I met him during his time in LA and I agree.
-
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
KFBK news has given up
- Thread starter finallyescaped
- Start date
I met him during his time in LA and I agree.
One of the promises made about the Internet by its promoters was that it would freely allow people to associate with others who had different views and that all would gain an understanding of each other...
You know what happened? The exact opposite. It turned out that people in chatrooms (mostly) just wanted to talk with someone who agreed with their viewpoint. And (as we found out during the last decade), social media sites such as Facebook were encouraging this behavior by forwarding more militant posts of a particular viewpoint to those who showed they were inclined towards that viewpoint. The result, both in the U.S. and worldwide, has been growing social and political divisions that are being milked to make money for the owners of the social media sites.
And I would argue that the same is happening with talk radio. People prefer hearing what they believe to be true rather than what is actually true or opposing viewpoints. This has (at least initially) led to great ratings for talk radio but also to social and political polarization that cannot easily be assuaged.
Regarding Thom Hartmann, while I like him a lot (he usually has a better understanding of factual information than most of his conservative counterparts), I find his debates with conservatives to be very annoying. He's always interrupting what they say to get his own point across. I'm sorry but I prefer the older, more stowic style of debates where all sides are given a limited time to speak and make their points without interruption. This is great for public radio but not so great for commercial talk radio.
This applies to the internet in general.
I've said this to my friends for more than a decade:
We live in an era where we carry devices in our pockets that allow us immediate access to all the printed wisdom of the ages, all the philosophy, all the art, all the music.
We use them to watch cat videos and porn, to order lunch and to argue with strangers.
And I'd love to tell you that it's just dopey Americans, but nope---it's global.
It's a miracle we can feed and dress ourselves as a species.
Really interesting post -- which stations/markets were the hubs for iHeart news when this was implemented? Has it changed any since?
It was six years ago, so I'm fuzzy on the particulars since I decided not to be part of it. I know KFBK in Sacramento and KOA in Denver were. The other seven? Honestly, I don't know.
And I've been gone for almost five years, so I have no idea what cuts or changes have happened (outside of Sacramento) since.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that radio, the way it was being done, was unsustainable. The revenues didn't keep up with expenses.
KFBK may be the #1 station with a 9 share, but the overall pie that listen to broadcast radio is much smaller than it once was.
Now that federal funding has been removed from public broadcasting, even they are reassessing staffing and operations.
KFBK may be the #1 station with a 9 share, but the overall pie that listen to broadcast radio is much smaller than it once was.
Now that federal funding has been removed from public broadcasting, even they are reassessing staffing and operations.
I overlooked one other thing:
When I came to town in November of 2013, the Morning News anchors were Ed Crane (formerly of CBS News) and Amy Lewis. Ed had been at KFBK since 2008 and did a commentary segment every morning at 7:35 (ish?) called "Crane's Corner".
Ed's slightly to the right of Atilla the Hun and I thought it was a huge disconnect for him to read the news straight for four hours and spend five minutes in the middle of it suggesting that Hillary Clinton was in a bad mood because she got a splinter from that broom she rides (literally a Crane line).
I became producer of the KFBK Morning News in February of 2014 and my first question to then-PD Ken Charles was "what can we do about this?" Ken basically said we just had to live with it. Apparently the commentary was in Ed's contract.
We had a change in General Managers, Ken left later that year and before Bill White could arrive to take his place, the new GM ended Ed's contract ahead of schedule. End of commentaries. We hired Dan Mitchinson to take Ed's place.
And from that moment until just a few years ago, the newscasts were opinion-free. Violating that could get you fired and there's a young woman working in PR now instead of news because I fired her for exactly that...and in that case, it was an unfair attack on a right-wing political figure. We played it straight.
There are some who feel that the way to address the "trust in media" polls is to get rid of left wing bias.
What they completely ignore is the polls show the same distrust for right wing bias. It's a bigger factor than left bias.
ijr.com
It doesn't help public opinion when the government itself is promoting the lack of trust narrative, and the media reports it.
What they completely ignore is the polls show the same distrust for right wing bias. It's a bigger factor than left bias.
Trust In News Media Lower Than Ever Among Americans In New Gallup Poll
Americans’ trust in the media has slumped to an all-time low, according to a Gallup survey released Thursday. Nearly seven
ijr.com
It doesn't help public opinion when the government itself is promoting the lack of trust narrative, and the media reports it.
I think that's a serious misreading of California.
That's pretty much what "Colorado's Morning News" on KOA sounds like now, stuffed with a lot of happy talk to cover up the thinness of the material.
