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| Monday, November 27, 2006 |
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The News Monster is Dead
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 Last Tuesday, having just heard the news of Michael Richards' outburst in a Los Angeles comedy club (see post below) I decided to turn on talk radio for the first time in a long while to see what people were saying. I tuned in to the Denny Schaeffer show on WGST.
A black man was on the phone saying Schaeffer was hypocritical to criticize Richards because, "Y'all used to have the Regular Guys on there every day saying the same sort of racist things!"
Schaeffer said, "Yeah...and where are they now?," in reference to the Guys' month-old firing.
"Well it took you forever to get rid of them," the black caller countered.
Schaeffer said, "I'm not getting rid of anybody around here; I'm hanging on by a string myself."
Later that same day Schaeffer's string snapped. So did Kim Peterson's, a guy who had been on the station probably 14 years. And Tom Hughes, who had been there even longer than Kimmer, maybe 20 years. Clear Channel made some big changes to the old News Monster last Tuesday (11/21), meaning that now Atlanta's (distant) #2 news talker is all-satellite programming.
I've written about WGST a lot here and how it excited me as a young college student with talk show dreams in my head. I'm not the kind of guy to study signal patterns or analyze ratings trends, I just knew one thing: I loved David Letterman and Howard Stern, and the place you learned to walk in those shoes was AM talk radio, and WGST was the AM talk station that captured my imagination.
This was pretty late in WGST's history, maybe 1993, one of the few times they were on a winning streak. I drove to my Home Depot TV internship to Sean Hannity in the morning, ate lunch with Rush Limbaugh and drove home to the Kimmer. Later on in the evenings I went to the gym to Pete Davis. In college, about 1994 or 1995, I got an internship at WGST. I'm sure I'll never forget the euphoria I felt as Peach 94.9 (now Lite FM) DJ Steve Goss took me out on the balcony on Pharr Road where he chatted with Kim Peterson as Kimmer smoked a cigar, and Goss pointed out the tower to me in the distance.
Two or three years later, during the darker Planet Radio months, Ian Punnett, who replaced Hannity, was nice enough to offer to buy me lunch and chat with me about radio when I went to one of his remotes, and even let me sit behind the table with him for a segment while he did a remote from the Greek Festival.
Mike Rose took over as program director of WGST and the bit of pestering I did to him then resulted in three appearances for me on his WFOM talk show -- six years later.
I also saw a fledgling young reporter who was desperate to get out of Rome, Georgia, Stephanie DeLuca, go on to be an on-air star at WGST. The news part is all the stranger because WGST had a full newsroom when I interned there, complete with a 6 p.m. newscast; Forrest Sawyer was discovered off of this station. Do they do local news anymore? Probably not. I don't know for sure -- I never listen!
Somewhere in the late `90's, probably as I grew weary of trying to impress anyone down there into giving me a token weekend job, I gradually stopped listening to WGST. Talk radio in general turned out to be very non-creative, just a bunch of 40+ guys repeating Republican PR spin on the disasters of the day. As I watched the turn the nation took after 2000 I found I had less and less interest in listening to Limbaugh grind his axe against Bill Clinton's BJ and finally put WGST in the rearview mirror altogether.
But reading the news on Radio-Info just now (six days after the fact) I can't help but have a little nostalgia for the WGST that was, probably because it was a cornerstone of the life of the person I was. Seeing old favorites like WGST and 96 Rock fade off the dial, though, I guess radio in general is a fading part of the way we, as a nation, were.
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Posted by Art | 10:12 PM EST |
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I have removed all Clear Channel stations from all of my presets and wrote Chuck Desking (the Atlanta GM) a note basically telling him that I have turned my back on CC.
Like they give a shit!