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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Perhaps more folks will discover “silence is golden.”
Sirus XM seems to be bleeding subscribers. I made the mistake years ago of paying for it on both of my vehicles. Then I realized that I could Bluetooth it on my 2d off the app. Canceled one sub. Had to actually call them only to convince the closer I wanted out. Then last year I wanted out of the final sub. Same drill. They offer $7.99 a month for a year. Fine. That ran its course … now on website
… cancel. Now it’s their AI handling it. $7.99? No, thank you. $6.99 for a year? No, thank you. Canceled. But it seems one can suffer with full price for a bit then get same package for much less.
Yes! I noticed too. It is a little different in the Southwest (well, throughout the state of Arizona) as some of our stations have a (steadily diminishing) assortment of local/regionally broadcast talk radio shows of an hour in length, and of course, the interminable long baseball radio in season. There’s the Libertarian Circus show hosted by a middle aged traditional Republican black man although it has been cut back to a half hour and moved out of prime time driving hour. In Phoenix, where I live, as recently as 2022, we had local talk radio on a major station (The Patriot) where the host complained about Ukraine becoming our 51st state among other pointless expenditures. Actually… he wasn’t THAT boldly isolationist, but he did make amusing parody/sarcasm songs complaining that he heard more about the status of The War in Ukraine, tiny hamlet by hamlet, more than the status of the clean-up in East Palestine, Ohio or the latest derailment of other Norfolk Southern in the US. That mostly ended when Biden clearly went off the rails about a year ago as of the Presidential Debate (sorry, literal and metaphorical references to commercial rail transit which I won’t edit, as it is one of the supreme accomplishments of the United States; Europe and Japan have passenger rail, but our commercial rail is non-pareil!)
Anyway, I concur and commiserate with you. Since 2015, I have not owned a television; as a widow with no children, it makes me too sad not to have a man in my home, as they tend to like sports and enjoy television. Prior to 2019, I got almost all of my news from radio while driving to work or around town. I heard clips of people (Mueller, Trump, senators, etc.) followed by news analysis by radio personalities. I grew to respect Rush Limbaugh for his insights from 30+ years of experience.
We only get an hour of Mark Levin, once a week, on the radio out here. There is a young guy named Seth who is on in the morning with several others from 11 am to noon weekdays. Dennis Praeger is on from noon to 1 pm after that. Populist hour at 5 pm has been discontinued, and Black Libertarian Circus doesn’t broadcast until after dinner. Then the bleak night time hours begin, with only Coast to Coast with George Noory (who bravely remains non-partisan) from 10 pm to 2 am. He used to run until 4 am. The Wall Street Journal had a pleasant, chatty but informative AM radio show from 4 am to 5 am but that ended by 2018.
Yes, it is sad that talk radio on AM whil
I wrote a lengthy assent and empathetic assent with your post via WordPress comments but it might have been entirely consumed by that increasingly kludgy interface
Ah my friend, you have got me with this one. Brian Kilmeade is unwatchable on Fox with the stupid smile. Mark Levin, now I have hated him for years now and cannot tolerate the sight of him. But my favorite is the idiotic Mike Gallagher on Chicago “conservative” radio. On day, years ago, Gallagher said he deferred to Jews on Middle East topics since he “was just a Goy” and only Jews mattered. Chicago radio is filled with this s**t, it’s all Trump and Israel all day. I would shoot my radio but I need the only classical station left in town. The other abomination on the am dial is black talk radio. In Chicongo. Pure raciacist hatred of all things white and none of the media seems to care or mention it. Anyway I am getting ready to retire to a better place, any suggestions?
On February 17th, 2021, Rush Limbaugh died. Radio has never recovered.
Are you anywhere near WION? They broadcast in AM stereo and their sound quality is outstanding, at least if you get a strong signal. Their online streaming is a direct capture of the AM stereo received on an AM receiver and then digitized for the internet. They are on 1430 on AM. It’s a music station, not a talk station.
Radio could make a comeback, but the soulless corporations who own the radio stations just want to bleed them dry of whatever life they have left in them. That would require putting money into them.
