WCLT - Now, for the rest of the story

When I wrote about WCLT news reporting effort by Bill Clifford and his 2.5-person staff, I tacked on a riff about local owners. I mentioned the Spencer family but omitted Bob Pricer, who owns 51 percent of the corporation and has been the WCLT kingpin for longer than I’ve lived in Newark.

On reconsideration of how my essay might have been improved regarding WCLT’s who’s who, I asked Bill Clifford a few questions and he wrote such a great response - and threw in many extras - that I’m letting him tell the story in his own words, almost verbatim ...

“I didn’t know any of the Spencer’s had any shares. But your info proves they are minority stock holders. Bob’s wife, Dottie is not a Spencer. Tom Rogers was the first President of WCLT, he was married to Marian Spencer. Tom died in about 1976 or so, and he was the majority stock owner from 1947 to his death. Marian gave Bob her proxy so he controlled (and still does) the stock ownership. With that proxy, he paid Marian off over a number of years. As far as I know, Bill Rogers is still alive...and living in Virginia or Maryland. (Tom Rogers was Woody Hayes football coach at Denison) (Tom was also Gerald R. Ford’s commander in WWII). Tom died while Jerry was President.

“Bob Pricer was here on day one - August 2, 1947. Have you ever heard of anyone staying at the same place for 62 years?

“We’re not planning anything big for WCLT FM at age 62, but I will be writing a little tribute to Bob and WCLT FM. Bob has been a second father to me for about 50 years. I started after graduating in 1968, by rewriting news headlines in the afternoon. Ray Luther was news director back then. Ray died a few years ago. I have worked for WCLT five different times for about a total of 18 years.

“... Bob has done every job there is at WCLT in 62 years. His commitment to improving education within the Newark School System has been unwavering. He served as President of the Newark School Board back in the 60’s and 70’s.

“Bob is now 86. His mind is sharp. He still drives, and is at the station, along with Dottie, at least a couple of times a week. He keeps up with everything that’s going on.

“The one thing I like to tell people is this: WCLT FM, with 50,000 watts of power remains independently owned and operated by Newark people on the fringe of the 16th largest metro area in the USA. WCLT AM is part of this operation too as a talk-radio and news station. AM is 500 watts and the signal covers the Newark-Heath and Granville areas.

“In December of last year (2008) I sent an e-mail to Doug, reminding him, January 21, 2009 would be the 50th anniversary of the Great Ohio Flood 1959. He asked me to write some stories which I did. Doug asked me to be a stringer for WCLT. Which took me about 10-sec to say yes.

“One thing led to another. The afternoon news editor moved on to a job in county government. That job was open, at around Christmas time 2008 and I told Doug I was interested. He and news director Eric Brown were set on hiring me. I went to Doug again, and to be upfront with him, I advised him I was a diabetic, and spent about $1,000 on medicine out of my own pocket every month, and becoming part of their employee health care plan would cause a steep rise in their health care costs, and employee costs.

“So Doug said to me, how about if you run the news department. His plan was to pay me as a consultant, and I would pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes at the end of the year. There was still one little bump in the road. Since 1986 I have been a stringer with the Dispatch. Neither Doug nor the Dispatch had any problems with it, in fact both ends thought that’s a winning combination. So I started - February 2 - Ground Hog Day.

“I do my story writing from home. I am at the station 4-5 times a week. I am not on the air regularly because with diabetes I cannot talk as well with a dry mouth at times, and a very light stroke or heart attack in 1997. I recorded all of our April Fools stories for this year. And, record a couple of stories a week.

“Eric Brown is news director and Glenn Forbes is news editor. They both work for me. And as you have noticed things are changing. I hear about our improved news operation several times a week. I have also been working to establish a link with stringers and tipsters.”

WCLT prospers under family ownership

A few decades ago the competition for news between the Advocate and the radio stations was pretty hot, at least as viewed from behind the walls of the newspaper. Fur was bound to fly on rare occasions when Advocate reporters got scooped.

All that faded, at least as far as has been evident to newspaper readers. The Advocate apparently gave up on being timely when the deadlines and press times shifted. WCLT wasn’t offering much news anyway, judging by its on-line news summary.

The return of Bill Clifford, WCLT reporter from the old days, may turn up the heat on the big boys at the Advocate. Bill is now the station’s News Operations Manager and since his return I’ve noticed a change in the number of local stories being broken on radio rather than print.

Bill’s many years of news experience and community involvement also place the station at an advantage in recognizing trends and the historical backgrounding of current events.

