The Sad End Of Radio

I was driving north up through the middle of the state, a hundred mile stretch of not much, trying to find the Tigers on the radio. Not only could I not find them, I could not find anything. Not on AM. I stepped through each frequency, and though there was the odd scratchy rough unlistenable distant station, there was no clear signal. Not one.

Of course, the truck radio isn’t the most sensitive and driving not the best medium, but there should have been something.

There was more on FM. Couple of woke public stations cozily and smugly smiling (yes, you can hear this) about the lack of Diversity in something-or-other. A bunch of stations playing….the precise exact same music they played when I was in high school. That was it. Downstate they do have stations which transmit what I took to be blacks yelling at each other over the loud noise of some machine shop or factory. Maybe they were broadcasting from Ford’s line? A lot of scream-mumbling over monotonic mindless thumping and unidentifiable sounds, anyway. Upstate we don’t have this, so I can’t say more about it. Gratefully, FM signals don’t travel that far.

Except for NPR, the stations were all automated, or sounded like it. Severely limited and carefully MBA-verified non-offensive lists generated by music optimization spreadsheets churned out well-known-song after well-known-song, along with automated ads, interspersed with firework-laden electronic echo-echo-echoing promos, manfully announcing you were listening to The Bear! or The Eagle! or The Whale! or Some Large Animal! When did stations give up call signs for forestry?

Not uncoincidentally, before the trip I had received from Sirius an offer to sign up for their service for the low-low price of only—wait for it—\$29.95 per month! Thirty bucks, each and every month? Are they crazy? “But Briggs, you can listen to Howard Stern swear and curse when he adjusts his wig.” Oh yeah? Well sign me up.

Back up north, I can get stations on AM, from all across the UP, and even some wafting across the Lake from Wisconsin. During the day, I mean. At night, they still come in from all over.

Problem is Mark Levine. I don’t mean Levine per se, but the Levines of the airwaves who are part of Conservative Inc. The old-school “conservatives” who nodded appreciatively when NRO produced their “Never Trump” edition, now all come grudgingly around because they have nowhere else to go.

Levine rants and raves and rages for three hours in service of his favorite cause: bombing foreign countries. It doesn’t matter if it’s Vlad’s war or that other recent one, Levine bravely makes his case our boys needs to be sent to bomb somebody. Five minutes of this you can take. But three hours each and every day? It can’t be done.

There are many Levines, some of which I suspect are AI. Take what they call “Brian Kilmeade.” That has to be the result of an algorithm. It never deviates from a set script. It spends at least an hour daily on everybody’s favorite foreign country, even if there is nothing special going on. That’s whoever programmed it’s business. I don’t care. But it isn’t just that show, it’s all of them in so-called conservative radio, which is most of AM.

Nearly all these shows are three hours each. Three! You’d think of the tens of thousands of based podcasts online, Big Radio could have found one they can broadcast. But no. Imagination has long since fled the two or three corporate offices who own all the stations.

(Note: I was going to recommend Zman for his tight and disciplined podcasts. Alas, this good man died before his time last week.)

There are rare on-air exceptions, which you wish there were more of, shows which focus on local matters, which when corporate types selling it they always say is the point of radio. But since these shows are so few, and conservative talk so dull, few people need to turn to radio. Radio isn’t gaining new listeners, especially in the young. That’s why the music is the same now as it was then: most who are listening are older. They don’t call the stations playing old music “oldies”, either. They are just stations for the only people left who are listening.

Go to a big box store, like Meijers here, and you cannot find a radio for sale. Think: do you yourself remember anybody, say under forty, buying a radio? When was the last time you bought one? Driving is really the only chance to listen, but in cars many have their “devices” bluetoothed to the speakers. Sirius is too expensive, and is anyway slowly bleeding out paying subscribers. And don’t even think about shortwave, which few now even heard of.

Radio could have caught new listeners, but corporations were cheap and cut back on content. Executives forgot people listened not just for the music or the news, but for the personalities telling you about the music or news. If you want to listen to music, it’s better streamed where there’s greater choice and control. News is all propaganda and not worth hearing. NPR is where souls go to die.

And the worst new of all? Dr Demento has retired. Fifty five years on the air. Gone!

Lack of stations, stunted content, few to no radios being sold except in cars (and even there they were going to take AM out, as many countries already have). The glory days of radio are long gone, and it’s difficult to see how they can return.

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