It’s easy to forget that after Tuesday’s election, there will still be a lame duck session of Congress. At the top of lawmakers’ agenda: funding the government. The current spending bill expires on Dec. 20.
But they could also take up a less pressing measure working its way through Congress that has attracted a lot of bipartisan support, the AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act.
As its title suggests, the bill would require carmakers to include AM radio receivers in all new vehicles in the United States. And it’s put two industries at odds: carmakers versus broadcasters.
Some car companies, including BMW, Tesla and Volvo, have dropped AM receivers from their models. The broadcast industry worries that others could follow suit, which could hurt AM stations around the country.
Some small AM stations still serve as hubs of community connection, like WJOY, which reaches just a few counties around Burlington, Vermont. It plays mostly “easy listening” music, and the only live DJ is Ginny McGehee, who hosts “The Breakfast Table” every weekday from 6 to 10 a.m. in a studio lined with pictures and mementos from her 40-plus-year career.
“Temperatures outside are 57 degrees in Burlington, 55 in Plattsburgh, and we have winds blowing into the 20s or so,” McGehee announced into her microphone on a recent morning.
From there, she gives updates on weather, traffic and news and plays pretty much any music she feels like. She also takes calls from listeners, many of whom she knows by name.
“I bet this is going to be Jeanette,” McGehee said when the studio phone lit up. Sure enough: “Hi Jeanette, how are you?” she exclaimed a few seconds later.
Jeanette was calling in with her guess for the game McGehee plays every Wednesday. She plays a short snippet of a song, and if listeners can guess the artist or title, they get to pick one of the numbers for McGehee’s lottery ticket that day. (“Have we won much money? No,” McGehee laughed.)
Jeanette’s guess was correct: “Ballerina” by Nat King Cole. She picked 16 for McGehee’s Mega Millions ticket.
This kind of show is an endangered species in the radio world, especially on AM, which is now dominated by a few formats.
“If you’re interested in political talk, if you’re interested in sports talk, if you’re interested in religious radio, then that’s often where you’re going to find people who are really interested in AM,” said Michael Stamm, a professor of history at Michigan State University.
AM radio was once the dominant medium for everything. Before FM and TV came around, it was broadcasting. And despite the plethora of other media options out there, AM still has a dedicated audience. According to Nielsen, the ratings company, 82 million people listen to it at least once per month.
“Eighty-two million Americans are telling you they continue to value AM radio, and that’s not even accounting for the enhanced need in those times of public emergency,” said Curtis LeGeyt, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters. His group is lobbying for the bipartisan effort in Congress.
The Senate version of the bill has co-sponsors ranging from Republican Ted Cruz of Texas to independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
LeGeyt argued that AM stations are a crucial link in the Emergency Alert System, and after a disaster, they’re often on the air when cell service and electrical power go out.
“Consumers principally access radio in the automobile,” he said. “So, without that connectivity, you’re leaving consumers in the dark, literally.”
The automotive and tech industries don’t buy this.
“This is nothing but a bailout for panicked AM radio broadcasters who [are] seeing their declining audiences as people shift to streaming audio, to other things that they really value,” said Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Technology Association.
Shapiro and others also say electric vehicles interfere with AM signals, though an independent study found that issue could be fixed for about $70 per vehicle. Opponents also argue there are plenty of ways for people to get emergency alerts, including FM radio. Plus, they say it interferes with the free market.
“Forcing it on everyone is unprecedented in the history of consumer electronics,” Shapiro said.
Beyond the special interest fight, Matthew Jordan, a professor of media studies at Penn State, sees an opportunity. If Congress mandates AM in cars, he said, lawmakers could at the same time push stations to get back to a principle he said many have strayed from: serving the public interest.
“In the early days, those were the justifications for radio,” Jordan said. “It was a medium where you could get farm reports, weather reports, all these things that were of public interest.”
That kind of programming isn’t completely gone from AM. A little after 8 a.m. at McGehee’s WJOY studio, a colleague popped in from the FM studio across the hall to tell her about an accident on the local interstate.
A couple of minutes later, McGehee was live on the air with the news.
“Just got word from my buddy Jon across the hall that there’s been a tractor-trailer and two cars crashing on the interstate southbound on I-89, and that the bridge is closed,” she announced.
Some listeners certainly heard about the crash from McGehee on the AM radios in their cars. That’s still possible, for now.
