The Death of a Radio Icon
What it Says About the Importance of Local Media
On Wednesday, Philadelphians received the devastating news of the passing of WMMR DJ Pierre Robert.
For those of you who don’t live in Philadelphia, you might be wondering: why is a guy who writes about politics wasting words on a music radio DJ? But bear with me, because the significance of Pierre and the pain that so many people feel today tells a story about the importance of local media—and especially radio—that relates to politics.
Pierre (and I’m using his first name because it truly felt like you were on a first name basis with him) was one of the last true icons. He hit the Philadelphia airwaves before I was born in 1981, and remained a mainstay until his passing (I literally was just listening last week as he told a story about interviewing Eddie Vedder a decade ago). He was a larger than life character, with his love of the Grateful Dead, his VW Bus “Minerva,” his indefatigable energy, and his perfect booming radio voice and laugh. He was the kind of guy who decades of listeners saw as a friend, eagerly rushing over to meet him at one concert or another.
Management knew it too. Despite cutbacks in recent years to Pierre’s top rated station, his corporate bosses knew that Pierre better have a contract for as long as he wanted it, lest they risk the wrath of angry fans (let’s face it, we Philadelphians have been known to get out our pitchforks on occasion).
It seems unimaginable that I’ll get in my car in the middle of the day sometime soon, and not hear that distinctive voice lamenting his struggles to get the studio technology to work, or talking about the power of music. That’s not to mention how much scores of listeners will miss the annual playings of Alice’s Restaurant on Thanksgiving or the seemingly endless Christmas Eve spectacular that could go on for six or seven hours until Pierre felt that he had gotten it just right.
The even sadder part is that the next generation of listeners likely won’t get the opportunity to spend time with characters like Pierre. The radio industry (music and talk alike) has become consolidated, with a few corporations owning most stations. These debt-laden conglomerates are constantly looking for cost cutting opportunities, and just about no one is safe outside of the legends who have been ensconced on top rated stations for decades. There seems to be no thought given to how there won’t be a next generation of legends at this pace.
Already, the push to find efficiencies has left most talk radio as a useless partisan and ideological weapon with a toxic impact on our politics. Once there were scores of local voices, who—even though they might lean one way or another ideologically—were also characters with idiosyncratic positions that could surprise.
Now, however, most stations are largely, if not entirely, syndicated. They feature the same national voices who sling partisan mud and drive outrage, because it can garner good ratings everywhere from Philadelphia to Peoria to Paducah. There’s no room for discussing local communities, and since most of these hosts are on stations branded as “the conservative talker,” or something similar, there’s little room for any deviation from the brand. Listeners are tuning in for a certain product, and hosts make sure to deliver, fearful that if they don’t, a competitor will. They play to listeners’ emotions, getting them worked up and ever more determined to demand that the politicians on their side take no prisoners.
Gone to a large extent are the days when hosts were real pillars of the community, who discussed local issues of import, and helped to inform their audiences. And stations that might broadcast multiple perspectives are but a memory—an artifact from yesteryear. Stations with a full or close to full day of local programming still remain to some extent in major markets, but as one goes down the media food chain, they are increasingly rare.
Even worse, with each passing year, local television looks more and more like radio: despite a FCC rule preventing companies from owning stations that reach more than 39% of U.S. television audience households, the three largest station ownership groups now own 40% of all local stations. This consolidation has been terrible for viewers. A 2019 study found that when Sinclair, one of the large companies that owns close to 200 stations, bought a station, it led to a deemphasis on local news and more coverage of national politics. A subsequent study of acquisitions by other media companies found that while this wasn’t true everywhere, one commonality existed regardless of which big company bought up a station: more ads during the local news.
These changes are bad on so many levels. They’ve helped fuel the nationalization of our politics, as well as the polarization making governance so difficult and leading Americans to believe that they hold few values in common with the political opposition.
And it might all get worse soon. The FCC is considering raising those ownership caps, which will mean more local stations owned by big conglomerates. As they buy up stations, they take on debt, which necessitates finding cost savings. That means no more Pierres (or the local news anchor equivalent, like Philadelphia’s legendary and recently retired Jim Gardner). In so much as these companies have an ideological agenda like Sinclair, which leans right, it may also remove one potential salve for our misinformation and polarization problems: while trust in local news organizations has declined since 2016, Americans still trust them far more than national news organizations or social media sites.
While MAGA devotees might write off a story from NBC or the New York Times as “fake news,” and liberals have a deep distrust of anything coming from Fox News (and rightfully so), both groups trust their local stations to provide them with unbiased facts, offering an opportunity to establish a shared set of facts that at least allows for debates instead of the two sides screaming past each other.
The recent case of Jimmy Kimmel also suggested that as station owners control a greater share of the market, they can throw their weight around and limit what networks will broadcast.
If these ownership changes make it impossible for local news to bring communities together, it’s hard to see what might be able to get Americans outside of their ideological silos. Additionally, it will remove one of the more promising potential solutions to the toxic impact of social media and algorithms that reconfirm people’s priors and spread incendiary, and often false, claims. AI will only make this phenomenon worse, and real shoe leather reporting that focuses on real people is the only antidote. But that requires investment, and station owners who care about their communities, not just the bottom line.
In many ways then, the death of Pierre is more than the loss of a voice that several generations of Philadelphians cherished. It’s the loss of an era in which local media truly served the public well and in which local stations were public trusts. RIP Good Citizen, we’ll miss you.