Radio: When?

It’s the question I get asked the most: "When?"

The answer is: "When…."

When the banks truly come clean on their toxic investments and properties.

Media’s recovery (and let me preface that by saying that not all media will) have everything to do with getting a factual and candid understanding of our present economic state.

The meat fell off the bones in radio, television, and newspapers when the economy was purportedly healthy. That's before sub-prime, before the banks tanked, before Bernie and his friends.

Like all nearly extinct species, the radio mega-chains couldn't adapt to the changing environment. It's hard to prop up an industry that requires ears when few are listening.

Toxic investments, toxic radio chains – what’s the difference?

Lenders are distended with non-performing loans.

They didn't balance the books. They unbalanced them.

Delaying the inevitable is postponing recovery.

I have to laugh at David Frigstad, the chairman of Frost & Sullivan, who said in not so many words that media are manipulating "statistics, negativity, exaggeration, and doomsday forecasts,” which “have driven fear and panic among consumers and business alike." His ten cent psychology is a worth a dime less than what he charges for it.

Memo to all dreamers, schemers, and their assorted coatholders: There’s no rug left to sweep anything under.

Don't they remind you of lyrics from Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone:” When you got nothing / you got nothing to lose /
You're invisible now / you got no secrets to conceal?

If the past thirty or so years taught us anything it’s that some things were never meant to be as big and unmanageable as they got. Banks and radio chains are just two examples.

We have to separate what can work from what never will.

Dismantle banks and businesses that can’t work and wipe out their shareholders. Strip away toxic their toxic assets – and from the pieces left over create new banks and businesses that will work.

There was a reason why the old trickle-up system worked so well for regulated media.

Some operators proved themselves to be efficient small or medium market size owners and operators while others were comfortable rising in the ranks from small markets to the majors.

The free-for-all of the last dozen years proved that just because these groups were able to con the financing didn’t mean they knew how to run that many of them.

That's a fact you can't confuse free-market cheerleader and New Hampshire Senator John Sununu with. A few years back, when arguing for more radio deregulation, he said the reason Clear Channel had the most listeners, ratings, and revenue was because it was the best radio programmer.

Let’s take Clear Channel, CBS Radio, Citadel, and Cumulus for starters. Of those four, how many will go belly up or be liquidated before December 31, 2009?

Just in the past couple of weeks a few of the smaller groups and regional specialists I work with received probing calls from some of the majors on their interest in some stations their trying to quietly unload.

I smell smoke.