Monday, September 23, 2013

Report: AM Broadcasters Sometimes ‘Own Worst Enemy’

In this week’s NERW posting, Scott Fybush, dissects the FCC’s proposals made last week at the Radio show in Orlando by Acting FCC Chair Mignon Clyburn.

Scott Fybush
AM broadcasters have been their own worst enemies for the last few decades, in no small part because there are so many conflicting agendas at play among the 5,000 or so AM licensees across the breadth of the U.S. 
To hear broadcasters tell it, every AM station in America is a picture-perfect community station, owned by a mom and pop who’ve been trying to provide local news and sports to their small town since 1947 or thereabouts. There are certainly some of those stations still out there, and we’ve tried diligently in this space to highlight their service – but for every WBTA or WINY or WDEV out there in smaller markets, or for every WBZ, WOR or KYW still providing solid big-signal service to a big city, there are probably a dozen other AMs that are less picture-perfect, at least where the FCC’s current endeavor is concerned. It’s not hard to find examples of other AMs that provide far less value to the listener these days: the forgotten stepsisters attached to larger, more profitable clusters of FMs; the well-intentioned stand-alone that just couldn’t quite pull the money together to remain functional; the rack of equipment plugged into a satellite feed from thousands of miles away. 
Therein lies the problem: the way FCC policy has been constructed for the last few decades, the Commission effectively cannot distinguish between all those wildly divergent species of AM operations. Blame that, if you will, on the end of the comparative-hearing era and the rise of the postcard renewal. Since the 1980s, any AM station that’s met the minimal threshold of being on the air, running EAS tests and maintaining some vestige of a public file has been just as equally entitled to benefit from changes in the FCC rules as any other AM licensee. (The one major exception turned out to be a failure for other reasons – the AM band expansion to 1700 kHz in the 1990s was based entirely on interference reduction on the existing band, but in the end removed almost no existing signals from the dial.)

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