Changing Channels

It's my party, and I'll play Tommy Roe records if I want to

 

Not that I'm hinting for presents -- very much -- but here's what Bruce Kelly, the former WMXJ-102.7 morning man, sent me for my birthday. Bruce these days hosts a talk show on WZFG in Fargo, North Dakota. All that time on the tundra, huddled around a campfire of reindeer chips, has apparently given him a keen appreciation for video minimalism. And Tommy Roe's Hooray For Hazel, 45 years later, is still the greatest record ever made.

NPR, running scared, dumps an executive

NPR, running scared from the let's-defund-public-broadcasting stirred up by its firing of analyst Juan Williams three months ago, offered up a couple of sacrificial lambs Thursday. Ellen Weiss (below right), the senior vice president for news who dumped Williams, resigned. And CEO Vivian Schiller lost her annual bonus. (Insert laugh track here from NPR commentators if they were reporting that BP or some other corporate Leviathan was "punishing" an executive by withholding a bonus.)

Those moves were accompanied by a blathery statement from NPR's board of directors that admitted no wrongdoing but portentously announced the formation of various committees and ethics policies. At the same time, another statement -- signed by Schiller -- praised Weiss as her body hurtled overboard: "Ellen exemplifies journalistic professionalism and integrity." Translation: With the Republicans taking over the House, we had to do something, and Ellen drew the short straw." 

Williams -- who also worked as a contributor to Fox News at the same time he was on NPR -- was fired after he appeared on Bill O'Reilly's shows and said that Muslims pose a civil rights/national security dilemma for the United States. "I'm not a bigot," Williams said. "You know the kind of books I've written about the civil rights movement in this country. But when I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous."

NPR, already suffering a collective near-stroke over the fact that one of its people was appearing on Fox News, dumped him almost immediately. "Our reporters, our hosts and our new analysts should not be injecting their own views about a controversial issue as part of their story," Schiller said at the time. Curiously, that policy did not seem to cover Nina Totenberg when she appeared on ABC and said that Sen. Jesse Helms should worry that a retributive God might give him AIDS.

NPR has always been more of a political cult than a news organization, and I don't think Thursday's announcement changes anything. It doesn't sound like Williams does, either. He was particularly underwhelmed by the statement praising Weiss. "If they want to be Pravda and issue propaganda like that, fine, but I think everybody knows the real story here,” he said on Fox News. Check out his full response.

Bubba the Love Sponge leaves XM Sirius

Bubba the Love Sponge has left XM Sirius satellite radio. He tells the Hollywood Reporter that he quit after XM Sirius tried to cut his salary from $1 million a year to $200,000 when his contract expired. It's part of a general round of cost-cutting at XM Sirius as the company tries to get out from under the competitive, high-priced deals that its two component networks -- XM and Sirius -- made before they merged in 2008. The real trimming will begin when some of the company's sports contracts (particularly baseball and the NFL) come up for renewal.

Miami radio giant Neil Rogers dies

Neil Rogers, whose off-kilter and frequently off-color rants mesmerized South Florida radio listeners for more than three decades, died Friday morning at a Broward County hospice. My Herald pal Ellie Brecher writes that the official cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Larry King unplugs his mike

Five decades and 50,000 interviews after he first jabbed a microphone into a surprised pop singer's face at a Miami Beach diner, Larry King is hanging up his suspenders. His Thursday night show on CNN will be the last of a broadcast career that eternally careened between pinnacles of wild success and pits of utter catastrophe.

King and his producers are being uncharacteristically tight-lipped about who will appear on the final edition of Larry King Live, which airs at 9 p.m. Comedian Bill Maher and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest will be at King's Hollywood studio -- but 14 mystery guests will also beam in from around the world via satellite.

Could President Barack Obama be among them? He's already shared a microphone with King, as has every American president since Richard Nixon. O.J. Simpson? King's mile-by-mile coverage of Simpson's 1994 slow-motion car chase by Los Angeles police inaugurated the age of crime as entertainment. LeBron James? Bill Gates? Lady Gaga? They've all been chatted up on the nightly show.

Or could the legendary allure of appearing on King's program -- which has survived the nose-dive of his Nielsen ratings even if the show itself hasn't -- even draw guests from the other end of this mortal coil?

Then we might see Marlon Brando, who unexpectedly and indelibly ended a 1994 interview by kissing King full on the lips. ("I still can't stop thinking about it,'' King said 15 years later.) Or segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace, who opened an appearance on a King show by ostentatiously glancing around the TV studio, then sneering: ``I don't see any blacks working here.'' (Retorted King: "They own the station. They're out to lunch.'')

In fact, it's hard to find anyone of any significance in the past half-century, living or dead, who hasn't sat across the table from King in his various radio and TV incarnations. Read my full story in Thursday's Miami Herald.

Neil Rogers goes to hospice care

Former South Florida radio king Neil Rogers has canceled plans for heart surgery and has entered hospice care, according to my pal Tom Jicha at the Brand X paper up in Fort Lauderdale.  

