culture, I don't accept that Beck, Hannity and/or Limbaugh speak for me. Beck is a joke. He doesn't come close to anything intellectual. Limbaugh is Limbaugh. Hannity is a Republican party talking-points clone. And not very bright. I love Savage when he is off-politics and his 19th century language, borders, culture bullshit. If that mantra is still worthwhile, it would have worked in the 20th century, which was plagued with nationalism. I enjoy people who have their own views, whether so-called left or right. As if opinion is a linear equation. It's not. I agree with disheartened guy that more opinions need to be aired. And, lastly, to show how labels don't work, I've written here before I enjoy Karel, especially when he talks about tech (although he is too Apple-cult centric) and some of his views about Wall Street, bankers, etc. I also enjoy so-called rational conservatives. Because I do at times enjoy Karel, people in this forum have said I could not claim to be a conservative, yet I have a professional career in media as just that. Go figure. Labels are for idiots.

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    1. I totally agree I often write on this blog about the very same thing. I'm basically a liberal, but don't want to be locked into a box which often I find people like to do as soon as I say I'm a liberal. I'm pro Israel, (having lived on a kibbutz years ago, for a short time, no I'm not Jewish) I believe people for the most part are responsible for themselves and their action. I caught some of Spencer Hughes show last week, and because he is for gay rights and gay marriage, callers had a fit, saying he could not be conservative, or had no moral, just unbelieveable.

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  10. Regarding the linked story, it contains this choice quote from John Dickey: " ...this is a business that we were already in. So we found duplicity and redundancies in positions and responsibilities."

    It strikes me as ironic that he used the word "duplicity," which infers dishonesty, when he apparently meant "duplication."

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    1. Darn! And here I thought I was the only one to catch Dickey's use of the word "duplicity" instead of "duplication." Perhaps it was intentional. I mean he didn't say whether, having found it (duplicity), he considered that to be a good thing or a bad thing.

      Anyway, I don't think merging their two programming network organizations says anything one way or the other about their plans for the stations. They obviously don't need to keep two management teams on the programming side.

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  11. Rich, on a related subject, you're always dissing KCBS's repeated cycle of stories all day. Well, yesterday I tuned in at 11:30 to hear the top stories and even worse, they were all old--ALL stories I'd heard on TV or seen on the web the day before. One was a story I'd read on line two days prior, about Oakland schools. They delivered all of these as if they were new stories but they'd been discussed on local and national media for the entire previous day. I had to wonder what their reporters (reporter?) were (was?) doing that morning.

    Then they went to a traffic report. "All clear on the Bay Bridge" they said, even though I was looking at a CalTrans sign that informed me crossing into SF would take 29 minutes and I was sitting in a huge backup. I swear, they are worthless. They should shut that place down and open something useful, like a sex-toy store.

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    1. It wouldn't surprise me that the KCBS traffic reports are less reliable since Clear Channel bought Metro. CC trashed Metro's infrastructure, which wasn't perfect, but they made a good faith effort to provide reliable traffic reports.

      CC is all about scraping data off websites like CalTrans and CHP, regardless of the accuracy. They're also big on "predictive" technology, which uses historical averages to predict current conditions.If such and such is always backed up at this time of day, it must be backed up today. That theory works, until it doesn't.

      Several weeks ago I was heading into the city at the ungodly hour of 6AM. I wasn't expecting any problems because of the hour. I was listening to 103.7 and a traffic report came on. The reporter specifically mentioned that the Bay Bridge was clear. When I got to the bridge, I discovered it was backed up all the way across. It took me 45 minutes to get into SF. As it turned out, there was a motorcycle accident on the SF side of the bridge, of which CC was apparently clueless.

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  12. Rich, (If you do a mention on The Super Bowl)....
    Thought this was sad and interesting regarding Chris Christi:
    http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2013/09/christie_super_bowl_box.htm

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