I’d rather see my kids eating mac and cheese every night and gettign their clothes form Goodwill than to teach them that morals are less important than money.
andros, puh-lease spare me. Who do you work for? You know damm well SOMETHING they do is fucked up and immoral. This isn’t the good ship lolly-pop. As much as I love America, WE as a counrty have done and still do some unbelieveably immoral things. When are you planning on moving?
Actually, nothing my employer does is fucked up or immoral. Thanks for trying, though.
And of course, it’s silly to suggest that I have to simply accept wrong behavior. As an employee, I may refuse to do work that I find wrong. If necessary, I may quit and find honest work–and in so doing teach my friends and family what I think is the right way to live. As a citizen of a country I may strive to ensure that my elected representatives are honest, and that nothing immoral s done in my name. I have the luxury of trying to change things from within, a luxury I don’t always have in the workplace.
In other words, nice cop-out, nicer justification for continuing to do things you know are wrong, really shitty comparison. Try again?
Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers yourself. Here’s a PDF file which examines AQH numbers for the entire U.S. in all dayparts except overnight, which shows the declining number of persons 18+ using radio from Fall 1998 to Summer 2001. And it’s still declining. There are simply too many substitutes for radio now for people to put up with shitty programming, a lack of local air personalities, short playlists, and crappy formatting.
You want to know what scares the shit out of radio programmers? Look at those dropping numbers for Men 18+, Men 18-34, Men 25-54, and Women 18+. There is some vast untapped audience out there – it’s the demo “People Who Have Stopped Listening To The Radio.”
I’ll let my BA in Radio/TV Arts speak for whether I’m a moron or not, but it should be obvious to even the dumbest programmer that, book to book, it’s better to get a 6 share of a shrinking audience than it is to get a 4 share of a growing audience.
1996 was six frickin’ years ago. I’ve not only changed jobs since then, I’ve changed careers. That excuse is good for a couple of years, but not forever.
My point is that you find it objectionable, yet don’t seem to be in any hurry to find a cleaner way to make a buck. I’m not trying to tell you anything about your business; I’m just working with what you give me.
The business is a business. The owners are - presumably - human beings, not automatons.
The owners are free to tell themselves what is proper entertainment. That isn’t social engineering; that’s free choice.
And to the extent that I think about them, I will judge them by their choices, as I would with any other human being, great or small.
I can’t buy the notion that the great are somehow bound by shackles, morally speaking, but the small are free agents. But I guess I’ve said that already.
There are aspects of capitalism that trouble me, but they’ve stayed outside of this debate.
Nope, I’d just say we’re all in a position to judge each other by the choices we make. And if someone chooses to make a few extra bucks that they don’t terribly need by means that I consider sleazy, that’s not a reflection on the free-market system, but on the person. It’s especially a reflection on that person if they blame their behavior on that system.
JFTR, there’s a difference between ‘providing a needed or desired good or service’ and ‘pandering’. McDonalds’ and the radio station - especially the radio station, with its FCC license - can stay in business without ‘pandering’. The radio station has very limited competition, and can make a lot of mistakes without going under. And if worst comes to worst, it can always sell its license to another company, and come out in good shape.
Yeah, suuuuuuure. :rolleyes:
Wooh this turned into a real thread. With a Free Market True Believer™ 
Let me try to illustrate how the free market is not necessarily going to give the most popular radio show.(with small numbers so I can do in my head)
Lets say we have a market of 20 people.
Lets say advertisers pay $1/listener.
Lets say it costs $2 to pipe a national generic morning zoo
Lets say it costs $8 to run a local current affairs show
Now suppose 10 will listen to the wacky zoo crew type stuff(through preference or not caring/just need weather&traffic)
Now suppose 15 will listen to local current affairs stuff
(through preference or not caring/just need weather&traffic)
All owners, pushed by the mysterious invisible hand, see that they are forced to go with the zoo feed because that way they make $8($1X10-$2) instead of $7($1X15-$8). The hapless owners’ only decision to make is which generic zoo to buy.
Huh, maybe then you can tell me why this is my favorite radio station The DriveMaybe you can figure out the relative success of trendy alternative stationOne and Two! Ever since One switched from being the 80’s channel, why, they have gotten away with ripping of as much of Two’s schtick as possible. One does not carry Mancow, whilst Two does, which is why i do not listen to Two much anymore.
