As many of you know, Marc Germain, aka Mr. KABC, literally the only thing left on that once-mighty station worth listening to, left the station last week.
His friend and occasional co-host April Winchell posted on her blog/website this piece. She says better than I can what pieces of sh*t are running things at Disney/Cumulus.
I've received upwards of 900 emails in the last week about the sudden
departure of Mr. K.
For his part, Mr. K is being very generous and high-minded in his public
reaction to the situation. And that doesn't surprise me. He has a lot of
class.
Fortunately, I don't. Fuck the high road.
Telling the truth is a powerful, freeing thing. In fact, it's my
insistence on exposing boneheadedness and assholery that has made me what I am
today: an unemployable pariah.
But that's neither here nor there.
The point is, I want to give you my perspective on Mr. K, and this sorry
situation. And I even have a glorious happy ending for you, so don't get bored
and go looking for porn.
What it comes down to is this. I know Mr. K well,
and I can truthfully say that everything he ever did at KABC was done with the
best interests of the station in mind. You have no idea how rare that is.
I've known a lot of gasbags in talk radio, and Mr. K is one of maybe two
people I've ever met who refused to put his own ego above the welfare of the
station and the show.
In this way, he was a dream employee. A complete team player who attended
every goofball event and pointless, life draining meeting without complaint. A
professional who put up with ridiculous hindrances like computers that didn't
work properly (making it impossible to use the internet during the show),
equipment that was falling apart, headphones that didn't work and on and on and
on. Never did I ever see him pull a diva act, when he clearly would have been
within his right.
His efforts made him a huge hit with advertisers, and paid off handsomely
for his employers. And just when he was number one in his time slot and had
accomplished everything a station could ask for, they started fucking with
him.
What most people don't know is that KABC inLos Angeles is pretty much controlled by KABC in New York. No matter
how successful their local programming may become, New York can simply come in
and change it all around. Yes, KABC is New York's bitch.And someone in New York
has a boner for Mark Levin.
I don't know why, and neither do you. No one does, because it is the
lowest rated show on earth. Agriculture reports get better numbers.
No one is listening. No one. It is death. The Mark Levin show is the
sound of death, but not as fun.
It's not the fact that it's a right wing perspective that alienates me.
I'm not taking issue with that. Honestly, my politics are right down the middle
in many ways, so I'm not reflexively turned off by a conservative voice.
It's just that it's the same old shit. The ultra theatrical party line
rhetoric, only spewed out by someone far less engaging than the usual suspects,
which is really almost inconceivable. This guy makes Sean Hannity look like
Garrison Keillor.
He's just another second string O'Reilly-Rush-Coulter wannabe, with
nothing to add, no new angle or fresh approach. He's simply yelling at his
listeners, like he sees the big kids doing. It is not new, is it not good, it is
not listenable.
And to thank Mr. KABC for all his hard work, and for building such a big
audience starting at 9:00 every weeknight, someone in New York moved his show
down to 10:00, and gave that first hour to Mark Levin.
Obviously, the idea was to leech on all those people tuning in at 9:00 to
hear Mr. KABC. They would be tricked into hearing Mark Levin (there's a vote of
confidence), and they would keep coming back.
It didn't work. No one came back. The show sank to the very bottom of the
schedule.
I really thought this spectacular failure would be enough to get KABC to
reverse itself, and allow Mr. KABC back to his rightful time slot. But when his
contract expired in January, ABC New York had a surprise: They wanted to take
away another hour for Mark Levin, as well as a few other things Mr. K had earned
through hard work. Yes, at a time when they should have been negotiating to keep
him, they made it impossible for him to stay.
And this, my friends, is how talk radio works. No matter how hard you
work, how well you perform, no matter how much you promote on your own, no
matter how many listeners and advertisers you bring in, originality and
creativity will always be sacrificed for consistency. Which is to say that most
talk radio stations would rather have a full menu of shit than feature even one
plate of something fresh.
It reminds me of a joke my dad used to tell years
ago.
A bunch of cowboys are sitting around the chuckwagon, waiting for
their dinner after a hard day of roping and riding.
Suddenly the camp cook
appears, with a somber expression.
"Boys, I'm afraid I have some good news
and bad news."
The cowboys look at each other expectantly. Finally one cowboy
says, "All right Cookie, let's hear the bad news first."
"Well," says Cookie,
"We're all out of food. From now on, we'll all be eating horse shit."
The
cowboys are dumbfounded.
"Damn", says the cowboy. "So what's the good
news?"
"The good news is," says Cookie, "there's a lot of it."
* * *
Now the happy ending I promised you.
Mr. K is very close to a new
show. I am extremely excited and I can't wait to hear what lucky station is
going to get him. Hopefully he'll be ready to make an announcement shortly. In
the meantime, go over to his web site
and sign up for an update. As soon as he has news, you'll be the first to
hear it.
