Memorandum 46

[snopes]

For nearly three decades, the memo has been passed around by word of mouth, the Internet, on nth-generation photocopied fliers, making the rounds among African American activists, politicians and talk-show hosts.

In "Black Africa and the U.S. Black Movement," also known as Memorandum 46, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser outlines a sinister 1970s government strategy to undermine black leadership in the United States and sow discord with Africans abroad.

Everywhere we looked, we found evidence that the document was fake.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080201751.html

[Johnny Slick]

One side of the story, of course. I will say that this little aside was probably a lot bigger than they made it out to be:

We agreed that we wouldn't "attack" other hosts again, if that was to be the station's policy.

I worked with a host (the guy who was murdered, actually) who used to get into a great deal of hot water by listening to the weekend hosts' shows and splicing "drops" from them (2 or 3 second snippets of sound) that he'd then use in all sorts of out of context ways. This guy ran one of the most popular shows in the conglomerate and was not stupid enough to take drops from one of the people more popular than he. Nonetheless, to hear the producer tell it, he almost got fired for this stuff anyway.

The argument is that it undermines the entire station when you lampoon other hosts. You can disagree with them, you can even say "I am disagreeing with X" when you do it, but when you cross the line into making fun of them or outright attacking them, you're committing one of the sins of talk radio. And if you're dumb enough to do this to people who are more powerful at the station than you are... what do you expect will happen?

To top it off, weekend shows are notoriously hard to gauge in popularity. The Arbitron ratings (that's the radio version of the Nielsens) are notoriously unwieldy when you get out of daytime slots during the week. IIRC I was on a show that was rated something like #23 in its timeslot (Saturday mornings, 6-8am) one quarter and #4 or 5 the next. Did we get better? Sure, maybe, but I don't think we got that much worse when we dropped into the teens the quarter after that. Not a lot of people listen to the radio during those times in the first place, and IIRC the Arbitrons still keep ratings by giving their raters a book to fill out. If one or two raters forget to write in that they were listening to a show in that timeslot, or if they were just sleeping in that day, it can have a huge effect on ratings for a week.

The point of that is that in radio the amount of crap you can get away with is correlated very, very highly to the ratings you bring in at your station. If you're not earning ratings, you have to play it by the book. If you're not earning ratings and you piss off people who are, well, there are a thousand other people who would love to have your job.