If you get a chance to listen to Katie Porter's "The Divided Dial, Part 2," please do it. (It's available at WNYC's website and featured on that station's "On the Media," program which is carried weekly by many NPR affiliates.) It explores how the far right used shortwave frequencies--especially those of religious outlet WWCR in Nashville, Tennessee--to build an audience for its hate speech and then bring that audience online with it when the Internet became popular in the early 2000s.
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Kari Lake previews her plans for Voice of America in the next Administration.
- Thread starter Bill Betten
- Start date
The RCI shortwave audience had likely already been reduced to hardcore shortwave enthusiasts when the plug was pulled in 2012. They had become a medium sized fish in a very tiny pond.
RCI pretty much lost me in 2006 when they switched from being a general news, information and culture outlet for Canada, and instead became a recruiting tool for potential immigrants, particularly from South Asia. The programming became narrow and irrelevant for anyone not in that target demographic. The shortwave broadcast schedule was also reduced quite a bit at that time. 2006 was also when the shortwave broadcasts of CBC Radio’s flagship news and current affairs programs The World at Six and As It Happens were dropped.
The CBC News website is a daily read for me, so there is really no reason to listen to RCI online. And for any major Canadian news event the site will stream CBC television coverage.
The BBC World Service is heading down a similar path, emphasizing streaming, podcasts and local rebroadcasts, as well as their news website. I fully expect most, if not all of the BBC shortwave output to be gone in the next two to five years, with the possible exception of very specific target areas and language services (Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan, DR Congo, conflict areas).
Fascinating! I'll have to check it out at some point.
It seems the far right has been doing something like this – within the bounds of the standard FCC rules and regulations, for the most part – on the AM broadcast band dial for years now.
Quite successfully, I might add.
It's really quite a shame how the far right appropriate things.
c
We still see in the Nielsen data that over a third of all people use AM. The NAB presented this data for the hearings about AM preservation, in fact.
But as long as there are ethnic and religious options that are profitable, we will have AMs. And a few heritage stations will still find that many listeners use the AM even if they have added an FM simulcast.
The biggest issue is that most AM stations don't fully cover their market even in the daytime, and it is worse at night.
Cleveland used to have 8 AMs that were not suburban. Only one covers the full MSA day and night.
Look at how many stations in the New York City MSA don't cover the whole market. There are a bunch of suburban stations on Long Island and in the Jersey suburbs and in the counties north of Manhattan and the Boroughs.
Only a couple of AMs... out of over 30 AMs in the MSA... come close to covering the full market: 660, 770, 880. 570, 710, 1010 and 1050 come close but miss big chunks. So that is really less than a half-dozen viable AMs in the market.
Where you find a "surviving" AM, you find a good signal. KFI, KSL, KOA, WSB are examples (even if some have FM simulcasts).
I was comparing internet to shortwave.
KSL booms into California after dark, almost like a local. I can even get a lock on the HD signal every now and then.
c
True. I used to listen to it at night when driving back to LA from weekends in "the desert".
But my reference was to having a signal that day or night provided a fully listenable experience everywhere in the Metro Survey Area. That means at least 10 mV/m (the ITU says 15!) and so few stations in any market do that.
I think your point about AM radio is a valid one. looking at the latest ratings for Tucson, Arizona, at
Tucson
radioinsight.com
it looks like the strongest AM in the market (at #12) is KDRI-AM. Though I would quibble with the variety format description (I would argue it's oldies), it does a good job covering all of the Tucson area 24 hours a day from a site some 20 miles northwest of the metro near Marana. And while the nighttime transmission can't go too far northeast (primarily because of WCCO in Minneapolis), that coverage of Tucson and points south is all it needs for that signal. (There is an FM translator in Tucson itself but not in any of the other areas the transmitter covers.) Bustos currently holds the station license and for now, at least, it's looking like (mostly) a cash cow for them.
