Radio-TV Observer

A special USA-365 supplement by Mark Smith

06-10-2006

We are all media observers. We all watch, listen and read and we know what we like.

Media is a business designed to make money off the public by entertaining them. It often does not have redeeming value, logic or a moral base. But it isn't required to. I ask you to accept TV, newspapers and radio as the creative, possibility and mistake-laden free form entities that they are.

Don't make too much of what is said, written or aired. It isn't about you, it's about them. That also applies to anyone who dares to be a critic.

CROWN POINT (6-10-2006) There hasn't been much movement in local radio in recent months and local TV is almost in a coma. It’s time to catch up.

WJOB (1230) AM’s new oldies format sounds better during the summer than it does during the winter, which isn't unusual because AM radio always does better during the summer with longer daylight hours. Sure, some of the old talk shows are gone, but the station needed cheap programming and nothing’s cheaper than the songs your momma used to listen to. 'Classic Oldies,' 'Timeless Classics,' 'The Sound Track of Your Life.' It's all the same thing. A format aimed at adults who have the money your sponsors want. Adults who own the businesses in the community. A format where you only play songs that you can be reasonably sure people like. When you play what used to be called 'Top-40,' you aren't really sure it's any good because you're in a race to play new music as often as you can play it.

The 'Timeless Classics' format is like 'TV Land.' They go back and get Dick Van Dyke and 'Bonanza' and while those shows are as old as dirt, you know that lots of people liked them at one time. You won't see reruns of 'Hullaballo' or 'The Gumby Show' or 'Sugarfoot' on TV Land because it didn't take much research to discover that everybody hated those shows.

Incidentally kids, Hullaballo was a dance show. Sugarfoot, I think, was a horse and Gumby was, well, Gumby.

The only thing wrong with the 'Greatest Hits of the 50s, 60s and 70s' format is that it lacks flexibility. There are no new oldies unless you want to go back 25 years and play some of the really bad music from that period. You get caught up in playing the same songs over and over again as your audience ages. The trick is to hook young people (even if we're talking about 30-something people) on music that was made before they were born.

A Chicago area station called 'Real Oldies' 1690-AM (which is an ultra oldies format dealing with the 50s and 60s) has two weekend shows called the 'Chicago Top-20.' They go back 40 or 50 years, play the top-20 songs in Chicago from a specific week on a specific year in that era and explain how those songs were created and who the singers were. It's broadcast at 8:00 a.m. Saturday and 12-noon Sunday. It's natural for WJOB if they could bring that show into the 70s and 80s. To be fair, WJOB (1230) AM has always had older listeners, no matter how hard they tried to change that.

I'd still like a sports talk show every evening on WJOB, but I may be in the minority there. Kids and jocks might think that Johnny Rivers is Joan Rivers brother, but kids aren't into AM radio anyway. Bottom line? WJOB probably made a good decision to ashcan talk and play the greatest hits of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

Could it also be that the Region Sports Network has stumbled onto the perfect way to air high school baseball on weekdays? Because the power on Chicago Heights station WCFJ drops late in the afternoon, and Relevant Radio 1270-AM does not want to give up the religious network programming hours of 4-7 p.m., the RSN had no home for high school baseball. So they tried airing games live on RegionSports.com and replaying them at 7 p.m. on 1270-AM. Many who would listen to prep baseball aren't home at 4:30 p.m., but don't know the scores at 7:00 p.m. So, it’s like listening live. It works very well and you can listen to the game twice if you have a kid playing or simply have nothing better to do.

Other unintended advantages to the 2 1/2 hour tape delay are that any rain delays can be edited out of the broadcast and the game broadcast can be shortened or lengthened. If there was no score in the first three innings of an extra inning game, those innings can be deleted. There is no state-wide score service for baseball so few know how the game came out. If I was the RSN or WJOB, I would never go back to airing weekday games live on AM radio. The Internet-AM delay combo works too well.
Note to WJOB, however. Airing games the next day isn't good. Everybody knows the outcome and has moved on. I'd drop that practice.

