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Post by David on Feb 18, 2017 12:50:47 GMT -6
KDYL (1060 AM) has been off the air for at least two days now, and the station's yellowpages.com listing reports the business as closed. Since the FCC AM station query is down at present, I can't research to see if the station has a silent application pending. Does anyone know if China Radio International decided to pull the plug on its CRI AM stations in the US?
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Post by CAwasinNJ on Feb 18, 2017 20:29:31 GMT -6
I can hear something in Chinese on 1060 now, so I would say the answer is no. Even if it were silent I'd be surprised if it was permanent. KDYL is a cheap outlet for Chinese government propaganda so why not leave it running?
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Post by David on Feb 19, 2017 9:00:40 GMT -6
CA, I don't know where you're located, but in Ogden I'm still getting nothing but static and white noise during the daytime on 1060. At night I'm hearing a station in Canada but nothing in Chinese, which is really strange because I can usually hear strains of KDYL even after local sunset. Either they've reduced power to the point where one has to be within 20 miles of their transmitter to hear the station or they're off the air, and I can't check the FCC site because it appears to be down for the President's Day holiday. Moreover, how effective of a propaganda tool is a station that broadcasts 95% of its programming in Mandarin Chinese? I can probably count on my fingers and toes the number of people in the Salt Lake metro that are fluent in that language.
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Terry
Silver Level Member
Posts: 488
Usual Listening Area: east Murray
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Post by Terry on Feb 19, 2017 11:22:21 GMT -6
I'm on the east side of Murray and 1060 is off the air at the moment.
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Post by David on Feb 19, 2017 12:48:20 GMT -6
The FCC and DOJ were supposed to be investigating G&E Studios/James Su last year to see if his ownership of U.S. radio stations violated FCC rules which prohibits representatives of a foreign government from owning American radio stations. However, I've never read anything indicating what the outcome of the investigation was, or even if the FCC and DOJ proceeded with the investigation. I believe that KDYL is one of the few stations in Mr. Su's network which is actually partially owned by a subsidiary of CRI; most of the AM stations that broadcast the CRI programming are just leased. It just seems odd that KDYL has been off the air for three days now and their yellow pages listing has marked the business as closed. It makes me wonder if the FCC shut down the station because of its foreign ownership interest. If memory serves, a station can only be off the air for 10 days without notifying the FCC, so perhaps we'll find out more about KDYL later this week.
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Post by CAwasinNJ on Feb 19, 2017 17:18:46 GMT -6
I'm in Davis and KDYL is down again at the moment. The FCC site has a misconfiguration so yes it's hard to get information from it. I'll keep trying to see if there was an application made for being silent but I doubt it.
I don't think anyone involved with CRI cares all that much about how *many* people can listen as much as they care that the message is out there at all. It's all about "getting the word out." There are a lot of radio stations that are that way. Religious stations spring to mind, as well at stations like KKAT that run network talk programming that almost nobody listens to. Does anyone listen to KDYL? Probably not, but they "reach" 1.8 million people. That's their point.
As far as the investigation of James Su, I haven't heard anything either and I know the trades will light up if there's anything to the investigation. He also owns WILD Boston which is Nielsen market 10 and will get lots of attention if anything happens there. The speculation when this began was that the connection was at arms length and it wasn't a problem. Technicalities count in the law.
Bottom line, I'll bet it's just a technical issue and once that's fixed the station will be back to normal.
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Post by CAwasinNJ on Feb 19, 2017 17:26:02 GMT -6
P.S. Nobody should ever trust crowdsourced wikis like yellowpages.com, though in this case it's correct. If you look at the listings for KDYL there you'll see they refer to the Holiday Broadcasting version of the station not the Su ownership.
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Post by David on Feb 19, 2017 18:03:21 GMT -6
It's funny you should mention how many people KDYL "reaches". Here's a comment from a former CRI employee about the subject (last comment on the page): swling.com/blog/2015/11/reuters-fcc-and-justice-department-investigate-chinese-radio-network/#commentsIt seems ludicrous to me that someone would spend $712,000 to buy a radio station and pay the power bill for 10 KW daytime for maybe a couple hundred listeners, but it's Su and RCI that are flushing their money down the toilet, not me. I can understand the appeal of a Chinese language station in Boston or DC, but in Salt Lake City?? The Asian population is about 4% in the SLC metro, and there might be a handful of returned missionaries that are fluent in Mandarin Chinese. I don't know what Su was thinking when he set up shop here, but I'm sure Ralph Carlson didn't care as long as the check cleared. I'd be willing to bet that any one of the three religious stations on AM have more listeners in a week than KDYL has in a month, or even a year for that matter. I know that KDYL has been off the air in the past, but usually not for more than 24 hours. I first noticed the station being off the air Friday afternoon, so for all I know it could have been off for a day or two before then. And thanks for the yellow pages clarification. I noticed there were two listings for KDYL, but I didn't notice that the closed one was for the pre-CRI station. UPDATE: KDYL is back on the air as of 5:00 PM Sunday. I guess someone finally noticed that no one was listening.  |
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Post by David on Mar 3, 2017 20:31:51 GMT -6
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