And did I say KDRI-AM had live local jocks on the air 18 hours a day? That's not bad for an AM radio station in a big metro area operating in 2025.
I think your point about AM radio is a valid one. looking at the latest ratings for Tucson, Arizona, at
Tucson
it looks like the strongest AM in the market (at #12) is KDRI-AM. Though I would quibble with the variety format description (I would argue it's oldies), it does a good job covering all of the Tucson area 24 hours a day from a site some 20 miles northwest of the metro near Marana. And while the nighttime transmission can't go too far northeast (primarily because of WCCO in Minneapolis), that coverage of Tucson and points south is all it needs for that signal. (There is an FM translator in Tucson itself but not in any of the other areas the transmitter covers.) Bustos currently holds the station license and for now, at least, it's looking like (mostly) a cash cow for them.
And did I say KDRI-AM had live local jocks on the air 18 hours a day? That's not bad for an AM radio station in a big metro area operating in 2025.
I'd ne shocked if theyre live.... last I saw a picture they were using playout one automation which is fantastic for vocietracking and one of the reason alot of smaller stations use it
I have heard live traffic report updates by the disc jockey on the air through the station's Internet stream between7 and 10pm week nights. I'd be hard pressed to argue that that information is being voicetracked.
Dozens face deportation amid layoffs at Voice of America
Around 60 workers who are in the U.S. on J-1 visas could be asked to leave the country after being laid off from Voice of America last week.
thedesk.net
Here is more on the VOA issuing layoffs to independent contractors.
It's entirely possible theyre live.. or also what i call live in the moment.. portions are voicetracked ahead of time... and some are voicetracked within x mins of the break airing.. thats done all the time at various stations
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...and you may well be right. Thanks for the insights.
Dozens face deportation amid layoffs at Voice of America
Around 60 workers who are in the U.S. on J-1 visas could be asked to leave the country after being laid off from Voice of America last week.
Here is more on the VOA issuing layoffs to independent contractors.
So, if the VOA, ever does get back on its feet again, it likely will not be broadcasting, no matter which platforms are used, in the number of languages it did in the past.
Hopefully different ways of reaching totalitarian regime and repressive nations, as shortwave and the internet can't get through. But one result of the politicized actions against VOA will be the recognition that its traditional ways of broadcasting are no longer effective or needed.
However, we won’t really know since there’s nobody there to ask the question.
At least when heart fires everyone, there are ways to find out if the staff was needed.
We already know that the methods that VOA was using are obsolete (SW) or ineffective (internet). The fact that nearly every other international broadcaster has left shortwave... starting two decades ago with HCJB... shows that there is no audience for the band, irrespective of the broadcaster or content.
We already know that spending on shortwave and internet streams to reach totalitarian nations is futile.
Example: Cuba has put over 20 station on 1180 AM all across Cuba to block Radio Martí on that channel. But they don't try to block Martí on shortwave... because they know that nearly nobody has a SW radio any more.
They still have some noise jammers on SW, or did when Marti was still on the air. Some SWL's reported hearing them even in the last month before Marti's SW plug was yanked.
Re: reaching totalitarian states: aside from SW and internet, there really is no other option, aside from maybe satellite, but how many poor people in third world, totalitarian regimes have a satellite dish? The answer is probably a lot less of them have satellite receivers and dishes than have SW-capable radios in the household.
But it's all based on anecdotal information. No real facts. If you go back to the first post in this thread, and the interview with Kari Lake, she was willing to accept the 390 million number that you say isn't based on anything. And even if she believed they had reach, she still shut it down. So she didn't care what the reach was.
My anecdotal information comes from someone who actually was a member of the BBOG. He says they were effective, and he visited the countries he was interested in. He knows metrics and methodology just like you.
All the Radio Marti shortwave frequencies still had jamming activity present up to the time the station left the air. Here in Houston the RM audio was way above the jamming levels, so no real hinderance to listening.