WJOB has occasionally run a classic football or basketball game-of-the-week on spring nights. That’s something I hope they would continue. That’s more listenable than Railcats games or that Illinois pro team that WJOB used to carry. WEFM (95.9) FM still does. Minor league baseball is something that must be seen in person. It really is of little interest on the radio.

The Post-Tribune and the Times unfortunately fell in with the 'pack mentality' of news media when they put the dead body of terrorist Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi on the front page of their newspapers. Most newspapers also showed Al-Zarqawi's dead head which is a vivid example of why newspapers are also dying. How out of touch with your readership do you have to be to put a dead body on the cover of your newspaper and then deliver it to homes with widows and children?

If you polled readers they would tell you that they didn't want a corpse on the front page of the paper. Most newspaper people are hardworking, but they are typically among the most isolated and unresponsive people in all media. They decide what they feel you should want and then they give it to you. Obviously, no dead people should ever be in the front page of the newspaper for any reason. A picture of Al-Zarqawi's blown up bunker and a snap shot of him when he was alive would have had the same effect.

When I see a newspaper do this (The Post-Tribune put a picture of a drowning victim being dragged out of Lake Michigan a few years back) it indicates to me that they want to appeal to the lowest common denominator, the very sick among us. Or that they want to shock readers because they are a little jaded. It makes me wonder about what happens to people when they work for newspapers. Do they lose their sensitivity and their morality? You can't question the intelligence of most folks who work in the media, but they get so full of themselves that you can't tell them the sky is blue.

The Fox News Network was the lowest common denominator last week. Going in and out of every commercial break, the official Network of the Bush Administration took war cheerleading to a new height. Fox used a split screen with two pictures of Al-Zarqawi, including the corpse photo released by the US Government. One photo was marked 'Alive' and one, marked 'Dead' as if their viewers were not mentally capable of telling the difference. But it has been said that the Fox Network is under orders from the White House and it appears they would drag Muslim bodies through the streets in front of network studios just like terrorists do to dead American GIs overseas. Certainly the insurgents will respond with more violence the same way we do when we see that practice.

The Crown Point-based Regional Radio Sports Network (RRSN) has a new outlet in WTMK (88.5) FM, which is licensed to Lowell. The RRSN is also heard on WEFM (95.9) FM in Michigan City and WHLP (89.9) FM, which is licensed to Hanna (located about 15-miles east of Valparaiso). The new Lowell station, as of now, simulcasts whatever sports air on WHLP. In the future, there is hope that the station can cover Lowell, Kankakee Valley, Crown Point and Porter County Conference (PCC) sports. WHLP does not come in well in South Lake County and WEFM doesn't get there at all. Your dog can't even hear WJOB (1230) AM at night in Lowell. Only WWCA presently serves the Lowell area with a signal you can hear at night without a satellite dish and the Region Sports Network still concentrates on their sponsor base of Highland, Munster, Griffith and Hammond area, although they should get credit for jumping up on the Lowell football bandwagon last fall with both feet.

A new radio station with a clear signal in the South Lake County area carrying local sports would be well-received and would allow for everyone to center attention on certain schools without neglecting places like Hanover Central. But nobody has said that anything is going to happen. If and when radio outlets have plans they usually do not broadcast them.

I may have been altered by watching too much gymnastics over the years, but I actually like these 'famous folk' competition shows. "Dancing with the Stars" and "Skating with Celebrities" seem harmless means of having some fun and cheering on people you used to like who now clearly need a paycheck. Granted, when you're talking about Giselle Fernandez and Todd Bridges, you are stretching the concept of celebrity, but it's fun to watch people you think you know try to perform. A lot more fun than watching nobodies being verbally savaged by cranky old judges. I'm amazed how upset some have become that Jillian Barberie had a previous figure skating history or Stacy Kiebler had previous dance training. This isn't the Olympics. Would you rather see them or not? It's television. And it's a lot less nasty than America Idol, where people seem to enjoy watching poor suckers getting ridiculed. The finalists on American Idol were all nice, especially Katherine McPhee. But be honest, would you really pay 14 dollars to own eight original songs by any of those people? Probably not more than once.

