Press Corpse

I don't find it particularly funny that I already heard this phrase once today. In reference to a different time but a similar situation, someone once said, "Would the last business out of Wisconsin please hit the lights?"

Today, it's starting to feel like "Would the last member of the media out of Wisconsin please hit the lights?" would be more appropriate.

My dislike of Clearchannel is well-documented, but until today, it wasn't personal. It may have been moral, political and professional, but they had never before done something directly to me or a friend of mine. Of course, in the current news climate, I guess it was only a matter of time.

Jason Fischer is a younger guy like me, and worked for the company for several years, first at their Milwaukee affiliate and then here in Madison at WIBA. He primarily covered their nightsides, meaning we saw each other at a lot of city council meetings, county functions, school board hee-haws and the other miscellaneous news nuggets that happen in the hours after normal people get to have their dinner and call it a day.

As the reporter for WIBA, Jason was my primary competition, but that didn't stop us from hitting it off right away. Perhaps it's a self-defense mechanism in a hostile environment, but cracking wise becomes a way of life in the back row during five-hour city council meetings, and Jason I have been jokingly reprimanded by the Mayor himself for "appearing to have way too much fun" during serious budget sessions.

He's sharp, brutally competent, positive in a pinch, well-read and now... unemployed, thanks to the Clearchannel corporate masters in San Antonio.

He's not the only one. As I understand it, Clearchannel gutted the WIBA news room this morning, leaving only a couple members of the morning team. I don't know who all went, but there were a lot of veterans in that news room. You don't need a lot of veterans, though, when your plan is to have Madison act as a "spoke" for a larger regional "news hub" that pipes the news of the day out to cities hundreds of miles away.

Call me naive, but I can't to this day believe that Clearchannel's business model is still legal.

So to take a quick tally, this reduces the City Hall Press Corps to two and a half people, tops. Kristin Czubkowski from the Capital Times can be found reliably in the back row at all hours of a city council meeting and at most important committee meetings as well. I seldom miss a city council meeting, save when I have to fill in on the early morning shift (the one that starts at three AM).

And of course, there's Nick Heynen, the nightside reporter from the State Journal, who shows up at meetings when there's not something else more pressing happening on the scanner. Somewhere out there, Dean Mosiman is floating in the aether gathering his information in mystical ways only a city hall vet can, but we don't see him at council meetings.

If there's blood, guts or tears, the TV stations might stop out, and they will now outnumber the regulars. If there's a campus-related issue, the student papers will send a reporter and a shooter each, and THEY will now outnumber the regulars.

I texted Kristin about Jason being let go, and she echoed my own sentiments: "Clearchannel has no idea what it's given up. Idiots."

And she was more right than she knew, because to the people thousands of miles away who made the decision to let Jason and his co-workers go, the newsies they fired today were nothing more than names on a spreadsheet. That's another danger of massive media ownership in America, and as more names fall off the front of media row, I get more concerned about the future of our country.

In 2003, the American people were unwittingly lead into a war in part because the national press corps didn't ask the right questions of our elected officials, and an angry punk rock band called Anti-Flag wrote a song about it called the "Press Corpse" that, in part, inspired me to become a reporter.

In 2003, ad revenues were fat and juicy compared to today, and the press's ranks were likely once-and-a-half to twice what they are right now. I feel safe in saying Anti-Flag hadn't seen anything yet.

Allegedly "Progressive" Talk

Are you ready for some biased media commentary? I didn't shed a tear, didn't furrow my brow, didn't even blink today at the news of major upcoming format changes at Madison's "Progessive" Talk, the Mic 92.1.

I know, right? Stop the presses, we've got a story for page one! "Local News Anchor Not Sad to See Competition Start to Fold." Somebody's sure to notch a Pulitzer on their belt for this one.

Well, before you write me off as completely irrelevent, dripping with bias, let me fill you in on some background here.

