KGO RADIO JUMPS THE SHARK
More News, Less Talk
An Essay by C.D. Reimer
Copyright 2012 C.D. Reimer
Smashwords Edition / February 2012
This 3,660-word essay is being published for the first time.
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About The Author:
C.D. Reimer lives and works in Silicon Valley. His interests are ceramics, painting, tropical fish, and web programming. These keep him out of trouble when he’s not fixing broken users and consoling hurt computers.
After serving two tours through The Twilight Zone as a child and a young adult Christian, he writes about everyday reality that he often finds weird, twisted and absurd for being so normal.
He’s currently
working on various short stories and his first novel, and blogs about
writing
and everything
else when he's not busy playing video
games writing fiction.
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KGO RADIO JUMPS THE SHARK
More News, Less Talk
I was listening to The Gene Burns Program on KGO Radio (810AM) in my car after getting off work and heading home for the night when he said that it was the middle of the week, Wednesday, November 16, 2011, and started talking about whether or not gun owners should be required to have a license and safety training. Actually, it was Thursday, December 1, 2011, and gun ownership wasn’t the pressing topic for that day. This was rather odd. If Gene Burns wasn’t available, the station would have someone else step in for him without having rebroadcast an old show. As I ran errands the next night, Gene Burns was discussing the Republican presidential debate that took place the night before. Actually, the last debate was on Tuesday, November 22, 2011, and the next one wasn’t until Saturday, December 10, 2011. Two nights of repeated shows was more than odd. I found out on the Internet that KGO Radio was switching to an all-news format, and, in the process, letting go the best talk-radio talent in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cumulus Media, KGO Radio’s current corporate overlords, decided to jump the shark by throwing away 40 years of broadcasting history in a hasty bid to improve ratings.
According to the Arbitron’s rating system that measured the broadcast audience size from listeners filling out a journal to record what radio stations they were listening, KGO Radio was the number one radio station in the San Francisco Bay Area market for more than 30 years. That recently changed when the venerable journal was replaced with an electronic recorder that the listener wears around their neck to determine more accurately what they were really listening to by picking up the station identification encoded in the radio signal. KGO Radio slipped from number one to number seven as listeners went elsewhere.
Talk-show veterans Gene Burns, Joanie Greggains, Gil Gross, Len Tillem, John Rothmann, Ray Taliaferro and Dr. Bill Wattenburg were all given the pink slip to make way for the new format. The only talk-show host not impacted was Ronn Owens, who reportedly has an iron-clad contract that made it difficult, if not very expensive, for the corporate overlords to get rid of him for now, and his weekday morning show from 9AM to 12PM continues. Although the talk-show format still remains for the weekend, Dining Around with Gene Burns, The Tech Guy with Leo Laporte and Money Talk with Bob Brinker were all pulled from the air. Brian Copeland, Karel and other lesser known—and lesser paid—talents filled out the programming schedule.
The dramatic change sparked an immediate outrage among listeners and longtime sponsors pulled their advertising in protest, especially since none of the listeners were permitted to call in and vent over the air. Having grown up listening KGO Radio for all my life, this sudden loss was like losing an entire family in a car crash. As the weeks went by and everyone adjusted to the new format, it became obvious that the corporate overlords weren’t going to pull a Netflix by reversing course and pretending that none of this had happened. More news and less talk were here to stay.
TALK AND COUNTRY
Although I was born here in California in the late 1960’s, my parents came from Boise, Idaho, in the early 1950’s. Their families were farmers, lumberjacks, construction workers and drug smugglers. Naturally, my father drove a truck that had only two radio stations—KGO Radio (talk) and KEEN (country music)—when I was growing up in the 1970’s and 80’s. They were, of course, other radio stations with different programming. Despite my best effort to listen to something else, my father always turned back to one of these stations, either talk during the week or country on the weekend. I accepted this as my heritage even though country music made me an outcast in school when Boy George, Duran Duran and Michael Jackson were popular, and the girls thought I came from a poor family because we didn’t have cable with MTV in the early 1980’s.
The alarm clock on my father’s nightstand would go off every weekday morning at 5:00AM with the signature melody of ABC News Radio before the news anchor announces the headlines for the day. (KGO Radio was an ABC-owned affiliate until being sold to Citadel Broadcasting in 2007, which was eventually acquired by Cumulus Media in early 2011.) The local news anchor followed up with traffic conditions, weather forecast, sports and politics. The radio turned off after 15 minutes, the toilet seat dropped down with a loud clunk in the bathroom, and the fragrant smell of cigarette smoke and crap wandering down the hallway to come into my bedroom. (As we moved to different houses in south San Jose during the 1980’s, I picked the bedroom further away from my parent’s bathroom to avoid that particular smell.) By 5:30AM or 6:00AM, my father would be on the road for the next hour to work in San Francisco as a superintendent hod carrier to supervise the bricklayers in building cinderblock walls for underground garages or planters.
As a rebellious teenager with flaming liberal tendencies, I became a news junkie when Ronald Reagan president from 1981 to 1989. I read the San Jose Mercury News, Newsweek and Time Magazine, watched the PBS MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour and ABC Nightline on television, and often listened to The Early Show with Ray Taliaferro on KGO Radio from 1:00AM to 5:00AM. Since I was a teenager sleeping in until noon during the summers, I could get away being up late listening to a liberal firebrand who sounded black, talked black, but refused to neither confirm nor deny that he was black, which drove the conservative racists that came burrowing out of the woodwork like cockroaches up the wall. He was the second longest running broadcaster for 34 years—Dr. Bill Wattenburg was there for 40 years—before the corporate overlords dismissed him. I wasn’t surprised to read comments in various news articles on the Internet from people thanking him for helping them get through the George W. Bush years (2001-2009). I’m not sure if I would have survived the Reagan years without listening to him.