Authors: Michael A Smerconish
Now, seated in the conference room with my face getting tanned from the blue hue of a company computer, I suddenly found myself no longer thinking about Susan Miller, Governor Tobias or Governor Haskel, but about whether I'd even hold onto my job. Don Fucking Fortini. It was truly his fault. He'd tried to squeeze too much gold from the goose. If he hadn't gotten me involved in recording some infomercials disguised as programming, I would never have been in this mess.
Fortini was our head of sales, and he had suggested to Bernson that we look for new revenue streams to capitalize on my increased ratings. The PPM ratings' data for
Morning Power
proved we were on fire. And with the additional ears came new advertisers and WRGT's ability to raise rates. I was doing as many as five live reads per hour that were wreaking havoc on my voice. But even with the sharp uptick in cost per point, we lacked inventory because of increased demand among advertisers. We
were sold out even after raising rates. For starters, all the political campaigns wanted to reach my audience in the I-4 corridor, but the trouble was, the law required they be offered available time at the lowest rate for which it had been sold in the prior year. The second and fourth quarters of the year are big for radio advertisers, but there are some lean weeks in January and February and again in July and August. Whatever the lowest rates the program commands in those months now had to be offered to the political campaigns in what was already a busy time of year. The resulting demand for advertising airtime created a daily scrum to see who we could clear and I desperately resisted any effort to increase the commercial allotment beyond 16 minutes per hour. Well, that's when Fortini pitched Bernson with an idea.
In a bid to increase the WRGT bottom line, Don Fortini came up with the notion that I would host infomercials disguised as programming that would run in the weekend overnights. This would accomplish two things: we'd be able to soak some local physicians willing to buy time during a graveyard shift, and we could circle back to advertisers wanting a piece of me so they could be associated with my voice, albeit in off hours.
There is a constant tension in the business between a host like me who tries to protect his on-air reputation and brand, and a hungry, commission-driven sales staff like Fortini's that is looking to sell any and everything. I think his people have a more difficult job than me. Truly. I could never sell radio time. But that doesn't mean I was pleased to host these whorish interviews with physicians. I went to Steve Bernson and told him it would undercut my brand as a presidential interviewee and ultimately cause us to sell at a lower rate, but he wouldn't get involved. Even when I said:
“Steve, if you haven't noticed, I'm spending my time these days interviewing potential world leaders and I'm a little short of time to sell ass cream.”
Despite my success, enhanced profile and ratings spike, WRGT was not in the beer money. We didn't get that kind of scratch, which went to the jock station. Our advertisers continued to be entrepreneurs and not advertising-agency-driven businesses, which had little regard for talk radio. Nor did we have a base of national advertisers, primarily because they were afraid to be associated with spoken-word programming for fear that they'd have to endure a flap like when Rush called that Georgetown coed a “slut.” They were always worried that they'd get tied to a host who would say something stupid and then they would have to contend with a national boycott and angry consumers. It had happened with Glenn Beck, too. Just when he caught fire on Fox News, largely because he called President Obama a racist (whose advice does that sound like?), his TV show was the subject of a protest that caused him to lose dozens of advertisers. So in this climate, Fortini had come up with an idea to tap a new revenue streamâlocal physiciansâand sell them half-hour blocks of time for a “show” that they would call
Doctor's Hours
.
I had learned to keep my eye on Don Fortini from my first few days at WRGT. I just knew he was capable of getting me into a shitstorm. In a different life he'd have been the maitre' d at a Vegas showroom, the kinda guy who would know exactly where to seat you based on your shoes, the size of your wife's handbag, or how much you squeezed in his palm. But Fortini seemed ill-suited for Tampa. He was consistently overdressed wearing suits and ties in a town where the “players” wore designer shirts open at the collar with sport coats and jeans. The thing he had going for him was that he spoke the language of the small businessmen who were our economic lifeblood. Medium in height and build, and darkly complected, Fortini was a radio veteran who earned his stripes first selling specialty
programming like Saturday morning real estate shows and Sunday night soothsayers. Trouble was, he didn't know when to stop selling. He would sell absolutely anything.
