Wednesday, December 28, 2005

WCER/Canton's "Patriot News Hour" - YIPES!

Driving in the afternoon near Belden Village Mall, the OMW Mobile was close enough to Canton to get a car radio to stop on that market's talk/religious WCER/900, still promoting itself on-air as "News/Talk WCER 900".

OMW can't remember what USED to be on the station at 3 PM, but the show we heard Tuesday afternoon is definitely an oddity in the mainstream news/talk world.

According to WCER's website, the show is called "The Patriot News Hour w/ Jim and Eric Cederstrom".

Anyone landing on WCER looking for even TRN's Jerry Doyle would be drawn away by this. Now, OMW's primary editorial voice is not quite WCER's target audience...we're more into mainstream secular talk (of all viewpoints), and WCER, even in a turn trying some secular talk, is still positioning itself to Christian lifestyle listeners with strong conservative-leaning viewpoints...some of them, we'd presume, would be a target audience for this sort of program.

But the show's production values are awful. The hosts are feeding their program via an unequalized phone line that sounds even worse than WNIR's weekend remotes or that station's occasional Bob Golic Out Of Town show. Maybe we're not the best judge of the show, since the content seems to be heavy on conspiracy theory talk laced with ads for companies selling gold...but it's bad.

It's the kind of show that normally airs on commercial shortwave outlets like WWCR/Nashville TN, where the station sells the airtime to the show's producers to reach a small audience of hobbyist shortwave listeners. It's so bad that the one and only Dr. Laura may be a *relief* to listeners at 4 PM, and that's saying a lot.

For now, we continue to tab WCER with the "talk/religious" format description. When we first heard the station, it was promoting a 15 minute morning session reading the Holy Bible...in which they'd read the entire Bible over the course of a year. The Canton station is an interesting mix of secular conservative talk and religion...something Christian-oriented Salem doesn't really do much on its local secular talker, WHK/1420 Cleveland.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

OA:
I consider myself conservative and am a Christian, but even I have a problem with programming such as you describe..Not to mention the shoddy production values. It sounds like stuff I've heard in recent years from illegal pirate FM's (90.5-90.7) around Canton. I wish that WCER would either go back to the preaching/music 24/7 and dump the conservative talk which can be found elsewhere on the dial...or go with a unique format such as full-blown oldies (similar to the old Q82) or Classic Country..

Anonymous said...

previous post..meant Q92 obviously.

Anonymous said...

Sue WCER...That's what they're doing in Detroit to WDET, the local NPR affiliate that took pledges then dumped the local look.

Anonymous said...

That would be fine and dandy..except WCER is commercial and your WDET example is Non-commercial educational..I dont think youd get far suing a commercial station for changing it's format..