Is digital audio on radio the same placebo proponents of National Health Care want us to swallow? Both issues have emotional appeal with key phrases and buzz words. Health care this week is a “moral issue” regardless of the real cost or benefits to our current health care system.
Digital broadcasting commenced with warning of a satellite-gone-wild virus aimed at wiping out our radio audience already living with cloned voice-tracked programming services and cost cutting plans reducing content of radio to the listening public- the poor listening folks purportedly begging for more channels and more choices and heading for pay radio via satellite. The research showed most people just thought radio as they once knew it was wholesaled out, perhaps even government-mandated or big-corp controlled in most medium and major markets. Most listeners simply chose not to participate in the mandated program choices, and in some cases sampled the pie-from-the-sky free trial of sat radio. Enter those “smarter than you or I” with their health of radio fix-all and the first key buzz term “just using the term digital” will drawn people to our clinic for sure.
From there we move to reducing the quality of our receivers by getting the insurance groups (auto makers) behind the digital effort offering reduced health care (the loss of coverages and quality in most radios in our vehicles) somewhere about year 2004. As the quality of analog broadcasting tapered to levels never heard since the invention of Top 40, we begin to “hear” the benefits of multiple channel choices and the need for more channels with special radios of the future and possible tax breaks for basic care stations shutting down becoming a suggestion.
Today we attempt to fix a “problem” for the care benefit of a select few at the risk of finishing off the best media in the world-free radio on over a billion radios with a delivery system that works best in ideal conditions of the climate (laboratory) located within walking distance to our treatment centers (radio transmitter sites) under supervised and regulated experimental environment with very little testing prior to the mandated defacto introduction. And like this current cover up of the free medical mania marketing, broadcasting has failed to take the work home and review the results or grade the tests with accuracy. The vaccine might not be necessary but they sure want to shoot the messenger firing the warning shot. Good news everybody. While there is a marketplace it can and will decide for us. Sometimes as a nation, regardless of our current economic conditions, moral values and precepts and the common good of the land do function given time for self healing.
Jerry Smith
Broadcast Tech and Listener
All Florida
