tellhimfred.com

I’ve been a bum lately in that I haven’t updated this blog since April 25th, prior to going to Montreal for a week. Of course, while I was there, I had my trusty XM portable radio, so I was able to listen to O&A while I was in the hotel room.

Well, it looks like a new controversy has surfaced. Never willing to have his name out of the papers, Howard Stern announced on Monday that he had been offered a major deal that would put him back on terrestrial radio just like Opie and Anthony.

In the New York Post today, there’s a column by John Mainelli which says:

“The joke could be on them if I get good and worked up [because] I got offered a major deal to go back to terrestrial and stay on satellite at the same time,” Stern told his Sirius listeners in comments replayed and mocked yesterday by “O&A.”

“Can you imagine if I go across town against them in all those markets and just kick some a-? That would really be cool,” said Stern, who now broadcasts to about a tenth of his former audience.

If an offer was actually made to Stern, it most likely came from Citadel Broadcasting, which is in the process of acquiring Disney/ABC’s radio division - including New York’s WABC, WPLJ and WEPN - and is headed by former Infinity/CBS exec Farid Suleman.

Well, if you know anything about the history of Stern and Suleman, you’ll know that a deal like this would NEVER happen. Suleman is the head of Citadel, who, in 2004 decided to cut Stern’s show from five stations because Stern kept talking about his move to Sirius. He then replaced Stern’s show with O&A in Syracuse by airing their XM show.

To top that off, Suleman actually called O&A’s XM show yesterday, and was talking to them about future communication. It was abundantly clear that Citadel is not interested.

And if you go back to the Sirius conference call last week with Mel Karmazin, you’d note that Karmazin was asked whether he’d consider doing a deal like O&A to have Stern simultaneously broadcast on FM and satellite at the same time. Of course, he said no. But he wouldn’t rule it out in the future.