The Media

Dialing down radio regulation

YOU MAY NOT have noticed any difference, but your local radio stations were freed of most government regulations in April. Since then, station managers all over Illinois have been happily emptying their file cabinets of forms required for years by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). No longer are stations required to devote a certain amount of program time to vaguely defined public service, or to go through elaborate procedures for ascertaining the needs of the community, or to play no more than 18 minutes of commercials an hour.

Those rules were adopted back when there were only a few all-purpose stations on the air. Now, with more choices on the radio dial — 78 diverse AM and FM stations in the eight-county Chicago metropolitan market alone — the marketplace, the FCC says, can be the regulator.

One of the first effects of deregulation is expected to be the shutting down of news operations by a few small stations that never gave more than grudging attention to news anyhow. Usually, these stations satisfied FCC requirements by throwing in a random public service announcement or two in the middle of the night when no one was listening. These won't be missed.

In metro markets, however, some AM stations will turn to more of what broadcasters call "non-musical information programming" (translation: talk), including more program-length commercials.

But it seems now that most stations won't go that route, since station managers generally acknowledge the prominent role news has played in the revival of radio. "News is what gets an audience for small-market stations," said Charles Wright, manager of WBYS in Canton. "We're looking for ways to expand our news."

All-music stations that cut costs by eliminating their relatively expensive news departments "will be cutting their own throats," contends Carey Davis, manager of WSDR in Sterling. WSDR is a rarity: an all "news-talk" station that covers local news aggressively with 30 full-time employees in a community of only 16,000 population. Last year the station brought in over $1 million in advertising.

Even with the larger number and diversity of metro stations, William C. O'Donnell, manager of Chicago's "News Radio 78" (WBBM), believes competitive reasons will compel most stations, regardless of format, to provide at least hourly news updates. All-news WBBM's audience ranking is in the top three in its market.

Nor does there seem to be any danger that deregulation will result in less radio reporting of Statehouse news. Ben Kiningham, director of one of the two audio news services at the Capitol, points out that the 48 stations buying his service in 26 cities (for from $50 to $300 a month) tend to be fully committed to news.

On the other hand, Statehouse radio reporters, with their staccato style and reputation for superficiality, have other things to worry about besides deregulation. Stephen Hess, in his recent book, The Washington Reporters, observed that the radio press is "at the bottom of the journalistic pecking order in Washington." It's the same in Springfield. Lacking the glamor of television newspeople and the more solid stature of print journalists, radio reporters, Kiningham admits, are subject to occasional spells of paranoia attributable to pressroom ignorance of — and, sometimes, contempt for — their work.

There are significant structural problems with legislative news as well. Much of it is not easily compressed into 30-second capsules. Even the all-news stations seem uncertain whether their listeners will pay attention to anything for longer than a few seconds at a spurt. Longer in-depth treatment complicated issues is unusual on commercial radio.

For a few days in June, I tried to follow the RTA crisis through WBBM's Steve Crocker, probably one of the most listened-to of the Statehouse radio reporters. Though Crocker is less of a showboater than his predecessor, Alan Crane, and more interested in the subjects he reports, I still had difficulty getting a sense of what was really happening, beyond whether the day's events were mostly good or mostly bad. The familiar pattern — brief summary followed by a sentence or two of taped "Actuality" from one of the newsmakers — is just not well suited to most governmental news beyond the headline service function.

Some of the best in-depth radio news anywhere is on public radio, which is facing not deregulation, but drastic cuts in federal funding. National Public Radio does a particularly skillful job of blending background sounds with their reports to help convey the mood of a story. Commercial radio newspeople seldom capitalize on ability to use sound more effectively than television.

A more important instrument for change in radio news than deregulation probably, is the communications satellite. New networks are being formed to transmit programs by satellite. Radio stations are now able to aim their programs and their "demographic advertising" at special audiences Greater specialization might encourage more depth in some radio news and in formation programs for listeners who are willing to search the dial.

34 | October 1981 | Illinois Issues