Talk Radio Remote Broadcasts

THE JIG IS UP

NYT Exposes Remote Broadcast Deception







When an on- air personality makes reference to working or living in your city, isn't it safe to assume he's actually there with you?

During those nasty blizzards, shouldn't your favorite talker or news anchor tell you when he's really broadcasting from sunny Florida?

In one of radio's dirtiest little secrets, that's sometimes simply not the case. Now, the New York Times has picked up on this trend, exposing one of the medium's most notorious examples:

LOS ANGELES, March 27 — When people hear the radio host Joe Crummey on Phoenix’s popular KFYI murmur sarcastically, “We don’t have enough human rights activists in this town,” they know he means Phoenix.

Ditto for when he offers to assess the “east side west side traffic right now.”

As it turns out, Mr. Crummey, whose favorite talk show topics include immigration, patriotism and Arizona politics, is indeed reporting for duty in the valley. Just not in the Phoenix Valley.

Rather, it is here, in the San Fernando Valley, where he works via the Internet from his home on the top of a hill in the Studio City section of Los Angeles. Listeners in Phoenix are none the wiser.

Armed with four computers, a digital recorder, a constant stream of Fox News and a professional microphone, Mr. Crummey holds court for three hours each weekday during Phoenix’s drive-home time slot — from about 400 miles away in a neighboring state.

“I admit that it is obvious that listeners infer that I’m there,” Mr. Crummey, whose pitch signals talk-radio host at “hello,” said during a tour of his home broadcasting operation. “Most people don’t know I am not. But I’m just on the radio talking about their town, and I guess they can take it or leave it.”

Here's an alternate link to the story.

With its focus on one particular host, the NYT failed to mention at least two past flaps of a similar nature, found here and here. And a few guys have been getting away with this deception for years.

The key issue is honesty: are you pretending to live and work in a city hundreds of miles from your real home? Otherwise, there's nothing inherently immoral about doing a live remote broadcast.


Over the years, your Radio Equalizer has quite often hosted shows for one city from studios in another, sometimes on opposite coasts. What seems to work best is to either come clean about your real location, or make no claim whatsoever about where you are.

Faking a presence in the other city, however, is not only sleazy, but a newspaper expose waiting to happen. In this case, no less than the New York Times smelled something funny going on in Arizona.

UPDATE: the competition weighs in.


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