We're way beyond the slippery slope. We're heading to the abyss. Rob Reiner

[calimary]

44. Thanks! One of the license challenges to a station where I worked was actress Marla Gibbs.

Last edited Thu May 24, 2018, 08:52 PM - Edit history (1)

She was best known for her role in the sitcom “The Jeffersons”. She was part of a group challenging the station’s last cense. Man were we super conscious of making sure that big binder of ascertainment interviews was current and relevant, thorough and impeccable. Oy...

The upshot, though, for both my pal the Public Affairs Director and me (News Director) was that management knew they had to step gingerly around the both of us. They didn’t dare try to fire either one of us. The station was under scrutiny, at the same time, for malfeasance that had been committed by its parent company long ago, and any license challenge that had even one tiny chipped tooth to it made the sphincters tighten and the Maalox bottles come out among the corporate types hoping to hang onto that expensive and highly-coveted broadcast license.

They didn’t dare mess with us or cut us or our departments back. That wouldn’t have looked good - to cut back on news and public affairs during a serious license challenge, when news and public affairs were where they could present proof of responsiveness to community issues and concerns as part of the privilege of holding that license in the public interest. So it meant that my job was safe until I decided to leave it. And I decided. NOT management, looking to cut more overhead, cut back on local news and public affairs (which of course included staffers), and just play more hits and commercial clusters.

Wild times. Weird, too, that some corporate monkey business years earlier and on a whole other continent would mean job security for me.

And broadcast deregulation changed ALL of that, and not in a good way.