Affirmative Action for Radio

I've often blogged on the subject of the "Fairness" Doctrine that would supposedly bring balance to the airwaves by requiring broadcasters to carry programs nobody wants to listen to. Now there's another movement underway which might be called Affirmative Action for Radio. Radio Equalizer has the details:

After early results revealed record support for the news-talk format and a huge drop in hip-hop listening, a new, far more accurate radio ratings system is under fire today.

With Obama's team now controlling the FCC, Arbitron and its highly-anticipated electronic Portable People Meter is threatened with a potential GM-style coup dictated from Washington. Pushing for the changes is the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters, known as NABOB.

From Radio & Records, an industry trade publication:

WASHINGTON -- FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein Wednesday morning (April 8) called for a government inquiry into how Arbitron's Portable People Meter (PPM) collects data and affects minority audiences and broadcast stations.

"I'm hopeful that the Commission will soon launch an inquiry into PPM," said Adelstein during the Commission's monthly meeting at FCC headquarters in Washington. "Some have questioned whether we have the authority to conduct such an inquiry. Apparently they haven't read the Communications Act."Adelstein said he was concerned about reports from minority-owned and targeted radio stations that their audience numbers had dramatically shrunk since implementation of the new measurement technology almost two years ago.

The goal: restore hip-hop's "ratings" and undo the newly-precise measurement of Rush Limbaugh's statistics. Combined with a White House-led effort to destroy the talk titan, ratings have recently gone through the roof.

The method: cloak the real agenda behind terms like "diversity" and "minority ownership", wrongly bringing the race card into the picture.Because the pager-like device prevents the rampant cheating that occurred with the old pencil-and-diary-based system, where fans of a disc jockey could wildly inflate their listening, some music stations are taking it on the chin. In particular, so-called "urban" outlets have been adversely affected, as strong morning drive personalities were pumped up artificially by this practice. Fudging the numbers hasn't been confined to that format, however.

The PPM system is now being used in Canada, apparently without the controversy generated here.

As hip-hop and other format ratings "increased", it came at the expense of other stations, including news-talk. But the PPM device uses a new technology to detect encoded radio signals, making fraud impossible.

Now, had the roles been reversed and hip-hop seen a big increase and Rush seen a big decrease, would anyone be calling for a change to the ratings system?

Just as ACORN is not interested in fair elections because their guys might lose, NABOB is not interested in fair ratings because it turns out they didn't have the listeners they thought they had. Therefore that system has to go.

Frankly, these new ratings don't surprise me at all. I've never understood how hip-hop and rap have managed to survive as long as they have.