An AM radio can be put together for pennies. I’ve gotten them as giveaway swag before. This is the stupidest controversy. You could give everyone in America an AM radio for the cost of this lawsuit and they could just stick it in their car with the stereo jack.
I take no position on this. Seems to me the cost should be negligible if they are forced to include them and the harm will be negligible if they are removed.
My guess is this has been made a big deal by right wing media who see it as a threat to their ability to reach
imbecileslisteners and this would be a footnote otherwise.That being said, having an EBS receiver in cars isn’t a bad thing. Cell networks are unreliable in emergencies. Cell phones didn’t work for days after 9/11. Not that car radios would be particularly helpful in NYC with super low car ownership.
Seems like if they really cared about emergencies they would require car radios to support the actual weather band frequencies as well.
This is an absurd abuse of government power, which “small government” Republicans are going along with because the AM radio listening audience skews right. By the same logic, I suppose the next step is to force homeowners to subscribe to a landline and cable TV.
This is being spearheaded by Ed Markey, a Democrat. The reason lawmakers want to keep AM radio is that it’s still used for emergency broadcasts. AM radio may seem like a joke if you live in a urban area with good infrastructure, but if you live in a rural area with poor internet and cell service, AM radio may be vital in getting emergency alerts. Auto companies are fighting this because EV components interfere with AM signals, so they have to spend extra money to shield EV components. The narrative about Republican lawmakers wanting to amplify right wing radio hosts is neat, but this is just another case of automakers not wanting to shell out a few extra bucks for a safety feature.
Then people living in rural areas, who need AM radio, can spend a bit more to get it as an optional package. Or like 5 bucks to get a stand-alone radio. Why force everyone else to get it?
Same reason we force new cars to come with a LATCH system for car seats, even if you don’t have kids; we want safety features to ubiquitous, even in the resale market, and we don’t want car manufacturers charging consumers more for them. This legislation would basically make carmakers treat AM radio like a safety feature, so they can’t up-charge rural consumers who need it more. Also, this legislation doesn’t put the entire burden on the carmaker. It also requires the government to look for alternatives to AM radio that could serve the same function (although I doubt they’ll find a non-digital alternative with the range of AM):
The proposed legislation would also direct the Government Accountability Office to study whether “an alternative communication system” could replicate and have the same impact that AM radio has for transmitting emergency information. (Source)
This is an aside. Using the term “skews” the way you did is common and incorrect. Generally, it’d be best to avoid the word skew when referring to right leaning or left leaning political ideas.
Why? Because a “Right Skew” would mean the data clusters to the left. And vice versa.
Google it! I swear!
It’s a pet peeve of mine. Not when people say it, just that it’s wrong even though it sounds right.
Carry on.
I like pedantry as much as the next person, but skew is a regular English word as well as a statistical term. It’s clear here which usage they meant.
The context they used it was the statistical term, though.
They aren’t describing something’s appearance. They’re describing the nature of the distribution.
They then are describing the visual aesthetic of the distribution, which is at odds with the description of the distribution. This is exactly my point. It stands.
No it wasn’t
Yes it was.
The word “skew” cannot apply to a population in any other sense than a statistical sense. It cant be stretched and malformed as the nonstatistical definition would suggest.
What’s to stop auto makers from putting one crappy am radio with a tinny speaker built into the dash labeled “Emergency Radio”?
Nothing, other than that there’s no possible way that’d actually be cheaper than just including it in the godawful-complicated touch screen entertainment center that will pathologically already exist in every new car.
The only reason they want them out is because AM radios reveal the amount of radio spectrum pollution the vehicle electronics are spewing out.
Solution is for the automaker to spend a few bucks on RFI filtering for LED drivers, etc.
The only reason they want them out is because AM radios reveal the amount of radio spectrum pollution the vehicle electronics are spewing out.
And the only reason Republicans want to keep them is because of the amount of bigotry and hate Republican hosts spew on the band. The party of GWB’s response to Katrina and Trump’s response to covid does not care about disseminating accurate information during a crisis.
I’m a radio enthusiast. I like listening to it at night because you can pick up stuff from thousands of miles away. When the ionosphere is higher and stronger. Especially camping out in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s fine. You don’t need a mandate for cars to have AM radios in order to continue doing that.
It’s not like they’re gonna put in more than the bare minimum to say they complied with the law anyway.
If AM broadcasts lose listeners due to the bands removal from vehicles, they will also likely lose income from marketing and other revenue streams. I assume AM radio is already in a precarious entertainment space and doubt they want more risk.
If right wing hate radio loses listeners, good.
While I agree with the sentiment, AM radio is also used for emergency broadcasts and other forms of communication. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Fix the underlying issues.
Edit: typo
