Seth Auberon, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
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| Hey, Bellas, let's start our own morning radio show to show the world how it's done. |
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Los Angeles has a bad radio market, really bad. I only ever figured this out driving one morning near the state capital, Sacramento, in Northern California.
I was confused. There were multiple good rock stations. I assumed it was the same station having quickly moved on to another rocking hit. But no, it was a whole other station overlapping coverage. There were different genres, actual competition, independence... It's rich up there by Rancho Cordova, but there don't seem to be too many people. How could a place with a fraction of LA's population have so many more choices? It wasn't a special day. Turns out, it probably wasn't even a special place. What it had been was that LA sucks, sucks, sucks -- all copying one another in a desperate bid for the ratings pie, motivated by capitalism and little else. They don't care about listeners, personnel, station managers, just suits producing results on paper they can take to the bank. LA radio is so bad, it's often better to listen classical or Pacifica or news talk. At least that way there are fewer commercial pitches and mind-numbing repetition.
It's not likely to change. There's no arguing with "suckcess." So stations figure they'd better develop a morning flagship show to represent themselves. It's the Morning Zoo, and it's painful. They get syndicated, and everyone gets to hear the same thing. Now as these morning shows compete, it's clear they live and die by the numbers. So where are these all-important numbers?
I guess the worst thing now is how every show has a gay character (e.g., Ryan Seacrest, Heidi Hamilton, Greg Gory, Aneesh Ratan, Karla Hernandez, Aly Johnson, Big Boy, some of them still closeted but fooling no one and winking at the audience), who's all jaded and doesn't want to promote LGBTQI+ but just be accepted and normalized. Each has a complete loser, an involuted incel, a morbidly obese person or persons talking about fast food, a macho sex addict, and the insufferable child-voice people like Ani Caribbean. There's the inarticulate idiot whipping boy, made necessary by the Howard Stern model of ratings success. Is there no shame?
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