Though Bill heads a 2.5-person news department, it is very aggressive, he says. “I love competing in the news business. As long as I am at WCLT, my friends at The Advocate should look over their shoulder now and then ... we’ll be there.”

I like that.

I also like the fact that Spencer family members are among owners of WCLT. Brothers Frank and John Spencer who owned the Advocate when I worked there, started WCLT in 1947. Frank died and John sold the Advocate to Thomson Newspapers, which sold it to Gannett.

But the family held onto WCLT, though they’ve had numerous offers to sell to big corporations, which would likely cut staff and expenses to the bones. This is the link to an FCC report that lists WCLT owners.

WCLT FM is number-one position in listeners in Licking, Muskingum, and Knox counties, according to Clifford. WCLT sales are about $3 million according to Manta.com.

I can’t locate the official Aribtron ratings for WCLT as compared to five years ago, but the Advocate’s circulation went from about 22,000 copies a day five years ago to 15,585 as of 3/31/09, according to Clifford and the Audit Bureau of Circulations. It was more than 25,000 in the early 60’s, when I first worked there.

I’m glad Bill came back. Not only can he find the news, he gives us information we don’t get elsewhere.

No, I insist on going out in this weather and driving for pleasure

The forecast is: Snow. Areas of blowing snow. Snow accumulation 3 to 5 inches. Total accumulation of 12 to 15 inches. Highs in the mid 20s. Northwest winds 15 to 20 mph with gusts up to 40 mph. Chance of snow 100 percent.

Which makes me just want to bitch-slap the next smug little person on TV who reads the above words into a camera and then adds: "Don't drive if you don't have to."

(Review and discuss: Take your siren and stuff it.)

Blame your lazy, incompetent media for impudent government

I have been inadvertently made aware at least two dozen times in the past several hours that Brittany's sister is pregnant. I don't give a damn about her or Brittany, but that news is inescapable.

Meanwhile, the impudence of government employees rages unchecked. Why? Because media are yammering incessantly about media-created "events" like Britney-slut and her sister's vagina. Media rarely talk about what's important and when they do, their lack of depth is prodigious.

Example: The U.S.-Mexico fence project has been stopped in its tracks. Did you know that? I heard about it only because I was walking by the TV last night when Glenn Beck was popping blood from his eyes over this travesty.

This morning I spent more than an hour running down a media report about the fence on the Internet because the fact that our nation is over-run by illegal Mexicans and God knows who else is just not in the same level of importance as what Britney-slut's sister's vagina has been over-run with.

I would really like to know if my congressmen voted for or against castrating the border fence. I cannot find out. No place in the articles I saw was the bill mentioned by number. Even if there were a number, good luck sorting through the way such votes are reported on the Internet, especially voting on amendments.

What we get from media is what the so-called "Washington Press Corps" decides to send to media. Never do we hear how our congressmen voted, not unless it's a real big deal to one of the media gatekeepers. That would be the folks enthralled by celebrity vaginas.

Example: Please tell me how Jay Hottinger, your representative to the statehouse, and Tim Schaffer, your state senator, vote on anything. In fact, just tell me what there has been for them to vote on.

Example: Please tell me anything of importance reported about the Licking County Commissioners in the past several weeks, except for a small blurb about a new tax proposal. Just tell me if they're still meeting at all.

Example: Please tell me what happened at the last Newark City Council meeting if you didn't watch it yourself. You may have read the Advocate's 22-paragraph fluff lionizing Mayor Bain for his exemplary service before he was voted out of office, or you may have read the five-paragraph "report" about the city employee union addressing council. But do you know what happened at the last council meeting that affected lives and property and tax money and who voted for it and why?

No, you don't. But you probably do know the latest buzz on Buckeye football or the minutia of the police blotter - because that's a cheap and easy journalistic gimme which any clerk can be taught to handle.

It is precisely for these reasons that you're getting government employees who thumb their noses at you. You don't know who's voting on what, and the people who are paid to tell you - the Gannetts and the WCLTs and the Dispatches don't know either, don't think it's important, and would have to spend some money on reporting and editing talent to get it done.

Meanwhile they're looking for the latest celebrity vagina news and whining about readers/listeners/viewers jumping ship.

Looking for conspiracy? Check for media-government connections

Most baffling to me about my fellow citizens is their inability to make themselves heard about energy prices. It is not an issue among Presidential candidates; it is not a concern of Congress; newspapers lay it to "supply and demand." I say it's conspiracy.