The difference between ‘Dancing’ and ‘Skating' and Idol is, the winners on the first two know they are not really dancers and skaters. The winners on 'American Idol' actually believe they are singing stars with a shelf life longer the ground beef. Get set for a new flood of reality competition shows led by Regis Philbin's 'So You Think You've Got talent.' As long as 30 million people watch 'Idol,' which is an especially cheap show to produce, you won't get dozens of scripted TV shows the way you used to in the good, old days when you had to have talent BEFORE you got on TV.

Next week's Class 4A state baseball championship game (June 17) will be aired live at 7:00 p.m. on Comcast Cable Channel 4. There will be no free-TV. You don't have to do anything. If you have cable, the game will appear on Channel 4 (where the message board is) after 7:05 p.m. The time of the start is tentative based on the length of the Class 1A, 2A and 3A championship games.

This is part of the IHSAA Network deal that had all basketball and football championship games on TV in Northwest Indiana for the first time this year. And, again, there is no chance that as long as cable systems have a contract with the IHSAA, that they are going to allow ANY games on free TV. You don't pay for something and then allow the person you paid to just give it away.

I wish I had positive things to report to you on the high school football and basketball TV front. Presently, there are no plans to air any high school football games on TV this fall on any outlet. WYIN (Channel 56) TV has not done games for two years and, under present management, it is said, will not. Comcast Cable, right now, does not have a working mobile broadcast unit that can tape a football game. And since its’ only two months until the 2006 season openers, fall football on cable looks highly doubtful. The situation is screaming for some high school to tape their own home sports events and run the games weekly on public access. I do not know why no one has tried that. I also don't understand why all high schools do not broadcast all home sports events on the Internet. Public access TV can't have sponsors but Internet radio can have a 1,000 if you can find them. Internet radio of baseball, football, basketball and softball could be very profitable to a school’s athletic department.

The Com Cast situation could change, but it might help if some cable subscribers actually contacted Comcast and requested the tape delay games while there's still time. The Thursday highlight shows are very limited and locked into a limited format. I think the community wants to see the Friday night football games from Northwest Indiana on tape. But I could be wrong about that.

Comcast viewers may not know this, but there is a Chicago-based weather channel called ‘News 5 Weather Plus’ on digital cable on channel 194. It’s very similar to the original ‘Weather Channel’ which is cable channel 36. But it's Chicago-based. Most of it pertains to only the Chicago area as it is apparently a national concept that has been adopted by NBC to major markets. Why do you need it? So you won't have to watch the hour after hour of the wonderful ‘Storms Stories’ or the wade through an insane level of hurricane coverage on the national weather channel when you need to know about a funnel cloud in Hebron. The Weather Channel got great ratings during hurricane disasters of 2005 and they clearly have geared up to make themselves 'Hurricane Central' this summer. You'll be lucky to get the temperature in Lake County if a Category 5 monster is headed for Tampa.

This ‘local weather channel idea’ almost certainly came about due to the overkill of Hurricane Coverage from the southeast. Call me insensitive, but I don't care about every hurricane that hits Florida. Hurricanes, like the wildfires out west, are simply not national weather stories unless you are related to Jeb Bush. But I do want to know about a sever thunderstorm warning in Newton County.

When 'Deal or no Deal' is the top-rated show on TV (as it was the week of June 1) it's hard times on TV. Television also has this obsession with its own. Whether it's Katie Couric taking over the CBS Evening News or correspondent Kim Dozier being injured in Iraq. TV assumes we care because they do and they ram the stories down our throats. I do not care about Kim Dozier as much as I care about American GIs who are dying at the rate of 30 a month. The poor unfortunate CBS lady chose to be there, her bravado overcoming her love for her family, her health and her good sense. I'm glad she's okay, although I wonder how the families of her two dead colleagues feel about all the attention she's getting.

