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OBAMA'S WAR ON TALK RADIO
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on DickMorris.com on May 25, 2009
Obama's liberal philosophy dictates that when the news is bad, shoot the
messenger. The newest data from Arbitron, the company charged with
measuring the size of radio audiences, suggests that listenership to hip hop,
inner city, and minority radio has been overstated in the past and that the
popularity of conservative talk radio has been under-reported.
This conclusion - ideologically inconvenient for Obama - comes from the
company's decision to dispense with the Stone Age way it has been measuring
radio audiences - by hand written diaries based on listener memory - with modern
machines which automatically record what the person is listening to and for how
long.
The opening barrage in Obama's efforts to reign in talk radio was fired by the
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week when its acting Chairman
Michael J. Copps announced an investigation of Arbitron's radio measuring
technology called the Portable People Meter. (Not to be confused with the
Purple People Eater celebrated in song in the 1950s).
Arbitron is the company tasked with rating radio listenership. The
equivalent of the Neilson television ratings, its measurements of audience share
are revered like Scripture by station managers, owners, and advertisers.
Traditionally, Arbitron relied on hand written diaries. Since the diaries
were based on memory, they were often faulty. So Arbitron availed itself
of new technology in launching its Portable People Meter (PPM) - a cell phone
sized unit the listener wears on his or her belt which automatically notes what
station they are tuning in and when they switch or stop.
The PPM measurements concluded that hip hop, urban rock, and minority-oriented
radio stations reached fewer listeners and for shorter periods of time than the
diaries had indicated. It found that talk radio had a larger listenership.
The left saw an ideological bias at work and the states of New York and New
Jersey sued Arbitron alleging discrimination in its choice of the sample charged
with wearing the PPMs. It said that the ratings agency, which presumably
recruited its sample by phone, was under-representing people without landlines
who used only cell phones and hence under-counted minorities.
Now the FCC is launching its own investigation.
But almost all political polling is done by telephone and samples cannot include
cell phones because one cannot determine the residence of the user from the
number. Since survey researchers draw their samples geographically, they
do not know which cell phone numbers are for which neighborhoods. (Land lines
distribute the first three numbers of an exchange geographically).
If Arbitron is flawed, so is all polling, political and otherwise. The
accuracy of most polling in predicting election results suggests that the flaws
cannot be too bad.
What is really at work here is an effort by the FCC to stack the deck to help
left-wing and minority stations earn higher advertising revenues than those to
which their real market share would entitle them. Solicitous of the
financial viability of its liberal allies on radio and anxious to undermine the
balance sheets of conservative stations, the FCC is lending itself to the
president's political agenda.
This investigation is, of course, only the first shot of the war against
conservative radio. Soon the FCC will try to strip right wing stations of
their licenses or impose fines on them payable to National Public Radio.
In our forthcoming book, Catastrophe, we explain how this offensive will work
and what will be its likely consequences.
But the opening salvo has been fired by the FCC which is willingly lending
itself to stations with Democratic bias in an effort to swell their advertising
revenues and to stop the growth of talk radio. Because the FCC will do
much more to try to destroy the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael
Levin, and Neil Boortz, we must be vigilant if we hope to keep free speech
alive, even if it comes from the right side of the stage.
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