WOWO woes

If you've been reading this blog, you probably don't need to be warned of the sharp practices that pervade the radio stations you once knew.

Countless heritage stations have self-destructed since the 1996 congressional bailout for corporate radio and rightist hate talk. But it's only fair to pick on WOWO in Fort Wayne in particular, because I caught WOWO red-handed on Sunday.

I'd already seen much criticism online of WOWO because of its spectacular downfall. WOWO, like other AM giants, was once a respected full-service station that would announce local emergencies as they happened. Folks today who weren't even in WOWO's primary age group before 1996 have positive recollections of the service aspect of durable AM's like WOWO.

When I was on my trip this week, however, I got a taste of today's WOWO - which is every bit as sorryassed as critics claim.

We got caught in a jam on Interstate 69 and sat in traffic for a half-hour. We thought WOWO would fill us in on it and perhaps briefly advise us on a detour - as stations have been known to do.

We thought we'd at least be apprised of what caused the tie-up. Was it a fatal accident? Was it construction?

But nope. Instead, WOWO was airing Rush Limbaugh. For a half-hour, all we heard was El Rushbo complaining about the same things he's been ranting about for the past 15 years.

Mind you, this was on a Sunday. Isn't Limbaugh a weekday program? The drug-addled has-been does work a long, grueling 15-hour week, you know - so I'm sure he gets Sundays off for all his relentless toil.

In WOWO World, I guess 5 days of Limbaugh each week is no longer enough, so now they have to rerun some of his diatribes on Sundays as well.

If WOWO thought they could get away with it, they'd air nothing but the audio of Rush Limbaugh pooping 24/7. If WOWO was a TV station, it would show nothing but a still photo of the washed-up radio talk show host hovering over the toilet with a column of shit dangling out his ass.

According to the all-powerful and heroic Wikipedia, WOWO's weekday schedule consists of Rush, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage. Weekends are full of Dr. Laura and a Cincinnati-based conservative called Mike McConnell.

What a sad decline for a powerful station that many folks for miles around say was once of the most influential stations in the region.