Monthly Archives: August 2015

Come On Man!

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HC LogoThe Houston Chronicle (Houston’s misleading news source) posted a story today about Houston radio ratings for the month of July.

Instead of a well thought-out article by David Barron, who actually understands ratings and the radio market, they opted for the madding slide show in the aggravating attempt to get more page views by click bait.

After a quick re-cap that really doesn’t put the data into perspective, they encourage the reader to check out where their favorite station sits in the rankings.

Ham OperatorEven before you can click and start down the magical journey of images, there is a glaring error, the first photo shows a ham radio operator which begs the question; huh? What a ham radio operator has to do with radio ratings is a mystery, much like Area 51 and likely to be solved in our lifetime.

Moving on, the next slide shows KPRC-AM with an unidentified talent (using the term very loosely). In the information they indicate their rating is a 0.8 and a 0.6. While showing two different numbers is confusing, they don’t bother to show rank, so it’s hard to know if that’s good, or that’s bad.

KROIThe photo for KROI-FM shows it when it was an urban gospel format. The caption (probably taken from the original story) explains that the station has seen changed formats two times and is now known as Boom 92 (but hey, it is a fun photo).

Some other highlights include the photo of cars lined up at a gas station to represent KTHT-FM radio, somebody from KHMX milking a cow, John Lander for KKBQ-FM (which has to be more than 30 years old) and my personal fav, a photo of Hudson and Harrigan (love those guys) for KILT-FM (610) which lists the station as having sports format. Obviously, they are mixing up KILT-AM and KILT-FM, but as they say on the Monday night football pre-game show on ESPN; “Come On Man”!

kilt

While radio ratings may not be a big story, putting a tease and link on the Chron.com home page suggests they think it noteworthy and yet don’t feel it necessary to fact check any of it. Even readers are posting comments about how dated/wrong the slide show is.

You can click here to see the awarding winning journalism here.

Reality TV gets a little too real

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trumpAmerican’s love their reality TV. From The Bachelor/Bachelorette, Big Brother, America’s Got Talent, Chopped, Project Runway and others, viewers are keeping their eyeballs on the boob tube.

That’s why it should come as no surprise that America is obsessed with the latest reality show; the GOP Republican Presidential Nomination race.

The star of this latest show is no stranger to this genre of entertainment. Donald Trump, star of The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice, has literally sucked all the air out of the room with his flamboyant showmanship leaving all challengers to come up with ways to get noticed.

  • Rand Paul posted a video of him taking a chainsaw to the tax code promising to kill it much like the car salesman in Used Cars.
  • Lyndsey Graham took to YouTube to teach us all how to destroy your cell phone after The Donald gives out your number on network television. I was shocked that he still uses flip phone from era long, long ago.
  • And, in what may be the most bizarre episode yet, Ted Cruz posted a video entitled  “Making Machine-Gun Bacon with Ted Cruz,” with the final moments showing the junior senator peeling a piece of meat off the barrel with plastic fork, putting it in mouth, and humming, “Mmmm, machine-gun bacon.”

Sadly, all of these demonstrations of statesmanship have had little impact on the polls. Trump still leads by a large margin which leads to the question; why? Do republicans really believe Trump has the right stuff to be president?

My guess is that voters want someone on that campaign trail who is not afraid of having an “oops” moment and really say what they think (even if it’s a bit wacky). They want that infamous off-the-cuff style of talk that Trump is famous for. Immigration, the economy and the other issues of the day will be hit with a barrage of Trumpism’s that will be sure to keep the candidates on their toes.

It truly is Must See TV.