I didn’t quit listening to radio. Radio quit me.I steal that line from Ronald Reagan, who said it about Democrats. He was a guy on a mic before going into another kind of make believe as an actor and politician. He used to phony up sports broadcasts to make them sound live.
And that’s it with pop radio isn’t it? Hype, whistle, wham, bam, thank you, ma’am.
There was a time when radio played it natural. I liked it like that, as comfortable as a movie matinee. Then came TV, audience and ad competition, and marketing and the Top 40. Bummer.
I knew something was wrong years ago when Del Rio, Texas sold autographed pictures of Jesus on the air.
National Public Radio is winning me back. I guess it’s a demographic thing.
Sanity is reclaiming the airwaves. I may not be alone in my opinion, at least in my fan class.
The local university station plays NPR the first half of the day for the faculty and off-campus neighborhoods. The students don’t start listening until the second half when rock starts. Hard.
When the kids graduate, they may not take the frazzling frequency along.
College grads are not big fans of commercial radio, turns out. Edison Market Research shows non-college grads listen more. But listeners who have a diploma tend to count themselves in the NPR audience.
Part of the explanation may be the increase of workplace radio listening, which is significant among college graduates. Thirty percent of those choose the Internet for listening, compared with 12 percent among non college graduates.
Hey, I think we’re sick of obnoxious radio, which is impossible to work by. It helps that NPR is slightly boring to the young, so it is attractive to the rest of us, cultural instead of counter-cultural and not demanding of our full attention while we are otherwise occupied.
Radio needs to be more like the later Ronald Reagan. A milder delivery plays gentle on the mind. The message seems credible that way, or at least more than sham sports or religious relics with counterfeit signatures.
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