• Get involved.
    We want your input!
    Apply for Membership and join the conversations about everything related to broadcasting.

    After we receive your registration, a moderator will review it. After your registration is approved, you will be permitted to post.
    If you use a disposable or false email address, your registration will be rejected.

    After your membership is approved, please take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself.
    https://www.radiodiscussions.com/forums/introduce-yourself.1088/

    Thanks in advance and have fun!
    RadioDiscussions Administrators

Religious Radio Organization Cheers Upcoming Opportunities to Acquire More Signals

Given that EMF also has an outreach program where folks can get counseling with a Christian belief system and the fact that all their music is either directly faith driven or positive in outlook, that sounds a lot like what my church would call "Christian values".

KQED has several outreach programs with local high schools. The station even hires certified teachers to oversee their programs. Yet their music royalty is paid as a public station and not a school.
 
It depends. Generosity isn't involved in something known as "tithing." That's where people give a percentage of their income to their church.
Not all Christian faiths tithe. The church I belong to does not, although they actively request contributions... and there are about 60 million of us in that group.
There is no equivalent in the secular world.
And there is no equivalent to many parts of faith in a pure secular world.
 
Not all Christian faiths tithe. The church I belong to does not, although they actively request contributions... and there are about 60 million of us in that group.

I understand that, but we were talking about donations being based on generosity. Tithing isn't based on generosity, but obligation. The only thing that compares to that in the secular world is government taxation.
 
The main studio rule was eliminated in 2017. I'm no fan of K-Love/Air 1, and I think their fundraising times are over the top and ridiculous. However...as with any type of non-commercial station there are some sincere and quality operators. It's also not fair in some of the posts above, to label all Christians the same, just as you would not do it for Buddhists, Jewish or Muslim folks. Why not then say all Muslims are jihadists and radicals because a portion of them are then, when they do indeed have theocratic governments and execute people with alternative lifestyles? I don't understand all the hate when Christian groups buy stations. No one is preventing anyone or any other group from buying these signals. The nature of the business today is that almost no other buyer is interested. So would you rather have the signals go dark if they aren't making any money? What's the future of broadcasting if that happens?


There are very sincere and quality operators in the public radio realm too
 
If I am EMF or CSN or whomever, adding another station adds very little to the cost of doing business. You are running one or two music formats with whatever staff is needed, plus a ton of local contract engineers. That's it.
No, it is not in their case.

(Sidebar: I am not a follower of their stations, the kinds of music they play nor am I a contributor)

EMF has extensive outreach programs, both by phone and in local communities and they work to "get Christians together" in ways other than format religious services.
Takes a great deal more money to support local news staffs in the places where public radio is most needed. It's not a generosity contest.
To me, it is a difference in purpose, and not easily compared. If I am a listener to K-Love but never find any NPR shows of interest, then that determines my alliance and preference.

I don't think that either can be compared with the other, nor can one be given a "higher score" than the other insofar as contribution to their community is concerned.
 
I agree. Compare K-Love with VCY or some of the Salem teaching stations. Very different. It's interesting to me that K-Love is getting better ratings than Salem got with The Fish in Atlanta. Of course K-Love is commercial free, and The Fish was not.
I don't listen to the various EMF formats, so I have a question: We know that the Fish stations had ads, and K-Love does not, but what percentage of the time on K-Love is spent in fund raising?
Relevant Radio is probably #2. With the recent supreme court decision, these stations will become more active in politics.
That is way too generalized to be a valid observation. I doubt that K-Love will do anything "political" as their format is intentionally aimed in good part towards those who are Christians but who are not active with a particular church or congregation. They avoid polarization, and I think that is one of their key corporate values.
Again, I agree. There is no law preventing a group of people from pooling their money and buying a radio station and playing 50s/60s oldies or any format they like. I've read of a few people doing it with LPFMs or AMs, but so far not a major FM.
Or, like Cats is accused of, buying a station and doing talk shows that follow his beliefs and even contain his personal participation at time.
Thankfully Stevie Wonder continues to own an FM in LA.
How many other cases are there of stations owned by a "person of means" who wants to provide a variety of radio service they feel to be lacking otherwise? Certainly Stevie Wonder's station is the brightest star in that firmament.
 
In fairness, the public file issues list isn't something that requires a lawyer. For a station like yours, you could create the list each quarter in no time at all just by keeping a running document of the local issues you discuss. And uploading it to the FCC site takes less than five minutes.

The FCC doesn't ever seem to care what's in the list, just that some list gets filed every quarter.
That whole process is a remnant of the very extensive three-year license renewal process of the 60's and 70's. I can recall a "normal" license renewal for WQII and WZNT in San Juan that filled a "bankers box" almost full with the paperwork.

For those not familiar, to get those three-year renewals, we had to show that we had done what was promised three years before and "if not, why not". Generally, an AM had to have evidence of 8% news, public affairs and "other" programming while an FM needed at least 6%. And then you had to have a minimum number of PSAs, which did not count against the percentages.

To do the Public Affairs and Other programming (educational, religious, etc.) management had to personally interview many, many community leaders. In my case for a market of about 1.2 million, that meant at least 60 such interviews with city of license and surrounding mayors, police chiefs, school board members, university deans, heads of civic and charitable groups, representatives of ethnic groups (in Puerto Rico, that was Dominican immigrants) and so on.

You had to compile those interviews and show how your station would address the "issues". And you had to provide logs from a Composite Week made up of a random Monday, Tuesday, etc., from the last three years to prove you had done it in the prior three years.

