Who Still Listens To AM Radio?

The cold and snow, and now the wood stove, still has me a tad behind. So something fun.

I saw this tweet and was sad:

At first I thought there wouldn’t be anybody who didn’t know. But then I recalled videos of kids (these days!) who were confronted by rotary telephones and suchlike ancient technology and couldn’t figure out how to use any of it.

Thus I suppose there might be some who haven’t a clue what an AM radio is or how to work one.

Turning one on and adjusting the volume ought not be too difficult, since the radio only has two controls. But after getting it on, then what? Does anybody under 50 (40? 30?) know how to “tune in” a station? Or, more importantly, know which station they want to tune into?

If you were in Michigan and I asked you to dial in WJR (“The great voice of the great lakes”), would the young know what that meant?

Would you?

Here’s our poll (below). The ages are 60 years or older, or 59 years or younger. It’s already clear a good chunk of readers are grumpy old men, hence I wanted to separate the men from the boys. As I myself reach more enlightened ages, I have learned the thing about being grumpy is that as you age, you earn the right and wisdom to speak about what is going wrong with kids these days.

Anyway, in the poll, I use “listen” to mean on an actual physical AM radio, any radio that has AM capability, even if it’s digital. I do not mean computers or “devices” hooked up to internet streams: these do not count as radios. I mean something used to tune in a frequency over the air.

I mean a radio, like in your car or home. I should ask a separate question of how many listen outside cars, or include more ages, but I dislike multi-questions surveys. Let me know in the comments instead.

(The poll asks if you routinely listen to AM, and are 60+ or 59 or younger. If you don’t want to answer at the other site, feel free to put it in comments.)

You figure what “routinely” means to you.

With the increase, and now ubiquity, of switch-mode power supplies (if you know, you know), and with “devices” proliferating, the air is flooded with noise and interference. “Devices” have trained human ears, especially in the not-yet-grumpy, to expect pristine audio. I don’t think many now have a tolerance for static, which is a necessary component to listening to AM.

If you are under, say, 50, do you even know what static is?

Many grumparians still listen to talk radio, and most of that is old-school conservative (OSC). Old, not new-school. The younger have moved on from these older voices, awakening to new (which is to say, ancient) political realities. The young realize the 20th Century is at long last fading away.

The young are quite right about the older voices losing relevance. There isn’t much point in listening to OSC radio. You already know in advance what will be said. If you only had the de-host-identified transcripts from any OSC show, you couldn’t tell the difference between any of them.

(Incidentally, which of you guys are buying time shares? All I hear when DXing are commercials promising to get you out of them.)

There exists a veritable flood of podcasts with new-school right-wing thinking, and as far as I know, none of these have been picked up by radio bosses. A tremendous missed opportunity.

The same fear of risk that pervades the rest of the culture infects radio, too. Instead of new movies, we have the umpteenth remake of a tired franchise, this time boldly sex and race swapping the hero (now heroine). Brave, brave.

Stations are shutting down, some countries have eliminated all AM (and shortwave) broadcasts, car manufacturers are trying not to include AM, which means the habit of listening can’t form. I was raised on radio love the old AM. I hate to see it go.

Are you listening?

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