Bwahahahahahahaha!!!
Oh, yeah this has been enormously successful. This is why there is so much choice, this is why i get to listen to online radio to get my fix of industrial and quite often the 80’S channel. :eek: 
:mad:
So now radio isn’t honest work? Just because YOU don’t like dick jokes and making fun of people? Even taking into account CarnalK’s info (which, by the way, I concede to be dead right) Howard Stren / Mancow / Opie and Anthony / Bob and Tom etc… have Millions of liteners around the country who love that type of thing. Under your new Ministry of Morality and Standards, what SHOULD they like?.
I guess we will have to take your word then, won’t we? And if they did, you’d quit? Good for you if you would, but I’m more interested in supporting my family than protecting the people of America from the horrors of :gasp!: immature humor and bad taste(that they listen to or not as they desire). My god next thing you know South Park will be the number one show on Comed… oh, wait…
The National average M-S 6-Mid AQH drops 110 people over 12 books, That is your VAST untapped audience? In this age of Digital Cable, Broadband, MP3 players, XM, P2P (free music) sites, PC’s with CD burners… losing 110 to all this other media while keeping 1,520 is your big cite? Hell, I’m shocked the number is that low! Radio is doing better than I would have thought.
I’m sure Clear Channel communications is crying all over thier billions of dollars over this as we speak. If you hurry you can propably save them.
You know why Industrial is on-line? Because the ammount of the population who wants to hear it at noon on a tuesday is incredibly small. Commercial radio is MASS media. The internet stations have exponentially lower overhead. They can program to smaller audiences, and can be accessed all over the globe to boot. This is basic stuff here anya.
and as for
Maybe I can tell you why a particular station is YOUR favorite? This is obviously going way over your head. And the Alternative station with Mancow (Q101) has a 2.9 in the latest trend The Zone the one with "has a 1.7. And your favorite station, The Drive which has " no silly morning show " acording to the web page, is also getting beat by Q101 with a 2.7.
For agruing against me, you have done a nice job of making my point.
(aside . . .)
Anya Marie, what do you listen to online? I could use a reliable industrial station . . .
Of for fuck’s sake. Sarge, I think we’re having a little communications problem here.
Firstly:
No, I said nothing of the sort, and I have no idea where you got that idea. If you’ll reread my post in context, I was discussing specifically work that I found morally objectionable. If I believed that my work in radio involved immoral or dishonest activities, then I’d go and find another job that I considered honest.
If you don’t find it dishonest or immoral, then there’s no reason to quit, of course. But that wasn’t my point. My point is simply that my morals are more important to me than a job–and that I think it’s a shame that yours are not.
Secondly:
Yup, I guess you will.
But seeing as how I’m self-employed, I think I know my employer pretty well.
Thirdly:
Back to this again. One more time, I’m not talking about immature humor or bad taste. You specifically brought up morality, and that’s all I’m addressing. So yes–if my employer acted in a way that I found to me morally reprehensible, I would have to find some way to address it. And if I cannot change it, I would certainly quit. Again, I’d rather my children wear K-Mart clothes and eat casseroles their entire lives and grow up knowing their father has the courage to stand up for what he believes.
Now then, if you really didn’t mean to suggest that your morals are less important to you than your paycheck, none of this applies to you, does it?
Dam!~
I knew you were going to be self-employed when I wrote that. Oh well, odds were in my favor; I had to go with it.
MY morals are not less important than my paycheck. That being said, if I were to tie in my own personal morals with the conduct of the company I work for I’d never have a job again (you’re not hireling Broadcasting Managers, are you?). Pick a “Big Corporation” at random and I’ll bet you someone on a university campus is bitching about something they do.
If personal morals are inseparable from the corporate behavior of your employer, there’s going to be a lot of welfare kids running around in America.
Sarge, remind me to introduce you to the concept of a “trend” sometime. The point isn’t a raw number of listeners – it’s a consistent trend of declining listenership numbers over the last decade. Each quarter, a few more people give up radio in favor of something else. And as local radio continues to disappear, the audience is going to get smaller.
Why do you think companies like Clear Channel and Radio One fought so hard for dereg? Why do you think they’re buying up so many stations, and branching out into concert promotion, ticket sales, billboards, etc.? Because it’s hard to make money as an individual station owner anymore. The only way to make money is to leverage your costs across multiple stations in a single market.
