Do You Listen To Talk Radio?

SATURDAY NIGHT MAGAZINE

The National Post - Saturday, November 11th., 2000

THE EXPERTS EXPOUND:

BILL ROWE, Talk Show Host, 590 AM, VOC (Voice of the Common Man) St. John's, Newfoundland.

"At election time, the callers determine what they want to talk about. But we try to keep it to public issues. We're not too interested in how good or bad a politician is in a personal way.

"My talk show is the ordinary citizen's talk show. Above all other media - whether it's newspapers, television, magazines - talk radio has an ability to accommodate the need of ordinary citizens to get back at the powers that be. Politicians will call in too, but we will only put them on the air, at the most, once a week. As for ordinary mortals - that's what we call the regular people - we won't put them on air two days in a row. And if you start calling every second day, we'll get wind of that too."

BRYAN DEWALT - Curator of Communications, Canadian Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa.

"In a sense, Quebec's Reginald Fessenden is the 'father' of talk radio. In addition to inventing sonar, he invented a continuous radio wave on which voice and music could be broadcast clearly. He was born in Quebec and went to the States at eighteen to work for Thomas Edison.

"In the 1890s there weren't many people working in the radio field. One of the big names was Marconi, of course. But Marconi was broadcasting using a system called spark gap, which generated a radio wave that wouldn't last very long, just a brief pulse. Fessenden was convinced there was a better way to send radio signals, and he was right. He used what's called a continuous wave rather than brief pulses of energy. There was much less interference and you could tune your radio much more precisely. He invented a high frequency alternator and had General Electric build it for him. And with that he conducted what is now called the very first talk program on radio. That was Christmas Eve, 1906."

ROB McCONNELL - Host, The 'X' Zone Radio Show - Newstalk 610 CKTB, St. Catharines, Ontario.

"Our tag on The 'X' Zone is 'Where people dare to believe and dare to be heard.' Our demographics is the twenty-five to thirty-five-year-old, with a high percentage of female listeners. When we have psychics, numerologists, or tarot-card readers, the numbers are about eight-three to eighty-four percent female.

"Last year we had a lady call us from BC who was going to commit suicide because her body was infested with alien implants. We were able to contact a doctor in the States who surgically removes illegal implants, a psychiatrist, and the RCMP. We brought it to a happy end." []