The 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.

Even 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.

The 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”!

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.