Serving the public convenience and necessity remains standing, though much of the communications act of 1934 has been blown out of the water. And I'm not familiar enough with this region yet to say anything about the "Froggy" situation. But here's a similar example from my previous home:
WKTU FM is licensed to a village on Long Island, New York. Lake Success. It's transmitter is in New Jersey and it covers the entire New York metro area. Its studios have at various times been in three or four other locations, but never in the community of license. So, you can ask, is it serving Lake Success? Sure, if you believe that dance music is a public service. Does it do news that's specific to its community of license? Probably not, since little of note has happened there since the United Nations moved its headquarters from that town to Manhattan in the late 1940s and the Sperry Gyroscope Company was bought by another defense contractor and moved out.
But if you look back at the pre-deregulation era license renewal process, what do you find? A station seeking rewnewal would state what it was going to do to serve the community, and the FCC said "yes" or "no." It didn't much matter what the applicant said as long as it conformed to its own declarations for the duration of the renewal -- which at that time was three years.
Sure, most of them promised a certain percentage of the broadcast week would be devoted to news and/or public service programs. And the application asked for a percentage of commercial time that would be devoted to PSAs. If you put one half of one percent, that was okay. Or ten percent, or whatever. As long as at the end of the renewal period your logs reflected what you said you'd do, you were home free.
Then came the community surveys. The stations would have to go out and ask questions about what alleged community leaders thought was a good thing to broadcast. This was often a shadow play. The "leaders" would give answers. The stations would fill out the questionaires and maybe do a program or two about something mentioned in one or two of the interviews.
But basically nothing has changed but the degree of brazenness with which stations disregard the interests of their listeners.
Commercial radio is a business. And without bringing in the bucks, there's no money to serve community interests. So we have to allow for that. Want to staff a news department? Let's see.. pay a news director who can double as morning drive anchor, a mid-day and an evening newscaster, a reporter or two, a full membership in the Associated Press, an arrangement with the local papers to re-use their stuff after publication. So that's quite a payroll in today's money. You can't find a news director for $150 a week anymore.
At the moment, New York stations don't do much news, but they can turn to two all news stations and say "well, these guys do it, and so do a couple of the talk stations, so why bother?" They're right. Around here, State College and vicinity, I haven't been able to find a live local newscast after noon on a weekday and there seem to be none at all on the weekends. WIEZ tries. But it seems to be the same stories over and over, without a change in angle or word.
I would settle for one or two of the stations doing some real news in the afternoon.
But no one ever really listened to those Sunday morning public service shows, did they? And how many lost dogs or cats did the "Pet Patrol" actually find?
Yeah, there's little investment in news. But you know what? I think I'd prefer no news to badly executed news.
That former "real" stations have been turned into repeaters is a damned shame. But better a repeater than a dark frequency.
Are things worse than they used to be? Maybe. Or maybe they're just more obvious.