My wife and I drove out to Wyoming from Virginia last September and never turned the radio on. We enjoyed the scenery, we said the Rosary, we talked about past and future things: the degeneration of the Church and State, visited a magnificent Basilica in St Louis and we never lamented Lush Numballs although I always wanted to know his opinion it was always a wonder to
Me how he could do 3 hours on very little content.
“(Note: I was going to recommend Zman for his tight and disciplined podcasts. Alas, this good man died before his time last week.)”
This still aches every time I think about it.
I’ve got a beautifully restored 1936 RCA Victor super-heterodyne “Magic-Eye” console radio with standard broadcast (AM), short-wave, and medium-wave bands, but there’s nothing on but political talk radio and Mexican lettuce-picker accordion polkas. FM is contemporary pop crap, the anti-music known as “rap”, or droning, lying NPR. Yep, radio is dead.
@Alex: “The other abomination on the am dial is black talk radio. In Chicongo. Pure raciacist hatred of all things white and none of the media seems to care or mention it.”
Some years back, driving across northern Mississippi, the only station I could get was a Black Talk show on a college radio station. The hosts and guests were discussing their consensus opinion that if you ever see a Black thief shoplifting or stealing something, “Ignore it. Don’t say a word. It’s none of your business, and besides, you have NO IDEA why he needs to get that thing.”
I think I stopped listening to radio around the time when Paul Harvey was no longer there to tell us “the rest of the story”. I didn’t always agree with him but he reminded me of my Dad, who always tuned him in when we went out for a long drive in the old Chevy.
I miss those days driving aimlessly, just exploring the back roads of western Illinois, sometimes getting lost down gravel (or dirt) paths where little kids would come running out of the farmhouse to stare at the strangers who obviously didn’t know that this road didn’t go nowheres you’d need to go unless you lived there. I used to take drives like that too, but I had an old yellow Beetle instead of a Chevy.
A somewhat different take on the late Z-Man:
https://bestservedcole.substack.com/p/the-z-man-story
CCReed:
That’s a disturbing take on the late Z-Man in at least two senses: 1) If true, Z-Man was perpetrating such an elaborate fraud for such a long time that, unless he had some substantial pecuniary motive, it suggests some sort of mental illness on his part; and 2) Cole (the author of the linked piece, who gives everyone in the entire community – a word I’m using ironically, by the way – of obnoxious persons an even worse name) has such a gratingly and nauseatingly sophomoric manner of expressing himself in writing – I can’t bring myself to call it a “writing style” – that he tortures anyone who might be interested enough in his subject to try to make it through what he’s written.
JDinPA, CCReed,
I see Cole’s accusations, but he offers no proof. If he has it, he ought to give it. In the comments to Cole’s post is a reader who checked Zman’s August 2022’s post, finding only that Zman copied from his earlier self, and Cole’s answer to this was angry bluster.
Update:
This is the post Derbyshire mentioned:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220801070715/https://www.takimag.com/article/the-valley-of-greta/
This is Derbyshire (in section 05):
https://www.johnderbyshire.com/Opinions/RadioDerb/2022-08-05.html
I checked one free source for detecting plagiarism (https://papersowl.com/free-plagiarism-checker), but it pointed to a web forum—which had quoted Zman’s article in full. Somebody better able to check for plagiarism than I am can see about this.
Update:
I used another checker (https://plagiarismdetector.net/) , and found this match:
https://www.tumgik.com/tag/Nongqawuse
Search for “wherelibertydwells”, which is the user who has the comment that is mostly the same as Zman’s post. But this comes at the same time as Zman’s work, so it could just as well have been copied from Zman.
Update:
Amusingly, I checked a few more. Here’s one (that points to the same source of somebody quoting Zman), but fascinatingly, this site seems to be for students to FACILITATE their plagiarism, as it helps them modify the cheating bits.
https://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
Update (Saturday morning):
I posted the above on Cole’s article as a comment. He deleted the comment and then blocked me. I take this as good evidence Cole was falsely accusing Zman of plagiarism.
https://substack.com/profile/18933142-william-m-briggs/note/c-132271308?
