Claiming advertising agencies would pay .30 cents less per spot on a "black" station than the same agency would pay on a "white" station means one thing for sure. That "black" radio station's sales staff doesn't understand how to compose a deal. And if you ask anyone in radio - stations that rely on ad agencies to buy up their inventory are not really putting their best effort forward to make the most amount of money anyway. Consider that my second year in New York WABC - the biggest talk radio station in America grossed $24 million in revenue, that same year under strong sales leadership WMCA grossed roughly $18 million. The difference being that WABC had at least seven or eight times the audience that WMCA had for the same period of time.

If some one isn't getting enough money from advertisers for their radio station - that's no one's fault but the sales people setting up the contracts.

For what its worth - on my show on WMCA in New York - African Americans made up the largest segment of my talk show audience - nearly 37%. Whites were next, followed by Latinos, Asians, and various Semitic and Arab groups following. In other words we were predominantly a"black listened too" radio station, at least more so than any other demographic.

Certainly given the numbers that KISS-FM could garner - being the number one, two, or three station in the market (above WABC-AM), surely they could have been as easily hard nosed about what their valuable air-time was worth and choose to do business with only those who would pay the rates of what their sizable audience would deliver.

The far more disturbing aspect of the panel than the fact that five liberal or center-left people complained about being victims (you always expect liberals to play the role of the victim) was the telling sign that they wished to institute "fairness doctrine" like tactics to fix it - which inherently would cause them to lose even MORE billing dollars by forcing them to deliver even smaller audiences in the future because of a lack of ability to generate the largest audience possible.

The ever fair Michael Harrison - never did get a straight answer to the very genuine follow-up question he posed about the fact that general market talk stations tend to draw sizable minority audiences anyway, so was there even a need for such minority owned/divisive concepts to programming to begin with.

The implications of the panel could not be more clear. The panel that represented "black radio" in America today wants government enforced rules that tells businesses how much they may spend on any given station for advertising. They argued this out of laziness, either on philosophical or staff physicality bases.

Even more telling they ignored the prophet in their midst, who articulately argued that success should be based on effort, integrity, and character.

Or as Darrel from the hit TV series "The Office" argued to his "white boss" Michael Scott, "You gots to earn son!"