I want to jump back on and clarify my statement about what makes a radio station accessible to a group of people. An old line traditional African American community radio station, and by this we're not talking about WRKS and WBLS, talks almost exclusively to it's own constituency. I'm refering to radio stations such as WWRL, WLIB, and WHAT in Philadelphia. Their mission for decades has been to serve the wants needs and desires of the city's black community...and there's nothing wrong with that. As they shed their music programming, those station addreessed those needs by increasing talk programming, aimed at their original core of listeners...people who grew up having WWRL, WLIB and WHAT as members of their family. Sure, they never asked any white listeners to shut the radio off, but the race rhetoric and angst increased, making the station inaccessible to the people to whom the rhetoric and angst was directed. Plus, those stations were so well known by name for the audience they served, many non-blacks just never sampled them thinking there was nothing directed at them. WWRL, in my opinion, is a very good sounding broad based urban issues talk radio station, which no longer shows up in the book, because WWRL has never gone out of it's "community" to tell it's potential audience of people from all races and backgrounds that they should listen.
When was the last time you saw WWRL do anything that built cume?
It's a station that plays to the people who haven't found a good enough reason to leave it. Liberal talk with white hosts alienates the radio station's core of Black listeners. Of course it can be argued that WWRL has little or nothing left to lose, but it's a very good sounding and focused radio station that will be lost.