On February 1st, I'll have worked at AM 1670 WTDY for a whole year. Prior to that, I worked at the newspaper in Portage, which entailed a 45 minute commute to and from work every day. This left me plenty of time to listen to talk radio, and after switching back and forth from WTDY to the Mic for months, I finally settled on WTDY as my go-to station. The reason is as much a matter of principle as it is a matter of preference.

WTDY and a handful of other stations in Madison are owned by Midwest Family Broadcasting, a Madison-based company that has operated in the city for half a century and also owns stations in La Crosse, Springfield Illinois, Springfield Missourri and Benton Harbor Michigan.

As a company, our small locally-based operation competes primarily with Madison's Clear Channel Communications-owned stations, which include the Mic. For those unfamiliar with Clear Channel or its notoriety, try and imagine the business practices of McDonalds, Wal-Mart and the entire oil industry wrapped into one package and focused on radio and billboard advertising.

It was Clear Channel that lobbied for the massive ownership deregulations passed under the guise of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, then dropped a cool $30 billion to increase its nationwide radio station ownership to 1,200 -- the single largest conglomerate of AM and FM stations in the country.

Then, it was Clear Channel that began firing the on-air staff at smalltown radio stations across the country, and piping in voicetracked disk-jockeys that have never even been to the cities where their voices were heard. This practice, in addition to hamstringing local radio as a business and putting thousands out of work, also endangered dozens of lives in the 2002 Minot, North Dakota ammonia spill when no one was at the local radio stations to warn the populace to stay indoors.

It was Clear Channel that put together a list of songs following September 11, 2001 that were not to be played on the radio for fear that they might offend the populace or stir up dissent -- among the banned songs, Rage Against the Machine's entire body of work. It was Clear Channel that refused to display anti-war billboards or air paid commercials featuring anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan.

I barely acknowledge the Dixie Chicks as musicians, but when Clear Channel stations stopped airing their music following the band's public criticism of George W. Bush, I was pissed off as all hell.

Even before I worked for the competition, I couldn't ignore the flagrant hypocrisy of Clear Channel operating what they call "Madison's Progressive Talk." The progressive movement is one that's supposed to be rooted in the ideal of a locally-focused, uncensored public discourse.

Clearly, non-censorship is not one of Clear Channel's strong suits, but the Mic fails to meet the other tenets as well. Calling all-left, all-the-time talk radio a "discourse" does as much disservice to the term as Fox News has done to the concept of 24-hour news. I consider myself a moderate-to-left-leaning skeptical progressive when I don't have my reporter's hat on, but if I can listen to an hour of talk radio and not be upset by one thing I hear, I know I'm being pandered to.

It's not hard to see Clear Channel's original right-wing agenda behind left-wing talk. Sure, giving Al Franken a national pulpit eventually backfired when he was elected to the Senate, but for years, Republicans were able to dismiss his arguments as the irrelevent ramblings of a comedian-turned pundit when Air America could just as easily have filled his slot with someone with some real cred.

You can see the same in the Mic's morning lineup. Stephanie Miller isn't much more than a chattering, vacant floozy, discussing little of substance and spending half her program bubbling about the irrelevent goings-on in Hollywood. Ed Schultz has the potential to present a delectible conondrum as a "gun-totin', red meat-eatin' electric car-drivin' lefty," until you realize his corporate handlers keep too tight a leash on him to allow for any issue of legitimate depth to be discussed.

The closest thing the Mic had to a saving grace was their morning host, Lee Rayburn, who recently quit his post in Madison, as noted in the newspaper story above. He provided an interesting forum for local debate, but it wouldn't surprise me to discover he was driven out of his job. But with Rayburn the possible lone exception, every other piece of daily programming on the Mic is syndicated from elsewhere in the nation, sterile, safe and noncontroversial.

That's what has always perplexed me about the Mic's local following -- that a self-purported progressive city like Madison could rally around the obvious machinations of an evil empire like Clear Channel and turn its back on the locally-owned alternative. Up until budget concerns forced some massive cuts in November, WTDY was staffed by a set of live bodies at the microphone 13 hours a day, bringing a slew of differing, sometimes opposing, viewpoints on local and national issues to the airwaves. Management has assured me that as soon as we pull out of the slump, we'll be live and local all day again.

