Yet Another Modest Proposal, or One For All

It was inevitable that, as happens after or even during most disastrous major news stories, the hurricanes would be used for political purposes. Harvey and Irma were no different; the ground has yet to dry and Irma is being used to push a particular agenda...

Climate change? No, not that. I'm talking about FM tuner chips in cell phones.

An editorial in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel used the emergency to take smartphone manufacturers, and Apple in particular, to task for resisting calls to activate the chips. The paper's pique is understandable. Without the chips, you'd have had to get a battery-powered radio to receive anything, and to that, the paper wrote, "Even if you could find and afford one, good luck finding the batteries to run them," because radios are very expensive and AAA batteries are rare, I suppose. (Someone tell them about hand-cranked radios Amazon sells for less than 25 bucks. Their minds will be blown.) In any event, the editorial called on Apple to change its ways or for Congress to change it for them.

Okay, then, say your phone DID have an FM chip and NextRadio and you decided to look there for information. What would you have gotten? Several Florida stations did a fine job of covering the storm. Several did not. Several went off the air, including, for a time, the station doing the most extensive coverage in Miami. (Having your towers in the middle of Biscayne Bay might be great for your signal but not so much when the water rises.) And several punted, airing a TV station's audio. ("Now, let's take a look at the map." Thanks.) Some stations were staffed up, and some staffers got out of Dodge before the storm hit.

Today, I am not going to argue over the FM chip. I am also not going to deem any station's coverage, or lack of it, worthy or not. I will, however, propose something that was prompted by thinking about both topics.

Radio -- broadcasting in general -- prides itself on emergency coverage, so much so that it is the primary argument anybody makes for the FM tuner chip. Yet emergency broadcasting is inconsistent. You have one cluster with a News-Talk station serving as a firehose of useful information, another vamping with TV news coverage, another off the air, and another throwing on automation and evacuating. And, further, you don't have a lot of ability to tell people which stations are providing the most useful coverage and which are not, so it's the luck of the draw whether anyone actually finds it (and it won't help if the station they're accustomed to turning to for news has lost its signal and there's no communication via social media, for example, about where to find the stream or FM simulcast). This all happens because the emergency coverage isn't coordinated -- it's left to individual station and cluster owners to decide what to cover and how and even whether to cover. Throw in stations knocked off the air by the weather and the desire to protect staffers and their families by having them evacuate, and you have the jumble we have today. An FM chip won't magically change that, a point that the industry would readily acknowledge if emergencies really were the reason for having the chip active (hint: it's really about commercial interests, but you knew that).

So, the proposal: Ask Congress for a limited anti-trust exemption, then, in each market, create an emergency plan and facilities that would kick in when disaster strikes. Have all stations contribute both economically and with staffing. Build common studios at the region's emergency management offices. Designate certain FM stations as signals to be kept alive no matter what, and install auxiliary antennae and transmitters in safe, secure locations with generator power that would take over in the event the regular signals were lost. Coordinate staffing -- combine talents, assign people in advance to stay aboard and get the news out and report -- and agree that once an independent arbiter decides it's time to go into full-crisis-mode, all stations will switch over to the common feed. Build in redundancy and remote capabilities if all else fails.

Can't be done? CONELRAD. You remember CONELRAD, right? It was the U.S. national civil defense broadcasting system, before the EAS, meant for nuclear attack rather than local weather emergencies. If you're old enough, you remember that AM radio dials had little red notches at 640 AM and 1240 AM, and we were told that when the Russkies dropped the Big One on us, we were to tune to those frequencies. All other stations were to cease broadcasting, and then broadcast emergency material only on 640 or 1240, one station taking over from another in an endless chain (to confuse enemy aircraft trying to use the signals as locators, you see). It didn't work very well, unfortunately, and was ditched in 1963. But it was a coordinated plan, and there's no reason that on a smaller scale, with modern technology and industry cooperation, a group effort wouldn't work. And it would guarantee that once people fired up those FM cellphone chips or hand-cranked radios or battery-powered luxury devices, they'd always find the emergency information they need from radio.

Which is to say, I don't really care at this point how the FM chip argument plays out, but I do care about radio's role in emergencies. When I saw stations unable to stay on the air, and only one station being able to stay on the air in the Keys (only because the owner went down and kept it going), and the amount and quality of emergency information on the air being inconsistent, I thought, you know, there has to be a better way to do this. I don't know if the plan I'm thinking about is a better way, but if it isn't, I hope someone smarter than me can come up with one. If we're going to argue that we're essential in an emergency, we have to stop thinking about it as a competition and more as a service we collectively owe the public.

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Seriously, though, I want to ask the Sun-Sentinel editorial writers what they're talking about with the expensive-radios-with-hard-to-find batteries thing. I know you don't see radios up front at Best Buy and most people are using their phones for audio nowadays, but it takes only a few seconds to search "Radio" on Amazon. Fact-checking ain't what it used to be.

Perry Michael Simon
Vice President/Editor, News-Talk-Sports and Podcast
AllAccess.com
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