Almost everything about the Summer 1993 issue of Media Studies Journal is in some way resonant or ironic now, and rarely in a reassuring way.
- Former NPR VP Adam Clayton Powell III, while noting that radio has created unwired communities — if not quite the original social network that we like to brag about — also declares, “Radio mirrors our own fragmentation. Just as we live and work in largely separate social segments, we listen to self-selected and largely separate segments of radio … you are what you hear and you are what you choose to hear.”
- Diane Rehm, in an article about “America’s Electronic Backyard Fence,” writes about the increasing politicization of radio. Tom Lewis, author of the then-just-published Empire of the Air, writes about Rush Limbaugh, the host who helped it get there.
- Long before we began touting disaster relief as the thing that makes broadcast radio Spotify-proof, Radio-Television News Directors Association president David Bartlett declares news radio to be “more than just masters of disaster.” He also believes that “despite the charges of critics that deregulation killed radio news, it is still very much alive,” even if “individual stations can’t afford the same range of programming the old full-service formats routinely delivered.”
- Then again, deregulation in 1993 is still at the “ask forgiveness rather than permission” stage, where broadcasters are forming duopolies in anticipation of the Congressional blessing that will arrive several years later. Already, however, FCC Commissioner Andrew Bartlett is concerned that “technological changes, combined with a difficult and prolonged recession, have made the pursuit of ‘diversity’ and ‘localism’ in broadcast policy more challenging than ever before.”
- There’s an article about the ongoing modernization of BBC Radio. There’s one about radio’s role in the then-recent “end of the Cold War,” although it’s focused more on clandestine outlets than Radio Free Europe. WBGO Newark GM Anna Kosof sees a demand for something beyond “Top 40, Limbaugh, the same news and endless ads,” and declares “Public Radio — Americans Want More.”
- In “Whither (or Wither?) AM?” author Michael Keith declares that the band’s “slow fade … may be simply a manifestation of Darwinism at work,” especially at a time when broadcasters were complaining about too many radio stations. Keith fears that “the end of the century that gave us radio could also bring [AM’s] final sign-off,” meaning that regardless of whether there is AM for every car radio on the regulatory horizon, we’ve beaten the spread by 25 years.
There is 2025 irony even in knowing who publishes the Media Studies Journal. It is the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University.
And, of course, the name of the issue is Radio — The Forgotten Medium. While in summer ’93 the radio business was indeed experiencing what another article terms, “An End to Radio Romance,” it’s still a reminder of how radio was viewed throughout the media and academic communities even 30-plus years ago. Some of that was broadcasters’ own doing. In trying to tee up further deregulation, broadcasters were positioning radio as challenged and not receiving its fair share of ad money even then.
But with the exception of the few late-’90s boom years that brought their own anxiety, you realize reading the issue that radio has barely had a moment since 1993 when we weren’t playing defense. There are, at least, a few “reports of our demise”-type defenses of radio (including one using that quote). Radio Ink publisher B. Eric Rhoads declares that “challenges have always meant opportunity for radio.” He also pushes back a little on the journal’s title. “Though not a forgotten medium, radio is taken for granted.”
I came across the journal issue a few weeks ago while scrutinizing possible donations to a local book sale. I had that issue because I’d contributed to it. It was flattering to rediscover that essay, “Music Radio: The Fickleness of Fragmentation,” in the company of Rehm and Lewis. I wrote it at the very worst of Top 40’s early-’90s near-collapse, chronicled there in more detail than an academic audience might have needed. Like some of the other articles, I wish it didn’t resonate so much now. (As for that title, I have no idea whether it invoked Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on purpose, or whether it was my idea or that of an editor.)
In summer 1993, I wrote that even though broadcasters were moving away from mass-appeal Top 40, it wasn’t creating a plethora of choices for every possible listener, because they were merely oversaturating other formats — Country, Oldies, Alternative, and AC at that moment — especially since duopoly had made flanker stations more viable. I did predict that a CHR comeback was inevitable, especially if market clusters made serving a younger audience easier. That did indeed serve as the initial rationale for some of the big groups returning to the format, although by the late ’90s, the comeback had exceeded those modest expectations.
In 1993, what we came to know as SiriusXM was still an abstraction, although broadcasters were still concerned about digital competition. (They then thought it would take the form of DAB becoming a rival paid service of the sort SXM eventually did.) Where the plethora of choice already did exist, I noted, was cable radio. “So far these services are well-kept secrets; they cost money and you can’t carry your cable … box to the beach with you. But nothing says they’ll stay that way forever,” I wrote. Eventually, costing money turned out not to be a stopper anyway.
In the early ’90s, the success of Limbaugh and Howard Stern had already set off what I called “the national radio bandwagon.” Advocates of national-over-local, I wrote, “must demonstrate that it offers more quality bang for the buck, not just economies of scale.” Even if you’ve only been reading Ross on Radio for a while, you might have heard me say that a few times since.
If you’re reading this article anywhere near its publication date, you are probably experiencing anxiety about radio’s financial future second only to your own. The economy recovered from its downturn in 2008-09 and from the early years of COVID; radio, because of its other challenges, did not get to enjoy those rebounds. Now, broadcasters are turning off stations already, including some of those rimshot FMs that they were complaining about in 1993, and any recession is likely to especially harm the local retail they’ve come to depend on.
As I was during COVID, I am in favor of anything that keeps radio viable now. After revisiting the state of the business in 1993, it is, however, hard to imagine that yet another relaxation of ownership limits is the thing that accomplishes it, when we are reminded anew of what was waiting then.
In his article, FCC Commissioner Barrett sees the then-promise of digital radio as manifesting itself in things like “interactive CD-ROM and high-speed broadcast systems that allow radio stations to deliver text, data and limited interactive services,” which sounds either like dreaming small now, or a foreshadowing of our current metadata discussions.
There’s one more piece of foreshadowing that resonates in the podcast era, but is found not in the journal’s articles, but in its listing of previous issues, in this case the journal’s Winter 1992 issue, “Crime Story.” That blurb declares, “Crime is rarely covered in any kind of meaningful context, focusing too often on the sensational, the brutal, the bizarre. The media’s role in crime coverage is central to a society’s understanding of itself and its most central tenets of justice.”
The entire issue is available online here.
