We were going to put something cute here like “Brad and Britt met each other more than a quarter century ago and they were finally able to work together in 2004…”
Let’s be honest
This is why we’re here:
WBT in Charlotte hired Brad & Britt in 2012 to diversify away from the hardcore right-wing political talk the station had become mired in. Their listeners were literally dying off. The management told Brad & Britt they’d support them in changing the station culture. So, B&B started afternoons on WBT July 2, 2012.
And then the complaints started.
This would’ve been easy to predict for anyone who had been in radio for more than six seconds. When you change from one program to another, people will complain. Management swore up and down that they could handle the heat. Hell, the General Manager of the station said he had endured complaint calls back when his station in Philly put Howard Stern on the air. He assured them he could handle people complaining about B&B.
He couldn’t
Immediately, management began to back away from any support of Brad & Britt. B&B were informed in July of 2013 that they were being demoted to the 6-9 pm spot. Interestingly, this “demotion” helped make it easier for them to earn bonuses for good ratings, so they became possibly the only two people in the history of radio to get demoted AND get raises!
When their contract ran out in the summer of 2014 and they were no longer on WBT, Brad vented his frustrations in a now-famous, post-mortem Charlotte Observer article, the boys became pariahs in the entire talk radio industry because they told the truth in public: Radio isn’t radio anymore.
The medium that we knew and loved turned its back on us. Companies that own radio stations are slaves to Wall Street, they’re mired in debt, and they refuse to acknowledge that it isn’t 1991 anymore. They continue to run features like “Traffic and Weather Together on the 10s” instead of realizing that people get that information from their phones. Radio stations do things that are good for the bottom line (8 minutes of commercials at a time) that necessarily make the listening experience awful and drive listeners away. And don’t get us started about the medium’s ideological strait jacket!
We decided to work for ourselves, create a better product, and let the people who have always supported us get us unfiltered.
That’s why we’re here. And why we’re doing the podcast for you. Participate, enjoy, and spread the word that the boys are doing fine, having escaped the Ideological Sewer of Talkradio!