Bear with me on this:—

I once worked as an announcer for a radio station that went automated overnight. One of my jobs was to load and program "Frankenstein" for overnight play. "Frankenstein" (our pet name for the IGM automation unit—IGM=International Good Music, LTD—the outfit that made these monsters was in Canada) was a big console with three tape decks, three cartridge carousels, and a fairly complex clock with little peg switches. I threaded three fresh tapes (13 inch reels that held three hours of music each) onto "Frankenstein's" decks, taped voice tracks from the song lists onto a cartridge, loaded the carousels with the voice track cart and the scheduled commercial carts (along with station IDs at required intervals), then taking the timings from the song sheets in the tape boxes, figured out where to set the peg switches on the clock so that the commercials ran at the appropriate times and the 3:00 a.m. station ID came at 3:00 a.m.—no small chore. Then, at midnight, I shut down the live board and punched "Frankenstein's" Start button, made sure it was functioning as required, signed the log and left. I would listen to the station on the car radio as I drove home. There I was, listening to myself on the radio. As far as anyone could tell, I worked, not from 6:00 p.m. to midnight, but from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 a.m. the following morning (I only got paid for the six hours I was on live, though).

A couple of years later I applied for a job at another station. It was both AM and FM, with separate programming. When they gave me a tour of the station and explained what my duties would be, I found out that the AM side was all live announcer, live board, and the FM side was all automated. No live announcers at all. It was a four deck "Frankenstein" and it ran in a room all by itself, with someone coming in to program it once every twelve hours. By listening to it, you couldn't tell that there was nobody there.

Both of these jobs were in the early Seventies. Since then, radio station automation equipment has become a lot more sophisticated and much easier to program.

All this is to give you some background on automated radio stations. The punch-line is that I heard on the news yesterday that a toxic spill occurred in a small city somewhere in the US. I didn't get where it was; they only aired the story once. But the community authorities wanted to issue an evacuation alert as a cloud of ammonia drifted toward the city. In an attempt to get the word out quickly, they called all eight local stations and got nothing but answering machines. It turned out that all eight stations were automated. There were no live bodies in any of them. And all eight stations were owned by one out-of-town media corporation.

It seems to me that this sort of thing could have a direct and deadly affect on matters of Homeland Security. As the FCC deliberates, are they taking things like this into consideration? What do you think?

Don Firth