Radio's "Community"

By Frank Absher

All of us have, at some point, recognized that something about a situation was different, but we were unable to put our finger on exactly what it was. An article in Intelligent Life magazine helped me nail this one.
In it, British Prime Minister David Cameron is quoted as lamenting the fact that “…we have allowed the weakening of our collective identity.”

Okay. That sounds high-fallutin’ but his point is spot on.

One of the main reasons for the chaos in media today is their failure to create within their “audience” any sense of a collective identity, or community. Radio listeners have no loyalty to an individual station because the stations long ago decided it was more important to develop interchangeable formats than to develop a sense of community among their listeners.

If you go back to the salad days of network radio in the ‘30s and ‘40s, it was the radio programs that developed that identity. Whether it was an ensemble show like Fibber McGee & Molly or a news commentator like Elmer Davis, listeners felt a commonality, and their discussions with each other about those shows the next day strengthened that collective identity. To an extent, the same thing happened with TV programs.

After network radio died, most radio stations tried to be all things to their listeners, which was endearing, but as listeners’ tastes changed, so did their expectations. They wanted radio stations to entertain them in specific ways. Stations developed strong personalities and formats gave listeners what they sought, and listeners returned the favor by locking in buttons on the car radio.

Again, there was a sense of community – a common identity – in the audience. How many thousands of listeners sat in parking lots waiting for the next episode of Chickenman? After they heard it they’d talk with all their friends about it – more strengthening of the community.

Yes, there are the few personalities today who have this; Howard Stern is one example.

But radio’s abdication of its community leadership position can be directly linked to the disinterest in the medium today among both listeners and advertisers. A sense of common identity can be extremely strong, especially when mixed in with a certain amount of peer group pressure.

If the various media had not forsaken the sense of community many of them had developed, I think we’d be a whole lot happier with them today, and I, for one, might be spending more time with them.

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