In response to last week’s Letter to the Editor (“Is anyone listening,” April 3), it’s truly unfortunate that there is an increasingly corrosive pattern in Malibu: people not just criticizing others, but doing so without first checking their facts or inventing their own “facts” to bolster their arguments.
Contrary to assertions regarding the proposal to bring FM radio back to Malibu:
• Hans Laetz and I both started our careers in radio. Between the two of us, we’ve collectively spent more decades in broadcasting than either of us wants to admit.
• My time on the Telecommunications Commission only served to reinforce what I already knew as a local resident: Malibu’s cell service is completely unreliable up and down the entire coast, with several well-known dropout points. Music applications such as Spotify and Pandora stop playing and must be restarted every time the cell signal is lost (and please: eyes and hands on the road, people!).
• The satellite radio business has so few subscribers that Sirius and XM had to merge just to survive. Even now, its collective subscriber base is less than eight percent of the population.
• Yes, terrain and power issues can’t be ignored. That’s why KBUU is just one of the two frequencies we have applied for — one serving the east side of Malibu, and one serving the west. Together, those two signals can definitely provide coverage of most of our coast.
• The news and traffic information provided by the LA stations do not focus specifically on Malibu or PCH, and, as anyone who lives here knows, most of the FM stations in LA don’t reach much beyond Sunset Blvd. As for the other side of the band: AM radio may have been big in 1956, but most of us don’t listen to it any more.
Most of those serving on our all-volunteer boards are longtime local residents who have already been honored for all of their selfless service to our community. It’s truly unfortunate that now that we’re once again stepping up to devote even more of our time on something a lot of us want and can benefit from, people can’t wait to criticize it.
Scott Tallal