Ford has joined the growing list of automakers who plan to phase out AM radio in their cars. Loyal Scaiaholics will recall I still like rockin’ out to some BTO when I’m on a road trip and, when I had to replace my stereo, had to seek out a CD player.

As king of the AM radio malcontents, I should probably feel differently about this, but part of me, a substantial part, wants me to yell out, “Maybe it’s AM radio’s fault!”

Granted, that same truck I wrote about is now old enough to vote, so I tune into AM frequently there. But a lot of our station’s audience listens through the app.

This is an older story, but I feel like it encapsulates the argument made by those who consider AM radio a growth medium. “More people listen to AM radio than read the newspaper, and newspapers are doing great!”

A lot of people do still listen to AM radio, but compelling content will drive that audience, not government intervention to force automakers to keep including it. The argument is that AM stations are in charge of delivering emergency messages.

Those messages can save lives in a tornado warning or Amber Alert. But listen, we learned last year maybe relying on these newfangled “fax” machines may not be the best way to distribute information in an emergency. Without a focus on compelling content, AM radio is headed down the same path.

The last two companies I worked for have gone bankrupt. Meantime, the last local talk show host at my station in Portland just retired.

Mark Mason and Dave Anderson worked together when I was at KEX. They knew the city. They knew, and this may come as a shock, that the same political talk shows that drew an audience in other parts of the country may not succeed in a place like Portland. Their show focused less on politics from either side and poked fun at life’s foibles.

Mark even had me on his show after Hurricane Harvey to talk about how I got fired from my last bankrupt company for getting water damage to a car in a hurricane I was assigned to drive into.

So with Mark retiring, KEX’ parent company considers Glenn Beck an adequate replacement to draw an audience in the Portland market.

I was recently exchanging emails with my first boss from back in SuperOregon. I’m not one of those radio nerds, but I had sent him a link to this video about WLW in Cincinnati, which I grew up listening to. Some of the former hosts there talked about how radio has gone from putting the product first to ad departments running the show.

They say creativity has disappeared, and no one takes chances.

I was allowed to take chances in SuperOregon. That’s how I wound up with a church choir singing my name to the Hallelujah Chorus.

We may be arriving at a point where no one will take a risk to improve AM radio and draw the audience back but we also fight against any other types of communication.

Imagine if we’d dug in on older forms of communication. We’d have to warn people about tornado warnings by inscribing them on stone tablets and preaching them from the tops of very tall mountains.

It would have taken years to beat back the stone tablet lobby in order to make way for carrier pigeons. And now those carrier pigeons would be everywhere trying to deliver Amber Alerts, just constantly flying into jet engines and defecating on sidewalks.