Re: KRC
TB was involved with a station I ran before I ran it. He continued to make his presence known by listening and critiquing it negatively behind our backs to Covington, without so much as a courtesy call to us. We were in a market where we did not have the benefit of a full local staff, yet we were being called on the carpet for tiny middle-of-the-night errors that were one-time events...things that happen on a very regular basis today on WKRC, now that his staff has been cut to the bone (as ours had been years ago). I call that being a political hamster...maybe not as big a political hamster as Sean, but a politico and a member of the rodent family nonetheless.
As for KRC's smoothness, just for the heck of it, earlier this month I started writing down the number of errors I heard in a day of listening. I filled a single spaced page in less than six hours. One example: 3/12/2007, 6:07pm: No Savage... Jerry Doyle instead...for twenty minutes (sat channel was tuned incorrectly). Stopset at :17 was overridden by network for more than a minute, followed by a full minute of dead air. (This was PM drive, folks). And that's just one event. I have dozens more documented. They're a train wreck in progress, in much the same way 1530/1360 was during the Air America days.
At our house, we've taken to calling Rush Limbaugh simply "Imbaugh", thanks to the overstuffing of stopsets combined with the hatchet-chop local-to-network switching. "Blah-blah-blah, on 55KRC." (switch) "Imbaugh, with talent on loan from Gawda..."
Guess TB knows how it feels now, having to do everything without any decent help. Makes it easier to be an "easy-going PD" to the help when there ain't any help to be easy-going to.