Having a radio station in town that broadcasts left wing views exclusively does little to combat the image of Madison as eighty square miles surrounded by reality. As a progressive, I welcome a challenge to my viewpoints almost as much as I welcome a substantive discussion, and the Mic rarely provided either.

I can't feel bad for the Mic's listeners as the corporate keepers in San Antonio, Texas retool what some Madisonians thought was "their" radio station. Given Clear Channel's record, it was a predetermined inevitability, and I like to think that this will serve as a wake-up call that a truly progressive radio station is one staffed by people you can bump into at a protest, on a barstool or in line at the grocery store.

Bloodbath

I didn't need a reminder that the economy was fucked -- I've got friends who have been laid off over the past month, other friends with a degree from a World Class University that can't find decent work, if they can find anything at all. But I got a reminder this week anyway.

The past three weeks have been hell on me. Covering the Madison Halloween Celebration, the election and subsequent pandemonium, the sixteen-hour city budget sessions and the more streamlined county process, it's all been really exciting, and my brain hurts from having learned so much.

But adjusting my sleep schedule by eight hours on a bi-weekly basis has left me with a permanent case of jet lag, the approximate jet lag of travelling from Paris to Chicago, and I haven't even left the Dane County area. So when I got the call to get into work three hours earlier than I'd been assigned yesterday for a staffing meeting, I was a little too punchy to fully comprehend what was happening around me.

It's sinking in now.

Midwest Family Broadcasting announced a big staffing shake-down yesterday, a good chunk of it on our radio station. Of course, "it's the economy, stupid," and these kinds of layoffs have been particularly prevalent across all the media in the past year, but that does nothing to prevent the shell-shock and survivor's guilt that follow a bloodbath like this.

I'm going to take the departure of two of our news staff, Tim Morrissey and Erik Greenfield, pretty hard. I know the standard broadcasting procedure for dealing with layoffs on air is to omit any mention of the departed personalities and pretend like they never existed for at least a year, at which point it becomes acceptable to occasionally mention them nostalgically. But this is my space, and it's grounded in the reality of my life and what these guys meant to me.

When I joined MWF, Erik was the first person in the building I connected with. We're both relatively young for broadcasters, and we both got our starts at small-town radio stations in Wisconsin. We're also both capable of carrying on a conversation composed entirely of quotations from "The Simpsons," which generally left the other newsies utterly lost when they tried to join in our conversations.

I even look up to Erik quite a bit. He's got an amazing steel trap of a mind, and can spout off trivia like names and statistics as if he's reading them off Google, which is what most of us do.

And then there's Morrissey, who's been in broadcasting since the days when it entailed standing at the top of a tall hill and yelling. He's logged decades with MWF alone, and has worked in cities all over the country.

As the penultimate grizzled veteran news anchor, it would have been easy for Tim to kick back, enjoy his bountiful vacation time, log his hours in what we all assumed was a secure gig and let the rest of the station tear itself to pieces around him. But Tim was a mentor to everyone in that news room, to me in particular. He told me very early on he was "going to take a serious interest" in bettering me as a broadcaster, and he wasn't kidding.

Guidance, suggestions, verbal (and deserved) slaps upside the head, wry realism... Morrissey is good for all of that, and I know few people who are as adept at delivering a kernel of truth picked from a heap of bullshit as Tim Morrissey. If this is indeed the career I'll be spending my life at, he had a hand in shaping it, and if not, it was a pleasure to work with him anyway.

Both Erik and Tim are friends that I respect the hell out of, and I have no idea what I'm doing still in the news room while they've been cut loose. It boggles the mind. Another broadcasting veteran told me this morning, "You're the future of this operation."

Okay. Now what the fuck does that mean? They could have canned me and I would have been moved into a storage unit with a backpack on my shoulder and a ticket to Europe in my hand inside a week. Morrissey's got retirement to think of. E's got a house payment.

These are tough damn times.