Let’s all welcome Chip Franklin to our happy little city

I live in Tijuana and therefore do not get very reliable access to my beloved KPBS. During my morning drive, I’ve resorted to listening to AM 600 KOGO.  There’s a new morning host in town, his name is Chip Franklin and he comes to sunny San Diego from cloudy D.C.

Now, I don’t know if this is fair or not since I never listened to KOGO in its pre-Chip days, but OH. MY GOODNESS.  The show is bad, perhaps even terrible.  Chip’s got one of those guy-next-door voices you really want to love, but if you’re even half paying attention to the words coming out of his mouth, you’ll be as horrified as I.

This morning, Chip bitched about a law against barking dogs.  He made not one good argument — he simply wanted to complain. And talk. And talk. And talk some more about nothing important. He then moved on to a segment he calls “blind reviews,” wherein he, his friend from D.C. and KOGO’s film reviewer talk about and rate movies they’ve never seen.  They give them flushes (if a movie is really good, he explains, you’ll hold that 40-0unce coke in until it hurts, if it’s bad, you’re out of your seat within seconds; therefore, one flush is no good, five flushes is great).  Talk about a waste of precious public airwaves.  They kick around some names of actors and directors, make a few unfunny jokes then tell you whether they think the movie will be good or not. Thanks but no thanks Chip, we San Diegans like information, not uninformed opinion.

It upsets me because I’ve heard KOGO’s film critic — he reviews movies he’s actually seen every Friday. He’s thoughtful and provides useful information to film goers. His appearances with Chip only serve to discredit his work.

And KOGO’s morning news: Sheesh!  It reminds me of my NBC days in the sense that all the news stories come straight off the wire or from the SDPD — think fires, car crashes and out-of-town stories read for shock-value instead of usefulness.  The stories are rushed and therefore trivialized; there is no context or analysis, just simple ‘rip and reads.’ To be fair, Chip tosses the airwaves to either LaDonna Harvey or Dave Mason to do the news reading, but it just adds to the overall sense of stupidity KOGO presents every morning.   It’s not that the people who work at KOGO are stupid, but someone, somewhere up the KOGO ranks decided its San Diego listeners are stupid (which actually could be true, considering Rush Limbaugh comes on right after Chip’s morning show, and we all know how dim-witted those listeners are).

And one last complaint: Why the hell don’t  radio folk have to adhere to the ad/edit line?  Chip slips naturally between reading a news story (what we in the paper business consider to be editorial content) and reading ad copy.  He’ll be talking about how sorry he feels for Britney Spears then, before you know it, he’s talking about how fantastic AT&T rollover minutes are — he even uses personal anecdotes to help push the product.

What happened to quality radio?  I’ve thrown away my TV, do I have to rip the radio out of my car, too?