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WBEN GUN RALLY IN ALBANY

G

GeorgeKramer

Guest
Hot topic in the industry - did WBEN/Entercom Buffalo provide a valuable public service? They sure did. They listened to their audience and reacted, giving many of their listeners an opportunity to interact with their elected officials in the state capital.

But did they cross the line of being objective? That, my friends, is something we should discuss.

Entercom Buffalo sponsored the bus trip. They worked the phones on this project and pulled in some decent coin for a three-hour broadcast. My sales friends said THIS has been the sole focus at 500 Corporate Parkway since the NY SAFE legislation was passed.

So I say it was a great idea, but I wonder if the fine line between news and opinion saw the two impact each other, and I wonder what others think about how involved the sales/promotions departments were in promoting and selling something that is so controversial.
 
Did the news department promote any of this during their broadcasts? If not, there's no issue here.

In case you hadn't notice, Beach and Bauerle do OPINION, not NEWS. Unless you've got Steve Cichon or his minions hawking bus trip tickets on the air, you have no beef.
 
I'm with Rox on this. The only possible exception being if the news department continued to bang the story in a prominent position when there was no reason to do so. My WBEN TSL is limited. From what I heard, there wasn't a conflict. That being said, I know from experience that listeners' perceptions can vary greatly from reality. The gray area arises if WBEN scheduled promos for the rally within and immediately adjacent to newscasts, causing some listeners to get the wrong impression.For the most part, listeners know what to expect when they select WBEN.
 
Mouonting that rally and putting the station officially behind it could be a bad decision for a strategic reason. They've just succeeded in alienating a majority of their potential audience, especially those under 55, by effectively embracing a pro-gun stance as a company when most New Yorkers agree with Governor Cuomo and support the new gun law. (Check the Siena, Marist and Quinnipiac polls if you don't believe me.)

Could cost them listeners, and make advertisers who are already reluctant to sign up with commercial talkers to be still more resistant. If individual hosts want to take a stand, that's one thing, it's kind of expected. But a station and its ownership and management? That's a far higher and potentially costlier level of risk.
 
I'd love to see the details on that polling. The political opinions between NYC and the rest of the state can have a rather wide gap but NYC is the 1,000lb elephant in room and stomps out the rest of the state's desires.

In WNY WBEN is probably on pretty safe ground taking a pro-gun stance - especially among their core listeners.
 
"They've just succeeded in alienating a majority of their potential audience, especially those under 55"

WBEN's strongest demo is 65+, followed by 55-64. 12+ Mon-Sun 6A to 12M indicates less than 20% of Men and less than 15% of Women under 55 years of age listen to the station. As most posters and readers here know, WBEN is an aging station, garnering slightly more 55+ Women than Men. As spt87 notes, the core probably doesn't care. The station might as well be 9-30 W-G-U-N.
 
My take is that WBEN is supportive of the United States Constitution, which our forefathers carefully crafted over 200 years ago. A governor who is out for only selfish reasons sought to railroad an adjustment to a sacrosanct law of the land. In doing so, he also armed millions of people who had little interest in owning weapons, and now have them available without the attendant knowledge of how to use or safely store them. I say hats off to a media company that champions the 2nd amendment and all the other rights that are guaranteed by our enduring, cherished law of the land!
 
"My take is that WBEN is supportive of the United States Constitution, which our forefathers carefully crafted over 200 years ago. A governor who is out for only selfish reasons sought to railroad an adjustment to a sacrosanct law of the land. In doing so, he also armed millions of people who had little interest in owning weapons, and now have them available without the attendant knowledge of how to use or safely store them. I say hats off to a media company that champions the 2nd amendment and all the other rights that are guaranteed by our enduring, cherished law of the land!"

In other words, public be damned, we want our way, we want our guns, and we will do what we damn well please. We'll stretch the second amendment (which was originally crafted to give local communities control over law enforcement) to say whatever we want it to say. So much for the courts' supposed reverence for the original framers' intent

Not a good idea for any station to take that stance, especially if they want to expand their clearly aging demos to encompass the generations of younger and middle-aged adults they say they want to reach and who have very different ideas on issues like these. I can tell you that back in 1979 (during my time on the WBEN morning show with Jeff Kaye) the core was 35-54. and it helped us to a consistent #1 ranking in both the prime demos and te overall 12+ ranking. Clearly something has gone WAY wrong for the station to fail to maintain its strength in the 35-54 sweet spot. Looking at this thread gives me a better idea of how and why that has happened.

