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CITYCIDE: INVESTORS PULL PLUG ON RADIO MAINSTAY

By David Staba

And people say newspapering is a tough business.

On Dec. 9, WHLD-AM, which was once the radio voice of Niagara Falls, threw a party in Amherst featuring Randi Rhodes of Air America Radio. The union hall was full, Rhodes lavishly praised the station, a progressive outfit that bills itself as "The Voice of Reason" and a counterbalance for the right-tilting world of radio talk.

On the business side of things, advertising revenues were on the rise, according to staffers. Bouncing back from a dismal summer ratings book, optimism permeated the station's on-air and production people.

Then, last Friday, after members of the local morning team finished their shift at 10 a.m., they were notified that as of Monday, WHLD's format would shift to a mix of gospel and pay-to-play one-hour chunks of whatever the host wanted to put on the air.

And everyone was fired.

"It came from north of nowhere," said Joe Schmidbauer, co-host of "The Newsroom," the station's 6 to 10 a.m. show. "I was caught completely by surprise."

The increasing flow of advertising -- the party featuring Rhodes was sponsored by a prominent law firm and a car dealership -- wasn't enough to calm nervous investors. The group of political activists had entered into an agreement with Citadel Communications, which owns WHLD, to run the station. They were apparently worried about missing a payment and potentially harming their investments.

All of which makes you wonder about the business acumen of those involved. Pulling the plug on a venture less than a year after its launch shows that the investors didn't have much of an idea of what they were doing in the first place. The Niagara Falls Reporter has succeeded and grown for going on seven years not only because of the all-star lineup of writers, the skillful editors and designers and the savvy business department, but because its earliest supporters invested with realistic expectations.

The rug-pulling at WHLD is faintly reminiscent of the most spectacular local media failure of recent times, the Current.

If you've forgotten all about that embarrassment, consider yourself lucky. Those Greater Niagara Newspapers honchos responsible for the preciously hip weekly targeted at a nonexistent audience are still trying to suppress the memory of urinating away more than $1 million in six months. But at least, unlike the staff at WHLD, most of them kept their jobs, for reasons known only to their higher-ups.

And outside of those given a blank check to create it, no one wanted, gave much thought to, or misses the Current.

The launch of WHLD's new format coincided with the debut of WWKB 1520AM as "Buffalo's Left Channel," creating either a bonanza of liberal viewpoints or a glut, depending on your listening preferences.

To be honest, even though we at the Niagara Falls Reporter are often accused of landing somewhere left of Stalin on the political spectrum, I've learned I can't listen to liberal blather for any longer than I can take Rush Limbaugh and his legion of adoring imitators.

I'm secure in the knowledge that I don't care much for the current president, or his war, or talking heads who twist and manufacture "facts" to obscure basic reality. I don't need to hear it reaffirmed on the radio for several hours each day. And the national hosts on both progressive stations quickly proved just as repetitive, their viewpoints equally calcified, as their adversaries on the right. Propaganda is propaganda, wherever it comes from.

Political viewpoints aside, WHLD's greatest contribution was in filling what was, and again will be, a gaping void on the local airwaves. It was one of only three local stations, along with WBEN 930AM and WNED 970AM, to regularly cover the news. The more outlets paying attention to various developments and pronouncements, whether for television, radio, print or the Internet, the better.

WHLD broadcast live from last spring's state Democratic convention in downtown Buffalo, an event widely ignored beyond the odd sound bite by other electronic media. They also provided comprehensive local Election Night coverage, after airing lengthy interviews with most of the candidates in competitive races.

In October, the station even earned a momentary burst of national notoriety at the height of the Mark Foley scandal, when producer John McMahon's pointed question to Rep. Tom Reynolds elicited a particularly clumsy answer from the beleaguered congressman. A videotape of the exchange, which centered on the propriety of an elected official surrounding himself with small children while answering questions about a colleague's masturbatory correspondence with underage congressional pages, made it to "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" by way of Youtube.com.