Where to hear Christmas music and NOT the Rolling Stones

If your Christmas wish this season is to hear White Christmas 5,000 times, you can get a good start today while heading off to the mall. Tune in to Miami's WHDR, the FM station at 93.1 that until a few days ago was known as 93 Rock. After five years of lousy, WHDR became the latest Miami station to give up on rock and roll last Saturday, switching over to an all-Christmas format that will last until the holidays. Everybody's mum on what will happen after that, But one thing's for sure, when Danny & The Juniors sang that "rock and roll will never die," they were not talking about Miami.

All the news that's fit to giggle at

Expect to wake up a little bit dumber tomorrow. That morning-show DJ on your clock radio will no longer be able to tell you about the guy who was abducted by space aliens and forced to have sex with William Shatner. Or the guy who had sex (but it was meaningful, not just a back-seat quickie) with a dolphin. Or George Harrison's probable reincarnation identity. FlashNews, prime supplier of loon news to radio and TV hosts for the past decades, closed its doors Friday.

Mailbag: Soccer hooligans

The readers write:

I enjoyed your column on soccer "evangelism'' as I call it.  Why in the name of Johnny Unitas, Bart Starr, etc. must some people feel that religious urge to foist soccer on a largely indifferent public? Is it better that football? Do more classy people watch it, like the yobs who riot routinely at soccer matches? Are we inferior to the Euro trash that look down their noses at American football?  I think it's snob appeal and part of the trend of our "betters'' to denigrate anything American and worship anything from abroad. They are wasting their time. At age 64 I ain't about to start watching a sport where nothing happens except guys in shorts running around chasing a ball.

Gary Beauchamp

Laplace, La.

   

Screw those guy who wrote letters on soccer that the paper printed today. I'm with your sports colleague, (Greg Cote?) who said watching soccer is like watching paint dry. I've got to look at soccer because my grandson is a strong player and I need to be able to talk with him.

It seems to me that after millions of years of evolution we have developed hands with opposing thumbs and it's stupid not to use them. It's like having opera with music and only pantomime, no voices.

Arnold Mercado

Miami

Then an aired on WLRN, the Herald's public-radio broadcast partner. Tough audience over there:

Whenever I hear an egregious grammar mistake on NPR, I send a message as I believe NPR should be the standard of grammar excellency in broadcasting. You’re the latest offender. It’s “fewer viewers,” not “less viewers,” as you said in your piece today on the World Cup.

John Virtue

Director, International Media Center

Florida International University

Miami

That's hardly the worst of it, John. I'm afraid poor Dana Davis Rehm might have inadvertently heard the piece and put her ear drums out with sharpened chopsticks in despair.

Poor Diane.

 

 

 

  

  

Mailbag: NPR strikes back

When I recently posted a link here to a story I wrote in 1993 criticizing -- okay, eviscerating -- NPR, the folks there were not amused. Here's their reply:

There are many aspects of the recent blog posting An old-but-goodie piece of NPR-bashing that NPR could challenge, but I’ll limit myself to one statement, written this week: by Glen Garvin: “But the thrust of the story, I think, remains valid. NPR remains a cultish echo chamber with a tiny audience anchored in a dying medium, funded almost entirely with money extorted from taxpayers. Other than that, public radio is great.”

The fact is – not one of these assertions is true – and public radio is great.  We are dismayed that an organization with the Miami Herald’s reputation would fail to check the facts.  Here they are:

The NPR audience is significant and growing on all platforms. As of the latest national ratings period, Fall 2009, NPR stations reach 33.9 million Americans every week; NPR programming and newscasts alone reach 27.1 million. Our drive-time newsmagazine programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered stand at #3 and #4 in the nationwide radio ratings. Unlike many commercial networks, the number of NPR stations is growing, not declining, as the public has a thirst for fact-based independent journalism and high-quality arts, music and cultural programming. Since 1993 when this piece was first published, the network of stations airing NPR programming has grown from 427 to 901.  Our audience via digital platforms is also growing, currently about 11 million people visit NPR.org each month.

Radio is not a dying medium, though it is a mature medium. From 1998-2008 the audience for NPR programming grew 63 percent, commercial radio grew 13 percent, nightly network news was down 19 percent and newspapers dropped by 29 percent. Radio is amazingly resilient and is actually maintaining its audience.

The statement that NPR is funded almost entirely with money “extorted from taxpayers” is outrageous and enormously disrespectful to the people who make up public radio’s largest source of funding: the 2.85 million households that voluntarily contribute to public radio stations annually. The fact is that roughly 10 percent of public radio station funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private non-profit chartered by the Congress. The largest source of station funding is contributions from listeners, followed by corporate sponsorship. 

As to NPR, Inc., we have received no operating support from the federal government since 1983.  About 2 percent of NPR’s annual budget comes from competitive grants from federally funded organizations. NPR, Inc’s largest sources of revenue are NPR member stations, who pay program fees and dues to NPR, and corporate sponsors.

Dana Davis Rehm

Senior vice president – Marketing, Communications & External Relations

NPR