I cannot have escaped your attention, over the last 20 years, Radio, TV, and even Newspapers have continually been getting worse. From the 1980s through present day, the US Government has relaxed ownership rules around media.
This first resulted in Duopolies (one company owning two stations in the same city/market). If I’m honest, this seems like a good thing. One station is an expensive proposition, but two, that actually is much cheaper, and allows for one on AM and one on FM, or to operate a news station and a talk station, or two music formats; all well and good. For TV is allows a station to move network programming to a sister station when it needs to be pre-empted for events that you want to cover for the local community.
Over the years however, the number of outlets that could be owned in a market, and the percentage of coverage of the US consumer has grown exponentially. At this point, we are down to only two or three real players in Radio… none of whom actually have radio on their mind, just money. Corporatism is sucking the money, and life energy out of Radio. TV is still limited to two broadcast stations (which could have upwards of 10 sub-channels), and newspapers are just all over the place, in large part to the Internet, drinking its milkshake. But radio, that transitory medium that we all have in our cars, and has gotten so bad that en-masse we have moved to Podcast, Spotify, and other platforms that actually make us feel something or make us think.
We need to being to petition the US Government, FCC, FTC, and local and state governments, to put caps on radio ownership. We need to cut it back to no more than 4 stations per market, and no more than 20% coverage of the US population. We need locally owned stations, stations that follow their FCC mandate that they serve the local interest. No more sucking the capital out of these stalwarts of free speech and turning them into “liberal”, “conservative”, or “other” mouth pieces, but instead be the voice of the community.