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March 29, 2007

Welcome, Dan, to CBS Radio

CBS CEO Les Moonves announced earlier this week that radio industry veteran Dan Mason would become president and CEO of the CBS Radio division replacing Joel Hollander. Peter Lauria in the NY Post indicated that Hollander and Moonves had a “testy relationship” and that “In choosing Mason, Moonves is making the safe bet, selecting an executive entrenched in radio and intimately familiar with CBS.” It’s also a safe bet that Mason will have his hands full, especially in dealing with his executive vice president/Western region, Brian Ongaro, who has been indicted, along with seven others, on 33 counts of mail fraud, conspiracy and money laundering, according to the Dallas Business Journal and the East Valley Tribune.

According to Lauria in the Post, in making the appointment, Moonves said, “[Dan's] perspectives on how radio can thrive and grow in our highly competitive media world are very exciting. Dan has a key understanding of the huge potential of our radio operations.” Really? I’ll bet if you ran into Moonves at cocktail party and asked him what Dan Mason was going to do to increase revenues, get more involved in the Internet, and fix the hole in morning-drive time programming left by Howard Stern’s defection to Sirius Satellite Radio, you’d get a blank look. You might even get “Who’s Dan Mason.”

In large media conglomerates that own television assets, radio has always been a poor, n-word stepchild, and CBS is no exception. Of the major media conglomerates (Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, CBS, and News Corp.), CBS is the only one that has a radio division. ABC sold most of its radio stations to Citadel last year because radio is a distraction and it’s not a glamorous growth business (ABC kept ESPN Radio and several Disney stations). Moonves probably doesn’t want to fool around with a radio division, even though it owns 144 stations and is second to Clear Channel in total revenue. He probably had a flunky write a nice and vanilla press release which he approved between going to Hollywood parties and watching pilots for the upcoming TV season.

Is Mason the right man for the job and can he grow revenues? Will he run an ethical, caring organization or will he be a brutal, screaming, nasty boss like his two predecessors, Hollander and Mel Karmazin? Will he get rid of the mean-spirited, sadistic, and indicted-for-fraud Brian Ongaro or keep him around? How he deals with Ongaro will be an indication of the tone of his stewardship.

The goals of a radio station general manager are: 1) Keep the license, 2) make a profit, and 3) get ratings. The FCC grants and renews radio stations’ licenses. When a group started by the pesky Ralph Nader filed a complaint against 63 Clear Channel radio stations in 2003, it said, “The FCC is required by statute to deny applications for license renewal if a licensee exhibits poor character.” If that’s the case, then Mason had better address the Ongaro issue quickly if he wants to look good to the FCC. Looking good to Moonves is another matter. Mason has to deliver profits to CBS and if the stations Ongaro oversees deliver enough profit, Moonves might not let him fire Ongaro, which will say a lot about Moonves.

The Mason appointment is probably the second biggest personnel decision Moonves has made, after the decision to have Katie Couric anchor the “The CBS Evening News.” That decision was a cynical one and hasn’t worked out, so Les is under pressure now to make some good ones. Can Mason make Moonves look good? What will Mason do about Brian Ongaro? Welcome, Dan, to CBS Radio.

Posted by Charles Warner at March 29, 2007 09:37 PM

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