By Lawrence Henry on 11.26.04 @ 12:07AM
For starters, guess who dominates news radio.
Back in the 1970s, I took a temporary job helping to prepare the
daily news digest for Armand Hammer. That's right, your reliable
right-wing columnist once worked for the old com-symp himself. I
reported to a room in the Occidental Petroleum building on Wilshire
Boulevard in Westwood, and there, with a very pleasant young lady
supervising, I clipped stories from wire services that I thought
would interest the Great Man and pasted them into a daily news
report.
When I say "clip," I mean it literally. We had half a dozen wire
service machines, rumbling and rattling out a continuous roll of
machine-typed paper: AP, UPI, Reuters, and I don't remember the
rest; there used to be more such services than there are now.
Indeed, smaller radio stations of the time used to be called "rip
and read" stations, because that's all their news departments
amounted to. Somebody ripped the latest news story off a wire
service machine every hour and read it into a mike.
Today's wired world disguises the fact that most radio stations
are still rippers and readers of news, with the ripping and reading
accomplished via satellite and tape. So, as Daniel Henninger
remarked in the Wall Street Journal in "2004's Biggest
Losers," describing the new media landscape after the recent
election, "Anyone who can package and drive a particularized
version of the news on (the) scale (of Big Media) can move
opinion…"
How does Big Media "package and drive" a story? I contend that
it's through radio affiliate networks. This story won't be popular
to tell or sell with the conservative audience, because things seem
to look so rosy.
Conservatives have had a good election, media-wise. We can
rightly congratulate ourselves for exposing the Memogate fraud of
Dan Rather, for helping to keep the Swift Boat Vets' and POW
activists' stories in the news, and, on election day itself, for
exposing the phoniness of the early exit polls and keeping the
troops motivated. Much else, too. Conservative opinion magazines,
conservative think tanks and foundations, conservative conferences
and organizations exist as never before. We've changed things. A
lot.
Indeed, the macro statistics back us up. As long ago as June 11,
2000, the Pew Research Center reported "Internet Sapping Broadcast News Audience."
The accompanying graph shows, among other things, regular watchers
of network news dropping from 60 percent of responders in 1993 to
30 percent in 2000.
But, but…
In terms of a daily, dominant, big story (remember Abu Ghraib,
the 9/11 Commission Report's "No WMD" distortion, and a host of
others), we're still playing catch-up. We're still reacting, not
acting. Why?
Because ABC Radio News has more than 2,300 affiliate stations
around the country. Westwood One, which packages a service that
includes CBS, CNN, and NBC radio, has almost 2,750 affiliates. They
virtually blanket the nation with hourly and half-hourly 60- and
90-second spots on most radio stations that most people listen to
most of the time during the day when most people are where they are
most of the time when they listen to the radio: In their cars.
Where does that story come from? Most of the time, from the
New York Times or the Washington Post. (The last
few days, it's come from ESPN, but you get the point.)
Against that dominance, at this point, we can only hope for Fox
News to catch up. Nobody else has the financial firepower to try.
And, according to a story in Radio World Newspaper on January 14 of
this year, Fox has commitments from only about 150 radio stations
to try the new Fox Radio news service.
It's going to be a long, long haul. Nobody suggests that the
Internet isn't important. But, for now, in military terms,
traditional media holds the high ground, and it's very high ground
indeed.
topics:
Military
