SonicChicken blog

About two months ago, KCTC started broadcasting Air America Radio programming, replacing KSAC as the Sacramento affiliate for AAR. I wasn’t able to find any programming information on KCTC’s web site back in November, but today I checked again. They do have a program schedule, but for some reason they chose to ignore accessibility guidelines and buried the schedule in a graphic:

Also, there are no links to the shows’ web sites. In an attempt to correct these problems, I’ve transcribed the KCTC lineup graphic into the table below. All times are Pacific, in 24-hour format. The “Live?” column indicates whether the show is being broadcast live, via tape delay, or a replay of an earlier broadcast.

Please note that I haven’t verified this schedule. This is just a copy of what I found on the KCTC web site on 2006-01-02. If you find any errors, please drop me a comment.

My wife and I usually wake up to Air America Radio, broadcast in Sacramento by KSAC, Talk City 1240 AM. But on Monday, Oct 3, the clock-radio woke us up with music instead of Morning Sedition with Mark and Marc (Mark Riley and Marc Maron). I thought maybe the kids had been messing with radio, or maybe there were “technical difficulties” at the station. But today the same thing happened, so I started scouring the ‘net looking for answers.

First stop was Talk City 1240’s web site, which wasn’t encouraging. Their “On-Air Schedule” has all the previous Air America time slots listed as “To Be Announced.” They still have an Air America Radio logo on their banner, but none of the programming.

Next stop was Air America Radio’s web site. I searched for “Sacramento” on their station locator page, but the only station listed is KSAC 1240 AM.

I found a post by bonniesac which talks about Air America changing frequencies and moving to 1320 AM on 1 Nov 2005, but this doesn’t explain the absence of programming today. bonniesac is blogging on the Sacramento for Democracy site, which unfortunately doesn’t allow unregistered users to post comments. (Perhaps a pingback from this post will get through, but I’m not hopeful.)

There is another post, this time on the Morning Sedition blog, which also discusses the frequency change. It also has some theories on the lack of official information from both Talk City 1240 and Air America. (And again, this blog doesn’t allow unregistered users to comment. Closed blogs suck, but that’s a subject for another post.)

I haven’t found anything else yet, but this seems to explain what’s going on. I guess all us progressive/liberal types will have to get Air America programming via the Internet for the rest of October, before switching to the new station next month.

Andy let me know that the Sacramento Bee ran an article about this recently.