Has WHLD sold out the public trust?

WHLD is Air America Radio's newest outlet in Buffalo (New York), and they accept ads from highly questionable groups. Instead of, for instance, ads from Sprouts (the co-op on 3rd) or the Whole Earth Gardening and Grow Lights Center on 5th or Bud's Birkenstock on 7th or Vern's Volvos on Frostbitten Way, they accept... pro-casino ads!

BuffaloPundit responds to the claims that AAR has sold out the community and the people here.

In other news, by the time you read this a special guest will have made an appearance:

"In promoting Al Franken, we basically just opened the lines for calls, and we would have exhausted our whole supply of tickets in 24 hours," Marks says. "The phones wouldn't stop, so we realized we had to do a contest instead and give away two at a time. And still, the calls just keep coming until we tell them we've got a winner. They're calling from everywhere - East Otto, Gowanda, Erie, Pa."

If you lived in Buffalo that would be "everywhere". And, as with other AAR stations, there's a bit of an "issue":

Although its 5,000 watts don't stack up to the 50,000 watts at WWKB, many other local stations - WGR and WBEN, to name two - have 5,000-watt daytime power. But where WHLD runs into a problem is direction.

"It's a weird signal," says Brown-Cashdollar. "It doesn't always go wide in Erie County, but it goes up to Brockport, it reaches through Toronto, and it goes right down the coast of Lake Erie as strong as can be."

Marc Odien, webmaster of WNYmedia.net, says, "Even now, WHLD isn't the easiest thing to get up here in the Northtowns."

Since whenever I hear Buffalo all I can think about is the nearby Jamestown and how maddeningly beautiful Natalie Merchant is, how about a picture to wash all thoughts of AAR from our collective minds?

That's much better.

Posted in Meta at April 24, 2006 03:29 AM

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