There were extensive technical matters, showing you had operated correctly in compliance with the license. You had to show how you collected news, such as contracts with UPI or AP and all kinds of other stuff, too, such as corporate structure and ownership.

And what did we do? We interviewed all those people, most of whom hated the process because 30 other radio and TV stations called them, too! (I consolidated ascertainment in San Juan with all stations participating in a single interview with each leader in a hotel meeting room). Then we created junk programs that ran on Sunday at 4 AM, or newscasts that rand 5 or 6 minutes each in overnights, with nothing at all after 10 AM. Even if you tried to make the shows that were on the latest on Sunday interesting and entertaining, nobody listened.

Then, the FCC looked microscopically at renewals. Today, it seems, they don't care. In an era of podcasts and on-demand listening, it seems pointless to continue any of that sort of requirement and regulation.
 
K-Love and Air 1 (at different times) do fund raising for two weeks straight (with the exception of Sundays) about three times a year.
How intrusive is it? I know I keep coming across public TV fundraisers that all seem to be based on getting a CD collection of 50's music for a particular donation, almost like those Time Life informercials selling oldies collections I used to see regularly.
 
And what did we do? We interviewed all those people, most of whom hated the process because 30 other radio and TV stations called them, too! (I consolidated ascertainment in San Juan with all stations participating in a single interview with each leader in a hotel meeting room). Then we created junk programs that ran on Sunday at 4 AM, or newscasts that rand 5 or 6 minutes each in overnights, with nothing at all after 10 AM. Even if you tried to make the shows that were on the latest on Sunday interesting and entertaining, nobody listened.

We did much the same thing in 1986 in Oxnard/Ventura when I was in charge of public service programming. When I came back to that station three years later, the half-hour shows I had done then were still in the archives, so I edited multiple five-minute segments out of them and ran them overnight.
 
We did much the same thing in 1986 in Oxnard/Ventura when I was in charge of public service programming. When I came back to that station three years later, the half-hour shows I had done then were still in the archives, so I edited multiple five-minute segments out of them and ran them overnight.
The "best" I ever saw was Bob Hope's CHR in Puerto Rico, WBMJ, which played mainland Top 40 with Spanish language jocks, promos and advertisements. They took the supermarket tabloids and translated the most "entertaining" items and ran "Radio Rock Confidencial" for roughly 90" in each hour, twice an hour overnights.

Those were "news stories" since they came out of print magazines, and they counted on the total benign neglect of Puerto Rico by the FCC to let them get away with it. In fact, they did the stories so well, they were entertaining.
 
Then, the FCC looked microscopically at renewals. Today, it seems, they don't care. In an era of podcasts and on-demand listening, it seems pointless to continue any of that sort of requirement and regulation.

Carr still believes that there is a limited number of frequencies available. Even after all the over-licensing the FCC has done over the past 50 years.
 
The article linked in the first post fails to mention that Project 2025 calls for another step after defunding NPR and PBS, and this is to strip them of their non-commercial educational status. Trump should then “instruct the FCC to exclude the stations affiliated with PBS and NPR from the NCE denomination and the privileges that come with it,” according to the authors. This would likely be done with an Executive Order.

The goal is to force NPR stations off their current FM frequencies in the NCE band. It's not hard to understand the glee of religious broadcasters at the "educational" opportunities this would open up for them. That's the part they're not saying out loud.
 
The article linked in the first post fails to mention that Project 2025 calls for another step after defunding NPR and PBS, and this is to strip them of their non-commercial educational status.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has already talked about this in interviews on the subject of his investigation into the funding credits on NPR and PBS. He believes they are commercials, and therefore means stations that run them don't qualify as NCE. That's his interpretation of the law. NPR has already said that they have consulted the FCC in the way they do their funding credits, and have documentation to support the way they do it. But Carr didn't start this investigation lightly. He also wants to challenge their tax-exempt status. So this defunding of CPB wasn't done just to save taxpayers money.
 
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has already talked about this in interviews on the subject of his investigation into the funding credits on NPR and PBS. He believes they are commercials, and therefore means stations that run them don't qualify as NCE. That's his interpretation of the law. NPR has already said that they have consulted the FCC in the way they do their funding credits, and have documentation to support the way they do it. But Carr didn't start this investigation lightly. He also wants to challenge their tax-exempt status. So this defunding of CPB wasn't done just to save taxpayers money.

Right, it's in the manual. It's all spelled out what they are going to do. Carr is already teeing up his sham "investigation" which has a foregone conclusion that you can read in the Project 2025 roadmap.
 
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has already talked about this in interviews on the subject of his investigation into the funding credits on NPR and PBS. He believes they are commercials, and therefore means stations that run them don't qualify as NCE. That's his interpretation of the law. NPR has already said that they have consulted the FCC in the way they do their funding credits, and have documentation to support the way they do it. But Carr didn't start this investigation lightly. He also wants to challenge their tax-exempt status. So this defunding of CPB wasn't done just to save taxpayers money.
Yet the borders and limits on what constitutes an acceptable "supported by" announcement have been argued about for several decades. At issue is how commercialized such an announcement can be.

When I see those ads on public television showing the European river cruises, I can't think how such spots might be done to make them "more commercial". They are advertisements, not credits.

So the issue to me should more about the extent and limits of such announcements, or we will end up with personal injury lawyers and pain creams and arthritis meds all running full fledged spots on non-commercial stations.
 


Back
Top Bottom