Oh, by the way, Siena and Marist polls have sought to break out regional differences in public opinion on this issue, and guess what? There is no significant difference. Upstate and downstate NY, except for some rural areas outside any major metro area, support the Governor strongly on this and other issues. Go too far against the tide of public opinion, you take a big risk with your audience and could push it away. Older rural listeners won't carry a major metropolitan station.
 
"Clearly something has gone WAY wrong for the station to fail to maintain its strength in the 35-54 sweet spot."

1979 was 34 years ago. An entire generation and a half has evolved, in large part moving away from talk radio and the way it's been done for the last twenty years. Although the audience has evolved, most stations and talk show hosts have not. Local Rush clones can be heard in every market, banging the same empty drum and making lots of noise, repelling listeners of color and youth. This isn't a gun issue as much as it's a demographic issue. The future of talk radio is Sports. Shredd & Ragan type entertainers who are less dogmatic will have greater success attracting listeners in the 35-54 demo than the aging cookie cutter conservatives who noisily bang the same empty barrel day in and day out.
 
WBEN is still one of the most successful stations in overall ratings and revenue in the entire market. This guy Kraemer is obviously a talent-less dinosaur who got canned because he was inept many years ago.
 
We're a diverse and opinionated lot. Nobody gets through the business or posts here without a few nicks and dents. Kramer brings a certain edginess to the board. Like a good talk show host, he throws out a topic to see if it gets a bite. It's always good to see new blood post on the board and wouldn't it be swell to see some of the legacy posters to return, MidnightSkulker, ex13thfloorrand, needsmorecowbell, heydaybegone and even intheeknow, who bowed out after a string of invective but entertaining "clown" posts to those who disagreed with him. There were days when this board was one of the best on the site.
 
Please post a link to the polls you're referring to, Bob. I can't find anything from Marist. The latest Siena poll is a poll on the NRA, not on the NY gun laws. The previous Siena poll was of Long Islanders, not people from the rest of NY. If you look at that poll, you'll find that even Long Islanders - hardly reflective of the state west of Westchester - didn't answer questions specifically about the NY "SAFE" Act. If you're going to toss numbers around, you need to cite sources.

http://www.siena.edu/uploadedfiles/home/parents_and_community/community_page/sri/sny_poll/LI011313%20Crosstabs.pdf

I've received calls from pollsters, and sat through the process several times in the last couple of years. Let me tell you, as someone who took statistics in college, that many of these polls are poorly constructed, and the answer options are sadly lacking, if not wholly inadequate.

For example, the Marist poll asks about clips with 10 bullets - not the 7 bullet maximum enacted under the SAFE act. In many cases, the poll assumes that the respondents know what the existing law is (or was). For example, they asked if the then current assault weapons ban was strict enough. 74% of the people said that they wanted more restrictions - without specifying WHAT restrictions, or outlining the restrictions already in place.

I find the Siena polls in particular to be poorly constructed, with answers that tend to steer responses. Read the actual crosstab and you'll find that some of the reported "results" are skewed as well. Sometimes it's bad journalism. Combine that with bad polling, and you have junk results.
 
Ninth caller said:
WBEN is still one of the most successful stations in overall ratings and revenue in the entire market. This guy Kraemer is obviously a talent-less dinosaur who got canned because he was inept many years ago.
Click to expand...

When news broke out WGR broke in. Remember that when making a comment like that.
There once was a time when WBEN had fair competition.
 
There's WNED, WHTT, WYRK, and many, many more news sources, including all manner of net stations.
 
Well the questions that comes to mind here are:

How much does WBEN bill each year(or at least how do they rank in billing)? You would only get "inside sources tell me..." or "a little birdie told me" type answers for that question, perhaps(I really don't know)?

If WBEN is the top or one of the top billing radio stations in Buffalo, would this not be a notable achievement since they have top heavy demos? I thought advertisers prefer those younger demo stations(not to mention the entire broadcast biz - look at NBC reportedly wanting to replace Jay Leno with Jimmy Fallon in 2013).
 
"Ninth", there's only one other radio news department in town, and it's WBFO's. WNED-AM is history. Cumulus and Town Square have virtually no real news staff. A couple of news readers and no reporters don't qualify as a news staff.

There are many other sources of news, but they lack radio's advantage of timeliness, ease of access, and virtually no cost. Not everybody has a smart phone, and/or computer access 24/7/365. Pretty much everybody has access to a radio.
 
Our market is older. Interesting fact I was told by someone who is definitely "in the know": WBEN is #2 in revenue and its sister stations, WGR #3, and Kiss #4. Star is #6.
 
The program/operations director said today on the air that he attended the gun rally.
 
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