The mayor of Bellingham recently created some buzz by offering the key to the city to Comedy Central host Jon Stewart, an apparent response to the mayor of Mount Vernon’s offer of the key to their city to Fox host Glenn Beck. Our good mayor explained this act of real-life satire on an episode of The Morning Show on KGMI. I must admit, the whole incident brought back memories of an embarrassing time in this young writer’s career. Since I haven’t posted anything for a while, I’ll share with you the following story:
During Election Day of 2008, I was trying to cover the results all while broadcasting updates live on my cell phone. It was my first time localizing a major national event, and I was sweating bullets. I had just finished a live update from Whatcom County’s Republican headquarters where the scene was rather somber, when our News Director Tracy Ellis asked me to run to the Lakeway Inn Convention Center where the Democrats were gathered. The scene there was near pandemonium, as the national election results increasingly titillated that Barack Obama would be the winner. After attempting to describe the scene in another cell phone broadcast, Tracy asks me off-the-air to get an interview about the results from State Rep. Kelli Linville. So I hung up, and looked around the crowded room. I had no idea what Rep. Linville looks like! I didn’t even know where to begin looking or who to ask, and just when the gravity of the situation finished sinking into my brain, I spotted a familiar face come out of the crowd. Before I could even think, the man says to me, “you’re Mike from KGMI.” So I asked, “I’m sorry, what was your name?” And he says, “Dan Pike!” My face instantly turned pink. I had failed to recognize it was the mayor of Bellingham, and worst of all, he recognized me! He kindly led me to where Rep. Linville was standing, and I tried to cover my indecorum by saying “thank you Mayor Pike,” but the embarrassment was already incurable.
To this day, I am still humbled by that story. For a reporter, I have a terrible memory. And for a politician, Dan Pike must have an exceptional memory! He’s a friend of the station, he’s always willing to grant an interview, and so I say Mayor Pike should be allowed to give the key to the city to anyone he deems fit.
After much delay and self-generated media hype, the FCC is officially putting the ax to analog television signals in the U.S. starting today, June 12th, making your old TV with the rabbit ears officially useless. Our analog AM and FM radio signals are next up on the chopping block. The Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) Transition hopes to make your radio receiver obsolete as well, although the FCC currently says it “will not establish a deadline for radio stations to convert to digital broadcasting.”
The reason for the transition is because they say non-directional high-powered signals like traditional TV and radio are wasteful of the electromagnetic spectrum, and could instead be used for low-power transmissions such as cell-phones and wireless internet. But according to the Fermi paradox, the transition away from analog communication could cost us a chance of making contact with other intelligent life. High-powered wasteful radio signals like KGMI’s can be heard across the universe, so that means all the horrible-sounding broadcasts I made as an intern are still out there somewhere! But even if an advanced alien civilization does exist light years away, if our species is any indication they would have already gone through their own digital transition. So they would probably never hear us, and we may never hear them.
Woohoo!! KGMI is finally streaming on the Internet! I understand that nearly all the kinks have been worked out. You can check it out from our home page if you haven’t already. But I can’t help but ponder the potential consequences of this brave new medium.
Specifically how the Internet might affect syndicated radio programming. I wouldn’t doubt that Rush Limbaugh and the other traditionally syndicated talk show hosts are in a position to profit no matter where they are broadcast from, after all most of them have agreed to let KGMI and nearly every other technically-advanced radio station put their shows online. But nearly every technically-advanced radio listener knows that this means KGMI is no longer their only source for Rush. They can now choose from more than 400 different streaming radio stations (according to RadioTime.com) that carry Rush’s show, and they can even choose different times to listen to it.
On the other hand, I think online streaming could provide greater opportunities for local talk show programming. As online streaming gradually makes the big syndicated shows less exclusive to any regional radio station, I think that local programs, whether listeners hear them on the radio or the Internet, will be the only shows that local advertisers can guarantee are being heard in their region. Search the Internet over, and you will find nothing that targets Whatcom County better than shows like “The Morning Show with Joe & Patti,” “Radio Real Estate,” “The Whatcom Report,” or “P.M. Bellingham.” And now that anybody with a modem can tune in, could local shows like ours even become the next wave of “syndicated” programming?
Today, the U.S. Senate adopted two seemingly-conflicting amendments related to the Fairness Doctrine (an FCC policy that mandated fairness on the airwaves from 1949 to 1987). One amendment called the “Broadcaster Freedom Act,” which was offered by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint and passed 87-11, would basically block the FCC from reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. Another amendment, which was offered by Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and passed 57-41, says the FCC “shall take action to encourage and promote diversity in communication media ownership,” and would basically bring back the goals of the Doctrine without reinstating it.
