Wisconsin Radio Station Sells Naming Rights to News Room

WIBA is a radio station serving Madison, Wisconsin, the capital of that state and home to one of the nation’s more serious public universities. The station, 1301 AM for those in range, has sold the naming rights to its newsroom to Amcore Bank. In the land of 3Com Stadium, the Staples Center and the late Enron Field, this isn’t even the first time sponsorship of a news room has been sold so overtly -- Clear Channel Milwaukee's WISN-AM 1130 was named for Pyramax Bank last year. So what’s the fuss in the media? At least now, the news is acknowledged as a business proposition and colored accordingly.

Americans are delightfully naïve in their belief that the news should be, or even can be, objective. By the time someone is old enough to be an editor and have some say over content, he or she has decades of experience that will be reflected in views over what is news. Whether Ashton and Demi have a baby or what the details of the pre-nup agreement of Ari Onassis’ grand-daughter are matters of supreme indifference to the Kensington Review. People magazine has a different opinion. Content is inherently biased; here, one likes to believe it is biased in favor of thinking rather than feeling, in favor of the big picture rather than incidental details and in favor of what’s right rather than what’s convenient.

Which raises the issue of the relationship of the news outlet to the reader/listener/viewer. This journal will never be as big as People largely because of deliberate choices about content and about what the targeted readers want. Those interested in celebrities make up a much larger group than those who worry about rigged elections in Uzbekistan. It is a choice that affects readership, and that’s how it is.

Mercifully, the internet has made it possible to crank out this little publication at almost no cost. Print journalists and the electronic media have much bigger bills to pay, and therefore, must try to provide news and commentary that will appeal to enough people to generate ad revenues and justify a high enough cover price to take care of these bills. Thus, the New York Times devotes more space and effort in covering Brooklyn than Brugges, and it is written in English rather than Gaelic.

All WIBA has done make a little more revenue by being a bit more open about who pays its bills. If that engenders some skepticism in the listeners in Madison and its environs, good. When a bank is sponsoring the news, a radio station is likely to report on the banking business in such as way as to please the sponsor, or at least, not irritate it. Letting people know up front that that’s how it is merely lets them know what the biases are. The news business is not called the news public service, after all.

© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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