St. Louis Black Talk Radio Is Disappearing
by Frank Absher

            WGNU, which provides several talk shows aimed at the minority audience, is being sold to BJD Enterprises, which also owns KXEN in St. Louis. WESL, which has served the minority audience for decades, has faded into the history books, with management renaming the station WFFX and plugging it in to the Fox Sports radio feed.

            In the case of WESL, owner Simmons Media fired several Black employees and did away with all locally originated programs, including Richard “Onion” Horton’s morning drive talk show. While the fate of WGNU’s programming is unknown at press time, it is likely the talk shows of Lizz Brown and Tim & Syl will also be dropped, removing the sounding board opportunities both stations had provided for the minority community.

            Esther Wright, who is the current general manager of WGNU, sees a problem when a segment of the audience loses its “voice.” “When a group is silenced,” she says, “we all lose.”

            These targeted talk shows serve a need which isn’t adequately addressed by the mass audience shows. “When a minority group says ‘We are misunderstood,’ they need to have a place to be heard,” she says.

            A study by Felix Oberholtzer and Joel Waldfogel found that members of smaller groups were less likely to be affected by media influence today because the current “structure of media markets places small groups at a systemic disadvantage.” That is, the fewer media which are aimed at specialty audiences, the more difficult it becomes to target messages to those audiences. As the study says, “This makes it more difficult for candidates to reach and mobilize these citizens.

            Talk programming aimed at minorities has never done well in the local Arbitron ratings. The most recent numbers, January through March, show the two stations combined reached less than 1.5 percent of the total listening audience with their morning drive talk shows.

            Steve Moore, vice president of talk programming for CBS Radio and KMOX director of programming and operations, thinks radio’s influence may be waning when it comes to addressing minorities: “With the development of so many forms of media and distribution platforms, there will be more outlets for many specialized formats. That will be good for those groups in search of programming.”

            Patricia Wente, general manager of KWMU here says the feedback she’s gotten from African-American Public Radio listeners indicates “that the newsmagazines better reflect the depth and complexity of African-American life and that there are programs that talk directly and authentically to African Americans, but in such a way that others are invited in.”

            Onion Horton is a veteran of talk shows on many local stations. Adding him to WESL’s lineup as a morning drive talk show host bolstered the station’s ratings to the highest level in recent memory for the time slot. But about the time he had really hit his stride on the station, which was reportedly finally showing a profit, management fired him along with many other staffers and changed the format.

            Losing a “friend” who entertains and informs you on the radio is a personal loss, no matter how many other people listen. Tom Taylor, the executive news editor of

radio-info.com, says “Radio format changes always cause some displacement, no matter how small the audience may have been, and the disappearance of talk stations in particular can be distressing. You come to think of favorite personalities as good friends.”

            Some people think the moves by the two local stations are regrettable, but they merely mirror a much larger problem. Harold Crumpton, president of the St. Louis NAACP, told SJR local talk aimed at minorities isn’t always irreplaceable. “It depends on the information being put out. If there’s a lack of supervision of the shows, the host can make up things.”

            Crumpton says the biggest problem facing minorities today is ownership consolidation in the media. There once were some significant minority radio licensees, but “they were encouraged to hand over the frequencies or offered huge sums of money for them. In fact, this consolidation increased rapidly under the current administration in Washington. The solution is to change the attitudes of those in Washington and create opportunities for African American ownership of radio licenses.”

            His sentiments are echoed by David Honig of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council. “We need more ownership diversity,” he says. “Programs and formats disappearing are symptoms, but they’re not the cause of the problem.

            “The F.C.C. often forgets that broadcast diversity is also a function of who owns the media. The free market upon which the F.C.C. seems to be relying in lieu of regulation is supposed to protect [his emphasis] listeners and media consumers.”

            In mid-July, the National Association of Broadcasters sent a letter to House Ways & Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel, requesting a Congressional hearing to “explore ways to increase diversity and the representation of minority groups in the communications industry.”  And there’s talk about the return of the 1990s minority tax incentive program – presumably minus the loopholes that led to some much-gossiped-about abuses back then.

            Most sources contacted for this article acknowledge that there’s little that can be done by listeners once owners have made up their minds to change formats and fire employees. Tom Taylor admits it is a loss that’s regrettable: “Generally I’d say that the more local talk radio – and local newspaper, and local Internet sites, and local TV – the better. Relevant talk radio programming that’s created in your market has an immediacy (and an intimacy) that can create very strong bonds.”

            Those bonds, however, don’t show up on profit-and-loss statements, so they’re not terribly important to today’s media owners. 

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