I don’t know how to feel about mandated fairness on the airwaves. Like the Senate, I seem to be conflicted on the issue- I like the idea of requiring more local programming but I don’t like being told what to say. All good broadcasters are already trained to seek a balance and diversity of viewpoints as a matter of self-preservation. To do anything less would be a disservice to the democracy that gives us the freedom to broadcast in the first place. But should broadcasters have sanctions hanging over their heads if they fail to provide a balance of views?
Recently my co-workers asked me about the tragic polyphony accident that I describe on my profile here on KGMI’s fine Web site; the accident that I claim rendered me permanently unable to hear diminished 13th chords. Many of them struggled to conceive what horrible abuse of harmony could possibly leave a musician without the ability to hear a dim13. I had to confess that I can still hear dim13 chords just fine, but I haven’t blogged in a while so I decided to come up the following explanation…
It happened in a smoke-filled jazz bar back in the pre-9/11 days. I was on the stage with a surly bebop trio experimenting with avant-garde chord-combinations. I don’t remember the event very well, but the boys tell me I was hunched over my piano pouring with sweat, obsessed with finding even more radical and bizarre ways to pound the keys. After six sleepless days and nights of pushing the limits of discord, we stumbled upon what is now known as the “brown chord,” and I instantly fell on the keyboard screaming with blood pouring out of my ears. As I recovered from the accident, the doctors told me I had gained the ability to taste colors, but I would be cursed with horrible flashbacks every time I hear a diminished 13th chord.
Every Saturday morning, I get the pleasure of producing the President’s Weekly Radio Address and the opposing party’s response for KGMI. While I was waiting for the January 17 address to upload at www.whitehouse.gov, I scrolled down and found an archived message from December 29, 2007, about the U.S. economy by our outgoing President George Herbert Hoover Bush, I- I mean George Walker Bush. In the message from just over a year ago, Bush briefly mentions the “high oil prices and softness in the housing market,” but then goes straight into his spiel that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” I don’t want to play the game of Kick the Lame Duck here, but I think the recording speaks for itself. What I will say is that I hope our more tech-savvy incoming president will continue to post his addresses in a more timely fashion each Saturday morning than our outgoing president did.
January 20th, 2009 UPDATE
Well, I certainly got more than I wished for from our new tech-savvy President Barack Obama. Within moments of being sworn in, the Obama administration completely revamped the President’s Web site at www.whitehouse.gov and took down all of Bush’s archived radio addresses, making the link above useless right after I posted it (it’s fixed now). Obama’s transition Web site at change.gov is already obsolete. And the President has officially replaced the traditional Weekly Radio Address with a YouTube-style Weekly Video Address. KGMI will continue to broadcast the audio portion of the President’s address each week during The Saturday Morning Show with Joe & Patti. But at this time, the less internet-fluent Republican Party is giving no sign as to where or what form their weekly response will be. Stay tuned this Saturday morning to find out if they come up with something.
I haven’t had the chance to check back in a while and all of a sudden I see my blog has evolved into a chat room for the band Ministry! I guess that’s a credit to the dynamic, almost virus-like nature of blogs. My understanding, as an official baccalaurean of the fine and performing arts, was that Ministry was retiring, yet the band was recently nominated for a Grammy for its remix of “Under My Thumb” from the “Cover Up” album. The 2009 Grammy Awards will be broadcast February 8th on CBS. It might be one of the last TV shows that you get to watch using your rabbit-ear antennas, as the FCC is forcing all full-power TV stations to switch to digital signals by February 17th (UPDATE: Congress has now changed the switchover date to June 12th by way of the DTV Delay Act). It wont be long before they force radio stations to switch to digital as well. Check out this document from the FCC about the Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) Transition.
It’s appropriate that Election Day comes right after Halloween. I can think of nothing scarier than the mudslinging and negative campaigning that has taken over our election process. Well every Halloween, I like to single out the spookiest public figure in the news and carve their grimace into a jack-o-lantern. This Halloween, my Scariest Person of the Year is tied between Barack Obama and John McCain! If you go by the national news coverage of these presidential candidates, one is a commie and the other is corrupt; one is a terrorist sympathizer and the other could die at any minute! Aaaaaahhhhhh!!! Here is a picture of their jack-o-lanterns. My lovely life-partner Shannon made the stencils and I carved them out. By the way, Governor Sarah Palin won a close third place.
(Sigh)… OK, here goes. I am now entering the blogosphere. I’m diving head-first into the world of Internet social networking for the first time. Until now, I have always been reluctant to express myself using blogs. I’m still young and I’ve always been comfortable with the Internet, but until now I never really felt comfortable with blogging. I’ve never had a MySpace or Facebook account, and I’ve never left a threatening message on the Bellingham Herald Web site. I don’t know why I’ve never blogged before because I have to admit that it feels so liberating. So far, I’ve already used the word “blog” in the form of a noun, a verb and a present participle! My head is spinning! If anyone is reading this, drop a reply and let me know what you think about blogs. A blog about blogging… Does that even make sense?
