Such A Lot Of Fools (Commercial Radio's Owners)

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http://www.clevescene.com/stories/15/85/such-a-lot-of-fools

Commercial Radio's Owners Have Only Themselves To Blame
By Cris Glaser

The death knell for radio broadcasting rang in early 1996. Too bad it took three years for me and many of my fellow ex-newscasters and DJs to hear the beginning of the slow, mournful drone of the funeral march.

Not that any of us were blind to the sweeping changes that resulted from the Telecommunications Act, designed to deregulate the broadcast industry once President Bill Clinton signed it into law on February 8, 1996. Eliminating most media-ownership rules gave the green light to anyone with money or access to credit to buy almost as many radio and TV stations as they could afford.

Proponents claimed the bill would foster healthy competition in the broadcast industry; consumer activists like Ralph Nader argued that the act was "an example of corporate welfare spawned by political corruption," because it granted broadcasters highly coveted licenses for public-airwave frequencies at relatively little cost. Although its impact wasn't immediate, my beloved "theater of the mind" started to morph into a house of cards.

Consider this: During my first radio-news gig at the Elyria-based WEOL and WNWV ("The Wave") between 1988 and 1993, it was not unusual for me, on assignment, to run into reporters Vic Gideon of then-WWWE, Anita Quinn of WMJI, Francine Kane of WGAR, Tom Moore of WERE and the fine folks of public radio's WCPN and WKSU. Collectively, we nurtured a friendly competition to see who could race back to his or her station to break the story on the air. By the time I was hired at WWWE and its sister station, WLTF, in July 1993, the competition between Cleveland's newsrooms had grown even more fierce because of the rapid succession of owners, each more powerful than the last...


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