I’m sorry but must correct the record. I have been a radio fan since the early 1960s — AM, FM, LW, SW, CB, Ham, you name it. I am sorry to see the decline of AM. I understand Dr. Briggs’ views as he drove listening in the car. In my years and still, I always scan around to find all sorts of interesting things on AM radio as I drive around the country. There’s a lot there to discover.
But Ellie K’s comment entered several statements about Arizona radio that are factually untrue (and I don’t know why she put them out that way).
Seth Lieibsohn is superb, eloquent, grounded — I’ve listened for years, called in several times, and met him several times. He is on AM 960 from 3 to 6 p.m. weekday drive time.
Dennis Prager was not in the time slot Ellie identified, and is not on AM 960 right now due to being paralyzed from the neck down by an accident. I had followed him since he was on KABC AM 790 in LA in 1983. His time slot is occupied partly by Charlie Kirk — and Charlie is a formidable talker on serious issues. Larry Elder is awesome, currently featured on AM 960 as well, 8-9 p.m.
AM Radio in Arizona and nationwide features many locally-sourced programs — they are interesting to find, they give opportunities to hear non-broadcast professionals on a variety of topics. Some are infomercials mainly, but others are quite informative on their own merits.
When it comes to AM Radio offerings, a Biblical reference is in order: “Seek and you shall find.”
P.S. An outstanding network is available nationwide mostly on AM called Relevant Radio — produced by a Catholic organization — always interesting — and Patrick Madrid, on live in the mornings and rebroadcast other times, is perhaps the best talk host I’ve ever heard in 50 years when it comes to steady, clear, polite, informed, modest, and enjoyable discussion of (usually) serious subjects.
Cole’s article, while reading like the diary of a jilted 7th grade girl, is the very embodiment of crying out in pain while striking. Z-Man wrote upwards of 300 essays a year for the past half decade, output that no plagiarist would dare attempt as the odds of getting caught would be astronomical (perhaps Briggs could endeavor to calculate just how astronomical!) All that over a throwaway line, a figure of speech?
The death of radio, particularly AM radio, is regrettable but not surprising. There’s an almost inexhaustible number of streaming radio stations, many of them charmingly amateurish, but nothing beats the convenience of slowly turning the knob on your radio and coming across something unexpected. I used to love lying in bed at night (upstate NY) and coming across stations from across the U.S. and Canada.
Radio has been my passion since I was a kid. Around age 11, I had an AM/FM/Shortwave radio at my bedside and recall a winter morning hearing reports of a blizzard and being confident we’d have no school in Mount Olive, NJ – until I realized the radio was tuned to a Chicago station. Unfortunately, I had to run up and shower to go to school. Before that, I had already been infused with the stories from my grandparents in Norway, on of which was arrested by the Nazi occupiers for listening to a radio in his radio in his out house. Thankfully, he escaped and managed to take the set as well. I listened to that short wave set in 1980 and had interesting times listening to Radio Moscow and other European stations.
Today, in the New York Area the most of AM is dead. WABC770 has come back to life, however, with some good shows on Saturday and Sunday.
Right on, Brian (bulaoren)!! It has never been the same without Rush!!
God bless, C-Marie
Radio is not ending sadly. It is happily transitioning to internet streaming radio. My favorite is the Instrumental Channel on Lighthouse Christian Radio:
https://www.lighthouse.radio/?gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=22219815324&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5tC7rtnQjQMV10n_AR3Q-TKyEAAYASABEgLwhfD_BwE#1737260085951-9329c5de-438a
If you’d like a wide selection of radio stations from around the world: https://radio.garden/visit/tefe-am/JSbjvYLx is pretty fun. It’s always amazing how similar disc jockeys sound from major cities in different countries.
Not only has AM radio declined, shortwave radio has too. Both were great as methods for receiving information using very basic technology. One can hear AM radio with a handful of simple parts using 1900’s era technology, no electricity or batteries required. While internet connectivity provides a wealth of choices, we have internet access at the whim of others.