Improbable as it seems, television's unglamorous seventy-five-year-old sibling, radio, now reigns as the most profitable of all media. Radio's recent tidal wave of corporate consolidations, its cheap production costs, and its high cash flow have transformed it into the darling of Wall Street. One troubling result of radio's remarkable financial turn-around: the elimination of serious radio reporting. It is fast disappearing from stations across the nation, replaced by talkers, "shock jocks," syndicated headline services, or no news at all. Except at public radio and a few all-news stations, radio reporters have become a vanishing breed.

What's happening to radio today is likely to happen to television tomorrow, as radio-style managements bring to the nation's television stations the same cost-cutting techniques that succeeded in generating record-breaking profits from the older medium. Forbes magazine reports that CBS's biggest stockholder, Mel Karmazin, made so much money in radio that he was able to "swap his radio company, Infinity Broadcasting, for effective control of CBS." According to CBS's most recent proxy statement, he owns 10,847,739 shares, worth approximately $328 million. Now, Forbes says, Karmazin "is trying to use radio-style management to turn CBS around."

Since the Telecommunications Act of 1996 changed the limit on the number of radio stations one company can own, four multibillion-dollar corporations have gained control of nearly 33 percent of the $13.6 billion-a-year radio business. They are: CBS; Hicks, Muse, Tate and Furst; Jacor; and Clear Channel Communications. What was basically a locally owned media business has been converted into a national oligopoly.

The new radio entrepreneurs have slashed station budgets and eliminated what they view as costly nonessential operating expenses such as news staffs and even wire services. The current trend is to "outsource" radio headline news without letting the audience know -- not just cutting back on station news coverage but eliminating all reporters.

Many radio stations that offer periodic headline reports and that even promote themselves as "newsradio" rely completely on syndicated services such as the Metro Networks and Shadow Broadcasting Services, which use a single announcer to service eight or ten stations in a market. These syndicated services employ few if any reporters and do not bother to subscribe to the AP or other wire services. Instead, they merely cannibalize local newspapers and cable news channels. With costs so low, they charge radio stations nothing for their services, taking only a ten-second spot at the end of each brief headline news report to sell to advertisers.

In Washington, D.C., where politics is the hometown industry, all-news radio station WTOP faces serious news competition only from public radio's WAMU. Twelve of the D.C. area stations get all their news from Metro Networks, nine from Shadow. When news breaks in Washington, says Jim Farley, WTOP's program director, "WTOP is usually the only radio station with a reporter on the scene because it's the only commercial radio station in town that still employs reporters."

In the neighboring Baltimore market, WBAL won all ten out of ten news awards in last spring's Chesapeake AP radio news competition. "I wondered how that happened," Farley told me, "until I found out that WBAL was the only station in the market even to enter the local radio news contest. What's happening to radio news throughout the country is not a pretty picture."

Many stations that still call themselves "news radio," are in reality virtually all talk. They label programs starring talkers such as Howard Stern, Don Imus, Oliver North, and G. Gordon Liddy as "newscasts," radically redefining the notion of what is a newscast and what is news. On these radio stations, journalistic standards are non-existent; reporting has disappeared.

On the network level, for more than a decade NBC Radio News has been run as a Potempkin Village network, having no significant newsgathering or reporting capacity of its own. Soon after acquiring NBC in 1986, General Electric sold NBC Radio to Westwood One. As part of the deal, Westwood One's newscasts continue to carry the NBC News label despite the fact that the "real" NBC News has no editorial control over, or responsibility for, the newscasts that bear its name -- a basic journalistic malfeasance.

Westwood One also owns Mutual News, which like NBC Radio News is a pale imitation of its former self. Both radio networks operate out of the same Westwood One newsroom in Arlington, Virginia, feeding headline reports to subscribing stations, often using the same announcers who simply put either the NBC Radio News or Mutual network label on their radio newscasts. In today's bizarre intertwined radio world, Westwood One, with its NBC and Mutual News networks, is actually managed and partly owned by CBS, Inc., whose wholly owned CBS News Radio Network is still run by CBS News.

Alan Ludell, program manager and co-anchor of WILM in Wilmington, Delaware, the nation's only independently owned all-news radio station, complains that, "radio today gives the appearance of having a multiplicity of news voices. But in reality what is coming out of those many thousands of radio channels is the product of a very few, totally dominant set of media owners."

Out of approximately 10,000 commercial radio stations throughout the nation, only about fifteen are all-news outlets that employ substantial news staffs to report on what is happening in their communities. All but two of those are owned by CBS. And in Los Angeles and New York City, CBS owns and operates all four of the cities' all-news radio stations. The media company with the nation's biggest radio empire, CBS owns 175 radio stations and a host of competing radio program services and networks in addition to its widespread TV and cable holdings.

Running a close second in radio to CBS is the Chancellor Media Corporation, which owns and operates 108 radio stations in twenty-two of the largest markets, and which in July entered the television industry with the purchase of Lin Television's twelve network-affiliated TV stations. In a prime example of radio's maze of interlocking management and ownership, the Dallas-based leveraged buyout firm Hicks, Muse holds an interest in both Chancellor Media and Lin Television, as well as in Capstar Broadcasting. This gives Hicks, Muse effective control over approximately 500 radio stations in 100 markets across the U.S. as well as thirty television stations. Hicks is reportedly in discussion to acquire the nation's fourth largest radio owner, Jacor Communications.

Now, these companies are using their multibillion-dollar radio assets to make the move into television. "Radio is the model for cash flow -- the radiomen are going to run the TV business," predicts Jerry Del Colliano, publisher of Inside Radio newsletter.

Michael Harrison, editor of the radio trade publication Talkers, calls what's happening to news in radio "a great travesty of American democracy." Radio's new owners have turned the medium into a "commodity rather than a service," Harrison says, "abandoning any pretense of serious news digging or reporting."

A growing number of radio stations are simply brokering their program schedules, leasing blocs of time to entrepreneurs who produce program-length commercials in the guise of news or talk. For $250 per two-and-a-half-minute segment, you can actually buy an interview on one of Washington, D.C.'s three business news stations. For $1,500, you can buy an hour. Last June, Smart Money magazine warned of the "investment pros," the so-called financial experts and advisers who buy radio time and fill it up with their own version of business news, touting stocks and investment services. They blur the line between editorial content and advertising, between "journalism and hucksterism."

Radio pioneered narrowcasting -- the strategy of concentrating on reaching a single segment of the audience -- when the FCC deregulated the industry in 1980. Radio stations are no longer required to broadcast news or public affairs, and many no longer do. Television has begun to follow radio's example, as cable and digital TV enable TV channels to focus on a desirable slice of the audience without bothering to interrupt their formats with distracting newscasts.

As television follows radio's precedent, TV reporting is likely to be the first casualty in the stations' insatiable pursuit of greater cash flow, faster growth, and still bigger profits.

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