In my first year in Tampa, he'd hatched “The Right Way to Eat,” a one-day smorgasbord where WRGT commandeered the entire St. Petersburg Times Forum, a giant arena that normally plays host to Ringling Brothers, concerts, and the Tampa Bay Lightning. For an advertised flat fee of $20.00, listeners could come and sample the fare of more than 300 food vendors and restaurants. The concept was great. Listeners got to eat good food on the cheap. Restaurants got a ton of promotion. And the station made a ton of money. It would have been win-win-win had Fortini capped the event as planned at 2,500 attendees, but he could not bring himself to stop selling admissions. So when 7,500 listeners showed up, causing every restaurant provider to run out of chow, we had a near riot on our hands and most of our P1s went home hungry. Every successful station had a Fortini, usually held in check by somebody from programming, but at WRGT, that person was Steve Bernson, who was under pressure from his corporate bosses to turn some coin from their foray into talk radio. Apparently the boys at MML&J could preach a good game, while also knowing how to count the collection basket. In the end, the collection basket was more important, and now my tit was in the ringer because of this corporate greed.
“Stan,” Fortini had once said to mollify me, “these docs are not the Marcus Welby or Doogie Howser type. They are businessmen. Entrepreneurs. Just like our roofing and gold clients. They are all about business and we need to work with them.”
So twice a week I'd have to interview the docs on everything from plastic surgery to sciatica. It was a forum for them to sell their businesses, thinly disguised as legitimate, albeit boring,
programming. The interviews were then bundled in twos and run at a time when only insomniacs and some guy getting up in the middle of the night to take a piss would hear them. Still, if you tuned in at any time after the broadcast began, you'd miss the disclaimer and instead of knowing you were getting a paid-for infomercial, all you knew was that you were hearing God-awful radio. And with me as the voiceâeven though I went out of my way not to introduce myself.
To my amazement and disappointment, WRGT never had a shortage of physicians willing to pay thousands to hear their own voice on air. Most of these guys just did not translate to radio. They could remove your appendix, but answering a set of basic, health-related questions in a manner that a radio audience could follow was a challenge for them, to say the least. It probably took longer to edit these interviews than record them, just so “ums” and “ahs” and boring-as-hell answers could be made barely listenable.
So one day a rheumatologist was sitting across from me in the middle of the morning. I was already cranky from having gotten up at 3:30 a.m. to do my own program and now this, and he was talking like he was the walking dead.
On mic, I told him “Doc, you gotta wake the fuck up.”
I shouldn't have said it. I should have just thought it. He looked temporarily shell-shocked. But my comment did the trick; we finished up the discussion and I forgot about it. Like I said, these were taped segments that required heavy editing.
The following weekend, some rookie technical producer (not Rod) was running the master board when his computer crashed just before
Doctor's Hours
. When he rebooted, he clicked on the wrong mp3 file, and instead of the edited version, he played the raw version with me telling the man with the stethoscope to wake the fuck upâthe “wtf” up version as I liked to call it.
But he didn't get fired for that.
He got fired for his second mistake: filling out an internal MML&J report of some kind and thereby bringing it to the attention of Steve Bernson, which forced WRGT to fire the geek, lest anyone could ever say that management learned of what happened and didn't act. Unlike talent, the technical folks weren't forced to take the online broadcast ethics training, or maybe MML&J could have invoked the “well, we trained him not to” defense. Instead, Bernson had no choice but to alert the Atlanta parish and they demanded that he take defensive action in case the house of cards started to tumble. Typical corporate bullshit.
I heard about it the following Monday morning from Alex.
“How many complaints?” I asked.
“Just one, so far,” Alex said.
Oh shit.
“From the rheumatologist who stayed up to hear his own interview!”
