You had a great 100-year run, AM radio, and your demise is breaking my heart.
According to the Wall Street Journal, automakers such as Tesla, Volvo, and BMW no longer offer AM radios in their new vehicles.
Why? In part, because of the emergence of electric vehicles.
As the WSJ explains, citing the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an auto industry group, the electronics built into electric cars “create interference with AM radio signals, a phenomenon that ‘makes the already confusing AM radio frequency analogue is fundamentally inaudible. ‘”
EV brands can use armored wires and other parts to run AM radios, but, according to the Alliance, it would cost $3. 8 billion over seven years, which is why some corporations are phasing out AM radio.
Unfortunately, it is true that the economic and cultural heyday of AM radio touches us.
The first American radio broadcast took place on KDKA Radio in Pittsburgh on November 2, 1920, CBS News reports.
From the 1930s through the 1950s, KDKA-AM broadcast Pirates news, jazz, marching bands, and baseball games.
In 1954, his inner genius, Rege Cordic, created one of America’s first “morning shifts. “
In the 1970s, I woke up every day before I went to school and listened to Jack Bogut’s glorious KDKA morning show. I enjoyed his display so much that my most productive friend, Ayresie, and I skipped school one day in December 1979 to watch him broadcast from the window of a branch of the center, as he did every Christmas, when he was raising money for the Children’s Hospital.
Now, thanks to the emergence of streaming broadcasts, satellite radio and other options, AM and FM radio listenership have declined fast.
According to Nielsen, reports the WSJ, America’s 4,500 AM radio stations reached 107 million people every month in the spring of 2016 — but only 78 million people per month in 2023.
Due to the decline and the need to install functional AM radios in cars, more and more car brands are choosing to abandon AM radios.
But very fast, say AM radio advocates.
For starters, conservative communication screens (a staple of AM programming since the emergence of Rush Limbaugh in the early 1980s) have a lot to lose if AM radio disappears.
More than six hundred AM radio stations broadcast in languages other than English, making them an invaluable source of data for others for whom English is not their first language.
And federal emergency officials are pushing Congress to create legislation to prevent automakers from ditching AM radios in new vehicles, as they say AM is still a way to transmit emergency alerts and information.
The challenge of AM radio, one of the few on Capitol Hill with a strong bipartisanship, is not without irony.
Free-market conservatives sometimes argue that corporations are free to make their own possible choices about how to produce their products.
In this case, however, conservative lawmakers are pushing for a law that would require automakers to install AM radios, regardless of emerging prices for consumers.
The fight over AM radio is the kind of war waged in government when the new generation overtakes the centenarian generation.
Though the eventual death of AM radio can’t be reversed, it does make me sad.
Today’s youth will never enjoy the joy we felt when we sat in front of our radios on snowy Pittsburgh mornings, when KDKA announced that classes were canceled for the day.
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