If 81 percent of Americans believe it is "somewhat likely" or "very likely" that oil companies conspire to keep the price of gasoline high, (as has been determined by a Scripps Howard News Service/Ohio University poll and reported in the Columbus Dispatch this morning), why aren't they communicating about this to their government? And if they are communicating to their government about it, why isn't government investigating? And if they're not investigating, why isn't media investigating?

Here's my conspiracy theory: That not only are oil companies conspiring, but international governments are also conspiring, and our President is a ringleader. Not only is that conspiracy dogging us at the gas pump, but so is another: that big media is in on it too.

You'll wipe that snicker off your face if you'll go read the report on how the New York Times withheld a story about Pakistan for three years because Bush said so.

Now consider the biggest story ever about what I think is the biggest conspiracy of the Bush Administration, which is oil-price finagling, and guess why there are no meaningful media reports on why gasoline is $3+ per gallon.

The cure for ESPN-TV is radio

The harder ESPN tries, the more annoying it gets. Consider:

- its cute wannabe-comedian announcers who aren't terribly interested in the action on the field.

- its carney graphics team which pastes Disney over much of what's happening on the field.

- its wasted effort to attune viewers to every other game that is being/has been/will be played.

- its affinity for showcasing stupid people in the stands and press box.

- its infantile slobbering over people it thinks we should care about but we don't.

- its distracting "reports" from its token woman on the sidelines.

ESPN presents a football game as something for which viewers must search by trying to ignore their intrusive, show-biz crap.

Which is why, during the game with Illinois, I turned off ESPN's sound and turned on the radio announcers. They tell you what's going on, and that allowed me ignore ESPN whenever it started to piss me off and I could actually hear football announcers tell me about the game.

As a bonus, the radio guys were a few seconds ahead of ESPN's delayed broadcast, so that by the time I saw it on the screen I already knew the outcome. Ha. Score one for me, ESPN, because I am no longer oppressed by your creative genius.

Ahmadinejad: Listen to the other side, for a change

Neither Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor his ideas nor his voice are to be feared. I am interested in what he has to say.

That our government and our government-herded media are afraid we'll hear arguments against what's being fed to us from Washington seems evident by the attempt to shout him down before he's opened his mouth.

Shut up and let the man speak.

Imus reality check by black commentators

Imus fallout continues because it goes to the core of certain social problems.

Consider the "I'm victimized" position of Obama who, for the first time, has given me reason to think he's truly another dim bulb in the company of many dim-bulb presidential candidates.

His take: "He (Imus) fed into some of the worst stereotypes that my two young daughters are having to deal with today in America. The notions that as young African-American women — who I hope will be athletes — that that somehow makes them less beautiful or less important. It was a degrading comment..." He also called for the resignation of ol' Imus.

Fortunately, there are more intelligent African American leaders than Obama. Among them is Michelle Malkin, a black columnist for the New York Post, who wrote, in part, yesterday:

"The number one rap track is by a new sensation who goes by the name of 'Mims.' The 'song' is 'This Is Why I'm Hot.' It has topped the charts for the last 15 weeks. Here's a taste of the lyrics that young men and women are cranking up in their cars:
------
This is why I'm hot
Catch me on the block
Every other day
Another bitch another drop
16 bars, 24 pop
44 songs, nigga gimme what you got
We into big spinners
See my pimping never dragged
Find me wit' different women that you niggas never had
For those who say they know me know I'm focused on ma cream
Player you come between you'd better focus on the beam
I keep it so mean the way you see me lean
And when I say I'm hot my nigga dis is what I mean
-----
She ends her column with this:

"One dumb radio/television shock jock's insult is a drop in the ocean of barbaric filth and anti-female hatred on the radio.

"Imus gets a two-week suspension. What kind of relief do we get from this deadening, coarsening, dehumanizing barrage from young, black rappers and their music-industry enablers who have helped turn America into Tourette's Nation?"

Now, read the last two paragraphs of this column by Jason Whitlock, also an African American, published yesterday in the Kansas City Star:


"I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

"When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

"No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out."

Jason's column is on the money. I urge you to read it from the beginning.

Imus: No brains and no balls, so who cares?

Some observers may be snickering over the Imus chapter in the story of American political correctness gone beserk. I, however, think it's a serious matter that should be made a subject for textbooks on politically correct freaks who are logic-disabled and also textbooks on the testicle-impaired commentators.

