Al Sharpton makes $700,000 per year to host his daily talk radio show for Radio One, a national, urban radio syndicate.  Al Sharpton makes $700,000 per year so that his daily radio show can broadcast in only 28 markets (only 15 of which are in the top 50 largest markets in America).  Al Sharpton makes $700,000 per year to host his daily talk show that has been on for six years and yet still has only cleared 28 markets in the country.  Al Sharpton makes $700,000 per year to host his daily talk show that does not rank in Talkers Magazine’s Top 100 “Heavy Hitters” which not only measures ratings, but also goes out of its way to reflect the industry’s diversity and influence.

In short, Al Sharpton makes $700,000 per year to host his daily talk radio show even though it is neither popular, widely distributed, influential or relevant.  Al Sharpton makes $700,000 per year to host his daily talk radio show because Al Sharpton has brought something else to his employer that is far more important than ratings.  More on that later.

To understand the astounding salary that Sharpton receives to host what can only be described as a vanity show at this point, I contacted a veteran industry insider who wished to remain anonymous.  Their first response was “Al Sharpton has a talk radio show?”  I confirmed that he did and it’s been on the air for six years.  My contact said, “Who knew?”

Once past the initial shock that a radio syndicate actually turns over their microphone to the polarizing Al Sharpton (who many believe is anti-Semitic, a race-baiter and was proven to be a defaming liar in the Tawana Brawley case) my source confirmed that given the shows clearance and ratings the $700,000 salary is way beyond industry standards and makes no sense at all.  “He must be doing something else for them to justify that salary,” my source told me.

Yes, he must be.

As Wayne Barrett in the Daily Beast reports, it appears Sharpton provided Radio One a huge service by giving Comcast special “diversity protection” when the Comcast/NBC merger was under fire from the FCC.  As we reported here yesterday, Sharpton and his National Action Network assured the FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, (a political appointee put in place by Barack Obama after he rode to office thanks to Clyburn’s father’s support in the South Carolina Democratic primary) that the new Comcast/NBC corporate entity would bend over backwards to ensure “diversity”.  With the diversity protection firmly in place (thanks to $170,000 paid to Sharpton’s National Action network by Comcast over the past two years) the FCC voted for the merger thanks to Clyburn’s support.

One of the examples of Comcast’s commitment to “diversity” as noted in a memorandum signed by Sharpton and delivered to the FCC, was their huge ownership stake in TV One, a cable network aimed at the African-American community.  Comcast is part of TV One’s ownership team along with TV One’s single largest share-holder, Radio One, Sharpton’s radio syndicate.

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A great piece from the LA Times on the important role local radio is playing as the community struggles to come to grips with the aftermath of the worst tornado in over 60 years.

Reporting from Joplin, Mo.—

Radio host Rob Meyer — homeless and haggard since a tornado destroyed his house Sunday — had another shift coming up soon. He had slept for only five of the previous 48 hours, filling the rest with coffee and soda. And talk.

Hours and hours of talk, in fact, many with the confused and enterprising residents of Joplin. Callers’ voices broke as they asked if anyone had heard news about their daughters, friends and nephews who had disappeared during the storm or its aftermath. Others asked seemingly unanswerable self-help questions, such as: If the bank is destroyed, how can I get my safe-deposit box?

“We’ve just been answering phones live and seeing what people have to say,” Meyer said.

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This could be Soros Central, a.k.a. Media Matters HQ. Exposing Leftists presents students with a petition to sign asking their support in calling for various conservatives (Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity) to be banned from the airwaves.

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Liberals are despicably exploiting the tragic Tucson Arizona shooting as an opportunity to launch another “Hush Rush” initiative. A liberal pundit lamented that there is no left wing radio talk show host as powerful as Rush Limbaugh. Typical of their thinking, this lib believes it is unfair for Limbaugh to be King of the Radio Talk Show mountain. In every area of American life, this lib believes government should take control to produce equal “fair” outcomes.

So why isn’t there a left wing equivalent to Limbaugh? Lord knows they have tried. The left even launched an entire radio network, Air America, committed to trashing conservatives and America. Air America featured several “Great Left Hope” talk show host contenders to dethrone Limbaugh. They all crashed and burned including their radio network. Air America is off the air.

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While appearing on Ed Schultz’s MSNBC show November 17, 2010, Al Sharpton joined Schultz in criticizing Rush Limbaugh for “race-[baiting]” and using “federally-regulated airwaves to malign people.” Sharpton was bothered by the fact that Limbaugh dared talked about the racism inherent in the Democrat Party, particularly the racism white Democrats like former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca) and former Majority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md) displayed in pushing a black Democrat, Jim Clyburn (D-Sc), to the back of the bus” in order to preserve their own prominence.

It seems that when the Democrats restructured their positions in the House after losing control of it on November 2^nd, they made sure that the top two positions went to white people (Pelosi and Hoyer) even though Clyburn, who happens to be black, already held the position Hoyer wanted. Because Limbaugh dared point this hypocrisy out, Sharpton pounced and equated Limbaugh’s monologue on Clyburn with “race-[baiting.”