Which was a great relief, but we were not out of the woods. I was nervous because now I was suddenly expendable under the morals clause of my contract. Dropping an fâbomb was a fireable offense, even if I was hot as a pistol because of the campaign. And it was the sort of thing that could follow you from market to market. Especially with some of the religious or self-described family-values groups that now made a habit of charting personalities nationwide. Every station I've worked for has lived in fear of the FCC and their humongous fines, even when court decisions suggested the standards of what was indecent were getting permissive. My owners were un-persuaded by the mixed court precedents.
U2's Bono has done more to clarify those standards in my professional lifetime than even George Carlin did with his seven dirty words uttered close to when I was born. (Shit, piss, fuck,
the c-word I will not say, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits, in case you are wondering.) In 2003 Bono got up during an NBC broadcast of the Golden Globes (he got something for
Gangs of New York
) and said it was “fucking brilliant!” Bono didn't mean fornicating brilliant. He meant fucking brilliant. Like, hey, how terrific. Still, the FCC called that a fleeting expletive, for which broadcasters could be fined.
Saying fuck, the FCC decided, had an “inherently” sexual connotation in all contexts, and was therefore indecent speech that was subject to limitation, meaning fines. In other words, even if you said “fuck,” but didn't mean the act of fucking, you were still on the hook, or the broadcaster was. (Can you tell that I paid attention to this battle?)
Eventually a federal appellate court tossed out the fleeting expletive policy, saying, “By prohibiting all âpatently offensive' references to sex, sexual organs and excretion without giving adequate guidance as to what âpatently offensive' means, the FCC effectively chills speech, because broadcasters have no way of knowing what the FCC will find offensive.” Then the Supreme Court said the FCC could fine for this sort of thing but left the door open as to whether the law was unconstitutional.
What does it all mean? Beats the shit out of me, and apparently, my employer, MML&J. Nowadays, nobody knows what the rules are. Which is why before I even read the possible answers on the quiz, I knew I'd look for the one that was most encompassing. If the choices were: “A) only 1; B) only 2; C) only 3; D) Both 1 and 2; E) Both 1 and 3; or F) Each one of these statements is potentially indecent,” I always checked “F” and kept moving.
Needless to say, when Alex interrupted me, I jumped at the chance to excuse myself from the “training.” Wondering what it was all about, I returned Susan's call.
“Next time, wear a tie,” was how she answered. So it was about
Hardball
. Clearly she was referencing my attire on TV the night before.
She was probably right. When I went for that more casual look I felt like I was imitating the pseudo terrorism experts who popped up post-9/11 all wearing mock black turtlenecks and looking like they just finished accompanying Seal Team 6 while killing bin Laden before heading into the studio to offer some analysis. But of course, they weren't accompanying Seal Team 6. They were warm and cozy inside a television studio. I made a mental note to follow her advice.
I was never sure when Chris Matthews was finished with his own thoughts and it was time for me to jump in, but I appreciated the visibility that came from appearing on his program which was a staple for politicos on both sides of the aisle. Of course, on
Morning Power
, I'd forever mock him for once having said that watching Obama gave him “a thrill up his leg,” but in every one of our TV encounters I was reminded that he had no equals when it came to his institutional knowledge of electoral politics. The guy started as a cop on Capitol Hill and worked himself into a position of power and influence. Of course, nothing good would come from my saying that on radio.
“Hello, Susan,” I said. “What can I do for you?”
“Stan, I think we are on our way. The advance polling from Georgia, Ohio and Virginia all looks good,” she said, referring to the biggest prizes on Super Tuesday. “Vic Baron just can't match our field organization.”
I waved off Alex who suddenly appeared at the door to the conference room, and let Susan keep talking.
“Congratulations,” I said. “But why are you calling me?”
“I'm calling because I'd hate for you to be on the wrong side of this.”
I wasn't sure what she meant. But it was a far more direct point she was raising now than anything she'd said at Delrios.
“You know I could never be for your husband,” I said softly into the phone.