It's Nice When You're Big Enough To Admit You Suck

From the always engaging Discordian Research Technology, comes this ridiculous stunt, as revealed by Stay Free! Daily.  Radio is becoming increasingly irrelevant, but you have to laugh when Clear Channel poses as a pirate station to cannibalize itself ...it's just too good!  Here is a taste:

The text on this page was copied (on 5/24/05) from FreeRadioOhio.org, the website for an Ohio-based "pirate" radio station that turned out to be owned by Clear Channel. After word got out that Clear Channel owned Free Radio Ohio, the company promptly took the site down.

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The following is a list of radio stations in Northeast Ohio that should be forced to turn off their transmitters and turn their licenses over to the Federal Communications Commission.

WHLO (640  AM) obviously operated by communist, WHLO consists of nothing more than right wing rhetoric dispensed at toxic levels. WHLO features overbearing personalities that have little or no knowledge of actual facts. They allow their lack of knowledge to never get in the way of pushing W¹s plan and opinions upon us like a dealer addicted to his own crack. WHLO airs Quinn and Rose in the morning followed by a show that is so bad it was dropped by a Cleveland station, Glenn Beck. Speaking of those addicted to drugs, Rush Limbaugh follows beck and is the lead in to the Right¹s political poster boy Sean Hannity. After Hannity on WHLO, is the gay bashing Michael Savage, then the Laura Ingram Show. Where are our Barf bags?

WAKR (1590  AM) Barely a radio station at all, WAKR is now a shadow of it's former self. Back in the day you could listen to 1590 to hear everything that was going on in Akron . Now we get small segments of grammatically incorrect newscasts voiced by what appears to our ears to be strangers off the street. The morning show on WAKR is hosted by Ray Horner, he¹s the whipping boy for the Mayors office in Akron , not to mention Council President Summerville. If Marco wants to fill a pothole on Wooster Ave , WAKR will devote a 20 minute morning segment to it. You should hear the segment called the ŒEntertainment report" which features a 15 minute interview with a guy who installs cable television in Akron This airs every morning. It¹s just insane enough for us not to make it up. The rest of the day is filled with music piped in from a satellite hosted by DJ¹s in Los Angeles . The Music's okay, but what ever happened to " Akron's news Authority"?

There's much more, glommed from the FreeRadioOhio.org website before Clear Channel was exposed and took it down.  The New York Times outed them (i'm not linking because of dumbass registration requirement) as well, and a Clear Channel drone told the NYT reporter that they were building the buzz for a progressive talk radio station.

The vigorous and entertaining comments on Stay Free!'s story are hopeful that the news has come out, and the people of Ohio won't fall for it.  i have some experience in radio; on air, in music and news, and also reporting, copy writing and production.  And i can tell you that this fiasco won't hurt the station's future a bit.  i mean, if we had an FCC following its mandate, Radio Free Ohio would lose its license, but we don't.  And the fact is that radio listeners ... just don't listen.  It's the nature of the beast. Think that annoying, omnipresent song began being overplayed when you got sick of it?  By the time you notice it every DJ and music director in the country are sick to death of it, and thousands more listeners just decided it's their new favorite song.  Not enough people intentionally seek out a number on a dial to make a difference.  It's a supercasual medium, much more than, say, television.  The push button status in a car radio is earned by surfing and habit, not strategy. Listeners are barely paying attention to the stations they choose. Very few of them will deselect a new station in advance, though they might take months to find it...without publicity. The biggest threat RFO faces is Akron's Air America affiliate, and that battle will be fought comparatively, not preemptively. End of rant.  i'm sorry, it's radio ... i could go onandonaboutit.