By now everyone knows that Don Imus - the idiot who looks like an old woman in a cowboy hat and who mutters junk ideas at America from behind a radio microphone and to whom nobody with brains ever listens to anyway - has categorized a certain group of "ladies" as "nappy-headed hos." Later, fumbling and falling all over his feeble self in scatter-gun apologies, he used the words "you people." Shocking stuff, that.

Used in combination, the words "you" and "people" are now an inspiration for those who seek with gusto any reason to come up offended by anything and anybody so long as it calls attention to how unfair their lot in life has become. Who knew?

If you haven't read a transcript of the inane charge that "you people" is off-limits, read it in this New York Post report.

This entire war among babies has had the national spotlight through way too many news cycles. So far only one analyst has made any sense in how it might be best resolved.

That analyst is the esteemed radio "shock jock" Howard Stern, the one whose expertise normally does not extend above the belt, which is why he's on satellite radio as we speak. Howard Stern, the one once described as looking like "a Jew in drag with a bad wig," - that Howard Stern.

Howard's quote in the New York Daily news: "He's apologizing like a guy who got his first broadcasting job," said Stern. "He should have said, 'F--k you, it's a joke.'"

At last Stern finally said something I can agree with.

Imus has no balls in addition to having no brains. That doesn't leave much, so who gives a crap what he says anyway?

Newspaper editors, you've been sold out

Editor & Publisher recently reported on a meeting of newspaper editors who attempted to explain why the so-called "freedom of the press" has evaporated and so-called "reporter rights" have all but disappeared.

Among the comments were: "We have lost all three branches of government for the first time in history."

"There is not fraternity among us anymore."

“There are stories that are not being told because people are afraid of going to jail.”

“You’d be hard-pressed to find a time when the cloak [of government secrecy] was more tightly wound.”

Yeah. But worse than all that was the message of "Gene Policinski of the First Amendment Center (who) quoted recent surveys that said 42% of the public believes the press has too much freedom, and that 83% believe media bias exists in some way. 'It is a disturbing fact,' he said. 'It seems that the public has moved from criticism and through skepticism to cynicism. So free to distrust the press.'"

I wonder why the American Society of Newspaper Editors sits around and wonders aloud where their "rights" have gone, as though they, like welfare recipients, have some grand entitlement.

That newspapers have stopped fighting for truth and open government is an easy observation for anyone who's watching. There was a time when reporters didn't have to back down, when publishers were as concerned about responsible reportage - and all the aggravation and money required by responsible reportage - as they were about high profits. That was when the publishers were the owners and lived in the cities and states where their reporters worked.

Today's newspaper owners are a bunch of investors. They are not newspaper people. They don't give a damn about news, about skilled reportage, about hiring lawyers to break down closed government doors. They give a damn about one thing and that is more money - as much profit as it is possible to squeeze, no matter what has to be sacrificed.

These investors are businessmen and they own government and that completes the circle: business/media/government. That is precisely why there is no freedom of the press, no reporter rights, no fraternity, and no attack on government secrecy or power, and as a practical matter, no First Amendment.

Really bad real headlines

Dave Levingston sent an e-mail yesterday morning alerting several friends, including me, that WLWT Cincinnati had published the following headline on its web site:

WOMAN DEAD AFTER SLAYING, ATTEMPTED SUICIDE

The writers there might be excused, he said, because they are broadcasters and not writers.

He was kidding, but my curiosity was pricked. I wanted to know whether it was a widespread plague among broadcasters or just one of them who works in Cincinnati. After less than an hour of surfing, I found other broadcaster headlines that seem to prove the theory that broadcasters are, generously speaking, weak in English. These headlines are all real and they are all from yesterday's web reports:

INVESTIGATORS STILL LOOKING INTO A PERRY COUNTY FATAL FIRE - WCLT-Newark

IRAN WARNS OF 'ILLEGAL' STEPS OVER NUKES - 10TV-Columbus

LONGABERGER LETS GO OF HUNDREDS OF WORKERS - WNKO-Newark

TEACHER CHIDED FOR BITE DURING WEDGIE - NBC4-Columbus

JUDGE DELAYS MURDER TRIAL OVER FUNDING - NBC4 - Columbus

MAN CHARGED WITH ASKING PARENTS TO SLEEP WITH THEIR DAUGHTER - WCLT-Newark

Are broadcast headline writers language-deficient? Case closed.

Not quite.

Among the friends to whom Dave sent his e-mail advisory was a certain morning radio talk show hostess.

Her response to Dave's Headline of the Week e-mail inadvertently addressed the subject of broadcaster literacy.

She wrote back, and this is an exact quote: "i don't get it?"