I can’t let
a column printed in a small newspaper on the western side of Illinois go
without comment.
It is titled
“The Demise of Community Institutions,” and was written by a man who I have
never met who claims Fairfield as his hometown. Mark Tullis, writing in
yesterday’s edition of the Columbia Republic-Times, wrote of his concern for the
media here. The opinion piece was also published on a national blog site.
He says the
local newspaper’s annual Pink Press edition wasn’t as meaty this year, saying
it is getting “slimmer and slimmer.” That
was mild in comparison to what he said about our radio station.
Tullis
walked down memory lane by dropping the name of Gil Wallace, Fairfield’s
Morning Mayor, and how good he was back in the day. You won’t get any arguments
from me on that….I worked with Gil and loved him.
But then he
said this….quote….
“The station
is now a shadow of what it once was, operating with a skeleton crew and a lot
of computer generated bunk. Pretty sad.”
Bunk? I take
great offense to that opinion and suggest Mr. Tullis actually tune in. I doubt
he has…
Fairfield is
blessed with two vibrant media outlets when many towns in Southern Illinois
have none. The Wayne County Press is one of the few strong small town
newspapers left in Illinois. And this station operates with a staff which generates
timely news, sports, weather and talk.
We don’t do
computer generated bunk…
The decline in the quality of the radio station is a pretty commonly accepted fact among a lot of folks here. I'm not throwing blame around. I think we do the best with the situations that are presented to us. But to my recollection, people have been talking about it ever since the station changed hands and employees got fired. You can't be that shocked that someone wrote about it. You must have heard it before.
ReplyDeleteBecause you got me thinking about it, I got curious and looked over TOC's FCC filings. If you don't mind my asking, as I don't know much about the radio business, how is it that over the 10/2018-11/2018 period, Volunteers for Shimkus had 21 1-minute radio spots that cost them a total of 382.71. Rather, I'm confused as to why the numbers don't seem to line up on the filings. One(the file marked invoices final) seems to state that the cost for each ad was around 20 dollars, but the other(wfiw-fm-us-fed) quotes a price of around 57 dollars per ad. I also noticed that Shimkus's opponent Gaither apparently didn't buy any ad time at all, which I suppose would make sense as Democrats are extremely unpopular here.
How well would you say the radio station stands up to the Fairness Doctrine? I usually just hear one point of view on any political subject. Come to think of it, whenever I tend to hear national news, it always seems to be Fox. Why is that? Maybe I'm just listening at the wrong times.
I typed Fairness Doctrine, but I meant Equal-Time Rule. My apologies. I get confused because they fulfill similar goals.
DeleteAlso, while I'm thinking about it, why do you keep a mugshot wall of shame of people who have been arrested but not convicted?
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