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Blogger Ridicules "No Urban Dictates" Controversy

Because the fairness doctrine would be used to bludgeon right wing radio into either some kind of contrived balance (Air Rush? you have air some liberal idiot for the same amount of time) or shutdown conservative radio entirely.

I've yet to see an actual draft of the "No urban/No Hispanic" rule the FCC proposed. Since most of us have zero-nada-no bargaining power with the agencies, I would like to see how the Commission proposes to enforce such asinine nonsense. Especially if the Jim Crow Agency wants to buy time for the "Jeff Davis for Congress" committee and specifically states they do not want Black/Spanish stations. Which Federal reg. do you violate?

(For the uniformed, the FCC earlier this year issued a notice of proposed rulemaking wherein they announced that stations, at renewal time, would have to certify that they did not deal with advertising agencies who discriminate, in response to this probably baseless claim that the urban stations were not getting buys because the agencies were biased against them.)
 
Well, having worked at a couple of Urban stations in my life, I know there has always been some resistance by some advertisers or agencies toward what used to be called Black radio.

In the 1970's the black owner of a Cincinnati Cadillac dealership refused to advertise on the black station. But...it wasn't racism. He had advertised on the station and said the customers the station brought in at the time resulted in high repo rates. It wasn't racism...he just didn't want to do business with a group of customers that didn't pay their bills. (His words...not mine.)

Still, I've heard of the "no urban" dictate. I've just never seen it on paper by an agency.

Dictate advertising should not exist. But...I also don't think the FCC should try to be in the business of putting the onus on radio stations to ensure they only deal with agencies that they can certify do business by someone's definition of "fairness" that is not the customer's.

Unfortunately, you can't legislate what's in a person's heart...or mind. And the FCC would be wrong to try.
 
Having worked country, urban, progressive and talk over the years - as well as mainstream A/C, I can say that I have run into "no xxx-format dictates" for country, urban, progressive and controversial talk many times.

These knee-jerk "dictates" are, indeed, pretty dumb - they restrict the media buyer from exercising the creativity that they are paid for. However, it is well-known that there are plenty of dumb people in business.

The smart ones buy on well-vetted research, not blanket dictates.
 
As you say, there are plenty of dumb people in the agency business. Therein lies the problem, especially in smaller markets. Especially when dealing with one-man "agencies"--usually some guy pushed out of a large combo who then rounds up several of his business buddies to start his "agency." Buds who control a sizable chunks of the radio advertising dollars.

We should not take these buys because the guy who runs the agency hates--for example--urban radio? Therefore he is "discriminating," and we can't deal with him? The newspaper in the market has no such restrictions on them.

And then there is the problem in my first post. This "discriminatory" agency takes on the advertising for the campaign of a federal candidate (Congress). You can't refuse to sell air time to a Federal candidate, (unlike local candidates--where you can decide not to sell time in certain contests, so long as you treat both candidates equally). But then if you do, you are dealing with this "evil" agency, resulting in a black mark on your license come renewal time. And don't think the professional extortionists will not follow this very closely.
 
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