The Sunday Times - Comment

May 01, 2005
Andrew Sullivan

One by one America's media giants are beginning to teeter. Newspapers are
haemorrhaging readers. The networks are reeling from cable television.
Network news is staggering towards extinction, as its anchors retire or
discredit themselves. Institutions such as The New York Times have been
damaged by scandal and bias. The news weeklies are just as likely to run
cover stories on health or money than the hard stories of the day.

Now the last powerful, free-at-use medium that America has left is also on
the ropes.

I'm talking about radio. In a country where millions spend countless hours
in cars or trucks, radio has always been powerful. It has powered America's
vibrant music industry; it helped pioneer the conservative politics of the
past two decades; publicly funded radio is extremely dear to the blue-state
liberals, who trust it as Radio 4 is prized by middle England.

But just as blogs and cable news decimated newspapers and network
television, so radio is now in the grip of the next, big, decentralising,
narrow-casting revolution.

The reason? Satellite radio - digital-quality programming beamed to
receivers from outer space. For a small subscription fee - about £7 a
month - Americans can now receive more than 100 stations of limitless,
commercial-free radio for any taste.

You buy a tiny receiver, plug it into your car or home stereo, and get news,
music, sports, talk in a dizzying variety, bypassing the entire broadcasting
network that covered America for the better part of a century.

The growth of satellite radio is faster than any new medium in history. From
zero in 2001, the total subscriber list is projected to reach 8m by the end
of this year. In the first three months of 2005, XM satellite radio, the
biggest of the handful of new companies, added 540,000 new subscribers. Its
revenue grew 140% over the previous year. Remember, listeners are paying for
something that is essentially already available for free.

Last week, in a sign of the maturity of the new medium, America's domestic
goddess Martha Stewart signed on for a 24-hour Martha channel.

The legendary "shock jock" radio host, Howard Stern, recently announced his
intention to kiss regular radio goodbye in favour of a five-year $500m
(£261m) contract to go to Sirius, the second-ranking satellite service.

Why is this happening? Consolidation in the regular radio market has led to
huge companies squeezing more ad revenue and commercial time out of existing
formats. And who wants to listen to endless, screechy radio ads on the
motorway? But satellite radio is commercial-free. It's also free of
censorship in an increasingly puritanical America.
Stern, for example, was regularly fined for indecency by the newly
aggressive Republican-led Federal Communications Commission. Radio stars
Opie and Anthony - known for outrageous stunts such as recording sex in
churches - couldn't keep paying the government fines their smut brought on
them.

Satellite radio gets around political censorship and disciplining. Because
it's not on general airwaves, subscribers get what they want, and public
decency is preserved.

Satellite radio more accurately caters to contemporary culture. Radio has
always been an intimate medium. Broadcasting in an increasingly diverse and
fractured culture means reaching a lowest common denominator that renders
programmes bland or too commercial or simply too eclectic for increasingly
picky listeners. The spectrum of satellite radio expands the choices to a
dizzying degree.

You can now have talk radio channels for conservatives, liberals, Hispanics,
gays, or new agers. You can have Vatican-approved Catholic radio or WISDOM
radio, with Deepak Chopra sending karma to your car.

Interested in English football? On Sirius, you could have listened in Los
Angeles or Chicago to the Bolton v Chelsea match or Southampton v Norwich.
The entire baseball season is available, along with basketball and American
football.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...592845,00.html