Radio: The N.A.rehaB.

I’ll give credit where credit is due.

David “Fumbles” Rehr gets his for hiring grief counselors to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Austin next week.

He’s also stationing counselors at key locations throughout the convention center, nearby restaurants, and at the Driskill and Four Seasons.

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Fumbles, even assigned a personal grief counselor to every station broker. How solicitous of him.

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Okay, I admit it. I made the whole grief counselor story up .

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I still feel that Fumbles still fell short by not turning next week’s NAB Convention into a communal radio industry intervention.

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Fumbles, lure everyone in, lock the doors, and don’t allow anyone to leave until they agree to rehab.

We’ve suffered through a dozen years of our industry experiencing numerous behavioral problems that have ruined many eminent broadcast companies and precipitately ended careers. Employees, colleagues, and company executives are trapped in a terminal cycle of despair and lack of growth.

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The collective denial of these tribulations and the ambivalence about getting much-needed treatment further blurs the reality of how the industry is viewed by both consumers and clients.

Though the NAB Convo bills itself as featuring top-notch management, programming, and sales sessions – most of those that could effect change and progress won’t be there.

The NAB calls itself a trade organization that advocates on behalf of radio and TV and networks before Congress, the FCC, and the Courts – but, in reality, it doesn’t have much juice with any of them.

The NAB Conventions have become an assembly of the politically correct of broadcasting preaching to the choir.

In NAB-speak the word digital means HD Radio.

Technology means something we need to keep up with but can’t afford.

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Research is something we’d like to do - but like technology it's not in the budget.

Innovation is equated with failure. We'd like to innovate but it takes too much time.

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The radio industry is locked in denial of radio hemorrhaging listeners- especially younger demos – its future.

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If the real estate market is about houses whose owners can’t find buyers, the radio industry is about stations that can’t find listeners.

For that matter, it’s also about radio chains that can’t find buyers for the stations it’s trying to unload. Just ask CBS. When they made their announcement to dump dozens of stations, didn’t you expect the NAB would serve as the backdrop to announce their sale?

Yesterday, CEO Les Moonves insisted, “We’re not desperate to sell. We don’t need the cash.”

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In other words, we’re just continuing to downsize and cut budgets because we like doing that kind of stuff, not because we have to. CBS = Cut Budgets Severely.

Fumbles, denying you have a problem doesn’t make it go away. That’s why the NAB has to get into the intervention business – to save radio from itself.

One addiction the NAB can’t kick is keeping company with the same rogues that have fed misinformation to the industry for well over a decade.

Every industry plays some form of follow the leader. That’s a given.

Radio’s quandary is that there are no functioning leaders – just followers –walking in a lethal circle – one penguin following another, and all going nowhere fast.

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You see them every year and every year the radio industry slides down a few more notches. Coincidence? I think not.

It’s the same names, the same topics, best acronymed as SOS/DD.

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I shouldn’t say there are no radio leaders. There are many with the insight to comprehend and envision its future – but the NAB won’t offer them the dais to really tell it like it is.

Do you seriously believe Fumbles and his cohorts want to change this system?

Of course not. His meal ticket is predicated on the rampant dumbassery that’s permeated this industry. And it’s only the rampant dumbasses that make out at these convos.

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No one listens to the keynote address. Fumbles will deliver his well-written, crafted and timed short-sentenced cliché ridden speech using all the right buzzwords in all the right places. The crowd will applaud him unconsciously.

Rehr, who used to shill for the beer industry, is your archetypal middling salesman. He says whatever his audience wants to hear exactly the way they want it delivered. He always agrees with his audience on every issue.

If he headed the Audubon Society, he’d be delivering bird calls like a seasoned ornithologist.

(Free advice: Fumbles, lay off the Radio 2020 hype. No one – not even your most ardent believers – buy into that one.)

When David Pogue, the New York Times’ Personal Technology writer speaks, he’ll hit a nerve, which will quickly be dulled by the wave – no, more like tsunami - of denial that will sweep over the audience and override his message.

Invest in talent, creativity, and new technology? Who’d be dumb enough to take a chance on that? And how would that read in an annual report? That’s Silicon Valley geek stuff.

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Fumbles will go out of his way to make certain his convention doesn’t confuse anyone with the facts.

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Listeners care about radio as radio cares about them, which is to say, not at all. Remember that oily consultant who liked to say, “The masses are asses?” Well, as I like to say, even asses know when they’re getting kicked.

For those few fun years, post-deregulation, the NAB’s theme song was Pink’s “Get this Party Started” which quickly morphed into “Life in the Fast Lane.” The king of the convo was the CEO that acquired the most stations in time for NAB bragging rights. It didn’t matter whether the company could afford it or not. The business plan was buy now and figure out what to do with ‘em later and the finance plan was “buy now, pray later.”

Now you see some of those same people walk around the convo dumbfounded with eyes that look like they’ve been zapped by a lightning bolt and seared of life.

It’s definitely, positively, without a doubt intervention time for the NAB.

Fumbles must have tire tracks up and down his back from the amount of traffic his “Radio Heard Here” blog is generating.

Rehab is for those who believe in wasting money on HD Radio instead of building a lucrative Internet and streaming audio infrastructure and organizing a direct fight against the RIAA’s plans to impose a performance tax on music played on the radio.

So far, the best Fumbles has come up with for the NAB to challenge the RIAA is his duck campaign.

I have a friend who is with one of the four major labels. He’s not part of the New York-L.A. crowd. You won’t see him hanging out with the stars at the trendy joints or the MTV music awards. He’s in the financial end – and assured me that radio will have to pay a performance royalty for music in 2009.

Fumbles, while you were sending your cute little stuffed ducks to decision makers you think are your friends on Capitol Hill last November, the RIAA was up there, in person – and in full force working anyone and everyone on the royalty tax. It'll be your personal Murder Most Fowl.

It’s never going to happen, you say.

You keep telling yourself that hoping that you’ll eventually believe it.

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You’re about to pull another defeat out of the jaws of victory.

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While radio’s foes have the ducks in a row, you’re stuck with a dead one.

And that’s why you and your believers need rehab.
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