I don't know what KFBK does these days, but I can tell you that KOA (and KHOW) rely heavily on a "partnership" with KDVR ("Fox 31") for local coverage. KDFD has no local newscasts that I've heard; it runs the Fox-branded radio network for news and that's it. There is occasional street reporting by iHeart staff. However, to take an example, there's no continuing coverage of the statehouse other than what can be repurposed from interviews on Ross Kaminsky's show (and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that) and whatever comes from TV sound bites originated by "Fox 31". Now that Marty Lenz is gone as a morning anchor, with a reporter from the newsroom taking his place at least temporarily, I imagine there'll be even less iHeart-originated street coverage. There's not much room for it anyway; most KOA newscasts last two minutes.
For you conspiracy theorists, note that KDVR is owned by Nexstar.
I should try to hear what the Pueblo and Fort Collins iHeart outposts do, keeping in mind that Denver is both the state capital and the major commercial center of the state, which would strongly influence what stories get covered even without a centralized newsroom.
That was one of the issues of contention when they were pitching the job to me. I told them that by definition, you're then essentially doing Capitol coverage for a statewide audience.
I could tell that was the last type of story they wanted, but they struggled to define what would be a statewide story (apart from storms, fires, etc.) that didn't lean heavily on policy and law that affected all of California.
I actually expected my resistance to cause them to pull the offer to me, but they didn't. I expect they were relieved when I passed. Veronica is every bit as serious about news and principled as I am, but she didn't have the history I had with these guys. I'd long gotten over any intimidation.
I also suspect the joke was on them, because Veronica's no shrinking violet either. Easily one of the best hires I made in my career.
2 pm MDT:
KCOL (Fort Collins area) - Fox News, nothing local
KCSJ (Pueblo, with something else on 590 interfering, which I wouldn’t normally expect at 2 in the afternoon) - three national stories read by a Denver anchor, followed by a story about the opening of a new Denver park, followed by an Aurora crime story. That was it. How much interest there would be in those two stories way down south in Pueblo is debatable.
Yeah. This is what the 2019 vision was. Just took 'em a while to get there.
Cumulus-owned KABC-AM in L.A. also appears to be sourcing “local” hourlies from iHeart and following the same convention. There used to be local anchors reading local news stories along with local sports and weather before going to traffic. A more recent change has unnamed iHeart anchors quickly speed-reading three news stories — not all of them or even any of them local to L.A. — before someone else launches into the traffic report. Their sister station in the Bay Area KSFO-AM (former KGO-AM) only runs Fox News national hourlies with some hours having local traffic — the only local information given on KSFO / KGO anymore.
Keep in mind that Cumulus exited the LA market with the sale of KLOS. The only reason they still own this station is nobody will buy it.
They're running it as a bare bones operation with no real staff. Same with KSFO.
I listened to Tom in middle and high school on WPOP 1410 and he seemed to be talk mix with rock shock. In particular I remember a segment he did about a lady having mints in her mouth while performing a certain act on a man.
There are some days I wish I didnt have to do either!
Yeah. Tom had some go-to bits that he'd hit whenever the phones were getting slow. "All women are prostitutes!" "I'm an atheist---there, I've said it! Convince me I'm wrong!"
He definitely stood out on Phoenix talk radio in the mid-1980s.
I'm new here, I have to chime in to this discussion though.
My dad used to listen to KFBK in the mornings mostly on the way to work to get some news. Now, he did get annoyed at times with Amy Lewis, as did I, but not as much as we got annoyed at how the morning news seemed to veer to the right.
I don't think it was that bad when Cristina came on, but when Sam Shane came on the morning news turned more into a discussion or opinion type show it seemed like and we got to hear Sam's "views" and how much he talked like he was more of a right winger.
I remember my dad had sent some tweets to him on what was then Twitter, giving him his views and telling him what he thought. At some point Sam Shane blocked him, and eventually Cristina blocked him on Twitter as well. That's irrelevant but it shows arrogance.
Eventually we stopped listening after it became apparent that it was becoming less straight news and more Fox News or something. I don't want a point of view from my local news people who are supposed to report news.
Now Sam Shane has his own show in Tom Sullivan's old slot.
Having been the producer or executive producer for the last four years of Amy's tenure, I'll repeat that the newscast was straight down the middle, apart from the inexplicable guarantee in Ed Crane's contact allowing him to do commentary every morning at 7:35. As I outlined in a previous post, that was a major concern of mine from day one, but it took a change in management to end it:
KFBK news has given up
I only met Tom once in Phoenix, but I got the sense that Leykis really enjoyed the conversations regardless of how they began and ended. I met him during his time in LA and I agree.
radiodiscussions.com