Two things need to be pointed out here. First, Limbaugh has the Democrat Party (and particularly Pelosi and Hoyer) dead to rights, and that’s why men like Sharpton are using accusations of racism to silence him. But no matter what Sharpton says, Pelosi and Hoyer did move Clyburn to the back of the bus in order to guarantee that they, two white folks, would hold the key positions on the Democrat side of the House.

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“Good judgment prevailed as Congress rejected a move to assert government control over the content of news.” – National Public Radio

So spoke the government financed news of the failed efforts to sever government ties.  Good god, how Orwellian can the government news get?  If NPR can tell us with a straight face that severing federal funding and cutting NPR completely off from the government like every other radio station and news outlet (except PBS) is “an unwarranted attempt to interject federal authority” into the news, then NPR is a step away from fooling around with the laws of arithmetic.

The House voted yesterday 239-171 against stripping NPR of government funding, with Republicans voting unanimously to cut NPR loose.  Following the vote, NPR unleashed the aforementioned series of knee-slappers, which also included the positioning of the no-conservatives-allowed (or Juan Williams) station as a solution to America’s “increasingly fractious media environment.”  NPR then stressed that we keep funding “this essential tool of Democracy,” reminding us that before public radio, America was not a democracy.

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In the first of many acts of bipartisanship to come in the 112^th Congress, House Democrats have refused to work with Republicans on cutting NPR’s public funding.

The brouhaha was created when NPR fired Juan Williams for expressing his honest opinion on Fox News.  After an obviously political move by a “public” radio station that receives taxpayer dollars, the GOP moved to end the public portion of the subsidy.

The cut was selected by American’s voting online in the House GOP’s You Cut program.  But just as they did in the healthcare, cap and trade, and stimulus bills, the Democrats failed to yield to the will of the American people.

The amount of money NPR receives from taxpayers is disputed but may be as much as 25%.

The station originally criticized the possible cut by saying, “The proposal to prohibit public radio stations from using CPB grants to purchase NPR programming is an unwarranted attempt to interject federal authority into local station program decision-making.”

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I’m committing the unforgivable sin with my media friends here. I’m saying government should not be in the media business.

I have worked for 30 years in the activist old media and I’ve always found it odd that we had to compete with government doing public radio and TV in our market. It’s the same in virtually every market across the country. Now, granted, NPR and its affiliates don’t really compete because their ratings are so low (which is also a point that needs to be made), but it just made no sense to me that government would take a single listener away from those trying to build an audience through giving them what they want (BTW, local news feels it gives people what they need instead of what they want, which is part of another problem.)

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting gets $400 million annually, of which $4 million goes to NPR. Not a lot of cash, considering the size of the budget, but their tax exempt status is extremely valuable, plus, we’re talking about the principle here. Let’s begin the much bigger discussion on what government should and should not be funding, and perhaps this is a great place to start.

I’ve been on NPR shows before, I’ve been offered shows on NPR. I’ve always found the format stiff and restrictive. Oh, they like to say they are free-form and offering shows that could not make commercial media, but there is a reason they don’t make commercial media: nobody listens. With the advent of more media outlets through the internet, NPR has outlived its purpose. If you want to do a radio show about 15^th century Renaissance Italian art and how it relates to the Medici architecture that you think may be seen in your local barrio, then go to blogspotradio.com and do it. Knock yourself out and build an audience with your money, not mine. Get a web site, promote it and put it up there as well. I’d like to do a show on Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and how it changed modern sports journalism by being the first book to look critically at athletes. I wouldn’t expect the public to be forced to pay for it, but I guarantee you I could get more listeners than most of the shows on NPR. (more…)

Boston-based radio talk show gabber Fred “Toucher” Toettcher, of 98.5 The Sports Hub or WBZ-FM, offered some uninvited color commentary about the gathering of friends and family that were on hand to support Tim Tebow during the NFL draft last week.

As you might have heard, the former Heisman Trophy winner and University of Florida Gator quarterback Tebow was drafted in the first round, number 25, by the Denver Broncos. (Way to go, Tim!)

Toucher ‘joked’ that the group surrounding Tebow “looked like some kind of Nazi rally … so lily-white is what I’m trying to say. Yeah, Stepford Wives.”

Would Toucher have made such an impolitic, over-the-top comment about the folks (‘looked like an NAACP meeting’) surrounding,  say, the amazing Gerald McCoy, who was the number three draft pick and was a stand-out defensive lineman for the University of Oklahoma? (more…)

From AirAmerica.com:

It is with the greatest regret, on behalf of our Board, that we must announce that Air America Media is ceasing its live programming operations as of this afternoon, and that the Company will file soon under Chapter 7 of the Bankruptcy Code to carry out an orderly winding-down of the business.

The very difficult economic environment has had a significant impact on Air America’s business. This past year has seen a “perfect storm” in the media industry generally. National and local advertising revenues have fallen drastically, causing many media companies nationwide to fold or seek bankruptcy protection. From large to small, recent bankruptcies like Citadel Broadcasting and closures like that of the industry’s long-time trade publication Radio and Records have signaled that these are very difficult and rapidly changing times.

Those companies that remain are facing audience fragmentation as a result of new media technologies, are often saddled with crushing debt, and have generally found it difficult to obtain operating or investment capital from traditional sources of funding. In this climate, our painstaking search for new investors has come close several times right up into this week, but ultimately fell short of success. (more…)