That’s why they fought so hard for punitively high royalty rates for Internet broadcasters, too – to eliminate potential competitors.
Now, do you have any actual arguments to present, or are you simply going to gainsay what everyone else says?
Sure, the same argument I’ve BEEN making.
The answer to the OP’s question: what’s up with (immature/shock humor) on morning radio is not that the DJ’s are “talentless hacks” as was asserted earlier in the thread, but in actuality because there is a large audience for that sort of thing and the station is trying to reach that audience. Same as the reason “oldies” DJ’s don’t say controversial things and have lesbians on the air isn’t because they’re “tallentless hacks” it’s because they’re trying to reach a particular audience.
Is that good enough for you pldennison?
I know what a “trend” is. It’s your interpritation of that trend I find laughable. Radio isn’t loosing listeners because of a lack of tallent, it’s loosing listeners to new forms of media and entertainment that can narrowcast to better serve the needs of individual listeners. Even huge companies like CC can only have a few radio stations in any one market. XM has something like 150 channels to choose from. You think people are leaving because of no-tallented DJ’s and managers? Who the fuck do you think XM hires to program the music on thier stations, gynacologists? The Golf Channel would NEVER make it if it had to fight for a frequency and run a transmitter in EVERY markes it wanted to be in. On cable (like satelite), it has the ability to reach a LARGE audience that is a SMALL percentage of the population. Broadcaster’s can’t do that. That’s why radio listening is declining. Many listeners simply download thier favorite music to a cd for free. How are mass-media outlets supposed to compete with each individual picking all thier favorites at will? Your assertion that these listeners are leaving radio because the “playlists are too short and the dj’s suck” shows a complete misunderstanding of the way new technology impacts markets AT BEST. I suppose your local broadcast TV station would never have lost viewers to cable tv if they’d have gone after that "vast untapped audience out there – it’s the demo “People Who Have Stopped Watching Local TV” , hugh?
Well, I hadn’t been arguing the case against the free market here, and I’m still not.
But if I was, that would cinch it. I can’t think of a clearer statement of the problem with free-market economics as practiced in a corporate setting than the notion that it’s normative for corporations to do things that human beings would generally regard as immoral.
Wow.
Amen, RTF.
Now, back to the debate proper. Sgt, you were saying:
and
Pardon me, but you were the one who entered this fray by saying:
I would think that an industry that produces “crap” for “inbread [sic] mouthbreathers” isn’t exactly an industry to be proud of being a part of. Nobody’s telling you the broadcast radio industry is a disgusting place to be; you came in here and splattered that statement on the walls. But if pandering to “inbread mouthbreathers” is how you want to put bread on the table, far be it from me to suggest looking into alternative career paths.
Ditto McDonalds’ burgers. If they’re making “crappy food”, then they shouldn’t be proud of it. (What’s so controversial about that?) I was considerably less critical of them than you were.
Here, I’ve simply repeated you, and you’ve taken issue with me. Your argument is with yourself. And if you can’t agree with you, then it’s time to put your analyst on danger money.
I’m not saying it’s OK that typical corporations make decisions that are outside MY standards of moral behavior. I’m saying that if I were only willing to work for a company that followed my personal moral guidelines I’d NEVER have a fucking job. Neither would most people. Just because you sweep the floors at Microsoft doesn’t make you morally responsible for predatory business practices.
Now, for the rest…
I don’t have a problem with working for an industry that does crappy things. I don’t put out a product I’m ashamed of. Because some in the industry put out a product that I do not like in the coarse of going after a specific demographic does not concern me either. The Internet industry has porn. The music industry puts out music about killing and rapeing women. I guess Joni Michell should hang her head for working in that industry, right RT? Or would it be OK for her to hate Emminem’s lyrics while arguing that he’s not just a talentless hack?
[aside]
Oh, and for fuck-sake "[sic]”?
Yes, I was typing fast and misspelled “inbred” … Calling attention to it is pretentious bullshit.
[/aside]
I’m not saying I’m a fan of that form of entertainment; on the contrary, I’ve been clear I don’t care for much of it. What I’m saying is just because you or I may thing it’s in poor taste does not mean the people who do it are nothing but “talentless hacks”.