With the change, WHLD again slips back into the world of the barely relevant, where it has languished since abandoning Niagara Falls a decade ago.

Founded in 1941 and long the radio home of local legend Edward Joseph, better known as Eddy Jo, the station broadcast a hodgepodge of special-interest (often better described as limited-interest) topics and ethnic music in the years before "The Voice of Reason" debuted.

The latest format change leaves rather scattershot options for local news and opinion on the radio.

In Niagara Falls, there's Tom Darro's show on WJJL 1440AM from 9 to 10 a.m. on weekdays, followed by Sal Paonessa's hour at 10 a.m. Given their limited range and audience, though, both are susceptible to takeover by callers for whom hearing themselves on the radio nearly every day gives life some meaning.

Lockport's WLVL 1340AM offers a mix of local news, Scott Leffler's 49-minute talk show, two hours of Bill O'Reilly's voice and other syndicated filler. And, of course, Tradio, billed as "Western New York's premier buy-sell-swap show."

As for WWKB, "Buffalo's Left Channel" doesn't see fit to air anyone actually based in Western New York, with "local" host Leslie Marshall broadcasting from California.

The demise of WHLD's most recent format leaves WBEN as the only option for anything approaching discussion of local issues.

If you like to hear "counter-terrorism experts" prattle on about "Internet chatter" and other silliness, there's Tom Bauerle in the morning.

Bauerle's resident "expert," someone named Doug Hagmann from something called "The Northeast Intelligence Network," has predicted the annihilation of the United States via terrorist attack about 358 times since Sept. 12, 2001. While our confidential sources tell us the Northeast Intelligence Network is headquartered at a card table in Hagmann's mother's basement, Bauerle keeps breathlessly interviewing him, anyway.

When he's not echoing Republican talking points ("Fight the terrorists there instead of here, blah, blah, blah"), or bragging about the time he made an ass of himself on one of the few occasions he's been allowed to interview anyone but Hagmann, Bauerle occasionally breaks his own stories.

Like the time he told listeners that kids in a Buffalo neighborhood who looked like they might be of Middle Eastern descent were probably lookouts for a local terrorist cell. Because, well, they looked like they might be of Middle Eastern descent. And they were looking at cars driving through the area sort of funny.

More recently, he made the stunning discovery that sometimes kids say the stupidest things.

After a girl from Sweet Home High School told a reporter from the station that former fugitive and confessed murderer Ralph "Bucky" Phillips wasn't "a monster," despite his admission the same day that he fatally shot one state trooper and wounded two others during his five-month flight, Bauerle pounced.

His incessant harping on the girl's words, as well as a rather creepy obsession with the Web site of another supporter/attention seeker, raises an interesting question. What's more loathsome -- an evidently misguided teenager saying something goofy to a reporter, or a grown man dwelling on it for two days?

Bauerle's afternoon counterpart, Sandy Beach, isn't immune to grabbing the low-hanging fruit now and then, either. During last year's Erie County budget meltdown, both added plenty of heat to the public debate, but precious little light.

Beach, though, is far more listenable. He's a consummate professional and doesn't denigrate opposing viewpoints with the viciousness of the fatally insecure.

As the radio marketplace gets less interesting, though, the local online options continue to grow.

Blogs like buffalopundit.com, buffalogeek.com, wnymedia.net and buffalorising.com, among others, offer those who want to see other opinions and offer their own the chance to do so without waiting on hold or trying to impress a call screener. Several have taken to covering news events themselves, rather than simply commenting on reports from the corporate media.

Still, not everybody has the time or inclination to explore the blogosphere. Western New York is the poorer for the demise of this incarnation of WHLD, one more victim of the toughest of businesses.


David Staba is the sports editor of the Niagara Falls Reporter. He welcomes e-mail at dstaba13@aol.com.

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com December 19 2006