Well, at first it seemed like fun just waiting around to see how long it would take for our clue-crippled local rag to lift its slumbering head and groggily mention a major radio deal affecting (a) the #2 station in its “market” and (b) the #9 station, which also happens to be the top-rated “classical” station in the country. But as the days wear on, it becomes drearily apparent that this is simply going to become a tale not told by an idiot – or any idiot in town, it would seem – and it’s less & less fun, and ever more an exercise in open-mouthed astonishment.

Yes indeed, as of this writing, fully six days after it was announced, you may search the on-line presence of not only the Chron, but the Examiner, the Oakland Trib, and the local tabloids as well, for any hint of the swap that sends the unspeakable KDFC from the Mormons into the hands of Entercom – in the very same week that the latter was all over the news as owners of a not-quite-as-inadvertently-homicidal-as-they-might-wish Sacramento station. Is there any satisfaction in what amounts to scooping the entire local “news” apparatus? Hardly, unless one counts vertigo, nausea, and brain freeze as forms of satisfaction.

So for those who haven’t been paying attention because they assume the crack reporting teams at their local papers can be trusted to do it for them, note that Bonneville is trading two San Francisco giants of aural anaesthesia, #2 KOIT and #9 KDFC, and a minor-leaguer, #20-or-thereabouts KMAX, for three big Seattle stations and four in Cincinnati.

I guess it shows that KDFC has been more effective than anyone suspected, since it seems to have succeeded in rendering the entire San Francisco media establishment comatose. Oh well – I guess death by a steady diet of numbingly third-rate sewing-machine music and smarmy condescension is less painful than death by water.

UPDATE Saturday 01-27: Nine days and counting.

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