Were I media, I would drop that story. It's self-serving and irrelevant to the war however you feel about it. She's just another victim and one of the few who actually chose to be there. As for Katie Couric, a TV lady who switched one job for another, she makes no difference to me. Those who like her can watch her and those who don't won't.

Television is entertainment that vanishes into thin air when it's over. It is absolutely meaningless. The CBS Evening News has the same public value as a four episode marathon of 'My Name is Earl' and, actually, 'Earl' means more to the network. Which is why Dozier and other news correspondents shouldn't have risked their lives for TV coverage. They need to readjust their priorities.

THREE (3) Reruns

When Gilmore Girls is a popular show, I lose some faith in 2006-vintage TV. More and more I find myself watching older shows that I missed when they were 'first run.' Here's a quick sample of three 'retreads' I hardly ever turn off when I run across them.

Ted Danson is wonderful as the angry old 'private parctice' doctor surrounded by crazy friends, co-workers and enablers. The FOX TV show 'House' is a dramatic version of Becker. This was an under-rated show that is only occasionally serious. Terrel Farrel and later Nancy Travis are confrontational and adorable as Becker's love interests, but the show is based on the eternal TV 'everyman' premise that's worked sine the 'HoneyMooners' in the 1950s. Everybody on the show is trying in their own way to find that unreachable 'Pot of Gold' and you root for them to find it even though you (and they) know they never will.

A wonderful Australian-based remake of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tale of turn of the century (the last one) folks from all walks of life who went off in search of the land that 'time forgot.' An attractive cast of nobodies is very entertaining as the reporter, scientist, debutante and reporter who find the 'Lost World;' a prehistoric land untouched by civilization, but then can't find their way home. Okay, kids, it's improbable. This is the 1920s, before cell phones, satellites and paparazzi. If you can accept that there is a 'Lost World,' you've got to accept that their friends and family would stop looking for them.

The four are befriended by a beautiful, young 'Jungle Girl' (in name only, she's in her 20s) whose mom and dad abandoned her on a similar quest to find to the Lost World a decade earlier. The visitors befriend the Jungle Girl and they all help each other stay safe while looking for the way home. The special effect animals and dinosaurs are a little hokey but the Australian scenery (that's where it was shot) is worth your color TV. The characters are lively and bigger than life. Pure escapism.

It's still funny. Tim Allen's stage comedy act brought to TV as a comedy version of the PBS staple, "This Old House." Patrica Richardson (Jill) and Earl Hindman (Wilson) were timeless as the accepting wife and knowing neighbor and counselor. Tim's friends and co worker Al (Richard Karn) was the butt of 1,000 jokes. This was a gentle family show that never got too risque. Even Heidi (Debbe Dunning), the eye-candy 'Girl Friday' on Tim's 'ToolTime' show was never used as the center of attention that she was. This show holds up especially well in reruns despite some of the mid-1990s references to Detroit (where the show was set). All comedy is family and the suburban core of mom, dad and three kids again opened the door for timeless slices of life that put the 'situations' in situation comedy. This is the Dick Van Dyke Show of its time and reruns will always be on TV.

FINAL THOUGHT: A comforting thought. Chicago Cub TV ratings still are higher than those for the Chicago White Sox on the same stations, Comcast Spots Net (Channel 37) and WGN-TV Channel 9. Ratings of the second place While Sox have soared while the ratings of the fifth place Cubs are still high. Even though Wrigley Field is smaller than US Celluar Field, the Cubs still outdraw the White Sox at the gate as well.

In a sporting era where we are told that you should abandon the team you follow when hard times hit, it's good too see that the majority of people aren't ready to throw the wife and kids out of the passenger side door just because a newer, younger model comes along.