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Television

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With a nearly 20 year career in radio behind me, it hurts to have to turn my back on the medium that provided for me for so long, but the modern world of corporate radio forces me to side with television as the more useful genre. Why? Two words: community service.

Turn on your local corporately owned radio station right now. There are probably at least four to six of them in your area, all owned by the same media giant. That voice you hear likely isn't coming from a studio in your city. Nope. It's either produced in a hub somewhere in another state or it's contracted out to somebody out of market who does the same thing for a dozen other radio stations across the country. In other words, the guy who's pretending to be your local buddy doesn't know or care a thing about what's going on in your town. It's kind of funny, actually, listening to him mangle local names as he tries to sound like he knows what he's talking about.

This isn't as innocuous as it seems. What if you were dependent upon these stations to tell you about severe weather in your area or a breaking story on a local emergency? You won't hear about it on any of those preprogrammed broadcasting atrocities where the one minimum wage guy who's monitoring all the computers producing the sounds you're hearing is either asleep, outside smoking a cigarette or busy in another part of the building doing double duty with off-air responsibilities. That tornado will knock your house into the next county while you're still listening to music and happy talk from someplace a thousand miles away.

I was in Alabama a few weeks back when a really severe storm hit. It was two in the morning, lightning and thunder were almost continuous and hail was battering the roof and windows. I turned on the bedside radio - set to one of the big corporate stations - and heard nothing - absolutely NOTHING - about what was happening outside, because the computer running the station just didn't know or care. I went into the next room and turned on the TV and there - at 2 a.m. - was a man on a weather set, tracking the storm with maps and radar and a complete list of warnings and watches. A real human being giving out important information to other human beings. That used to be radio's job, too.

But corporate radio's lack of regard for the local community doesn't end there. Twenty years ago, I used to take my radio show anywhere and everywhere there was a community event going on. Fairs and festivals, openings of new exhibits at the museum

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