Former radio rascal Dahl sues over former radio ratings method

Under the old diary system Dahl was consistently at or near number one in his target demographic (25-to-54-year-old men who thought "there but for the grace of God go I" when they listened to Dahl, "but he is funny.")

But when the new people meters were put in, Dahl's ratings tanked. And he was yanked off the air by CBS radio, which decided it would rather pay out his $2 million a year contract than put him on any of the seven stations it operates in Chicago.

Dahl's experience, in fact, is cited as proof that the meters work because the industry was stunned when after 12 years of being on in the afternoon on WCKG (105.9 FM), Dahl was able to switch to mornings on a different station, WJMK (104.3 FM), and didn't skip a beat. He had excellent ratings.

Alas, that rating was the last time the old diary system was used. In the very next ratings period, with the people meters, Dahl disappeared. You couldn't ask for a greater condemnation of the old system or a better validation of the new one. Obviously, people were just writing in that they listened but they weren't really listening.

"If I'd known I was doing a bad show, I would have stopped doing things like just let the audience listen to me eat on the air. But with no proper feedback, I thought they liked the feedbag. See, that was funny. See, I'm good," said Dahl during a break in his podcast show which originates in his basement. His sidekick is his sump pump named "Sumpy."

Dahl deliberately lets his backyard pool overflow so that water seeps into his basement and the sump pump has to work and make noise. "Sumpy isn't as good as Buzz (Kilman),  who could pretend like he really enjoyed everything I said. But he'll do. Don't tell him, though, that I'll be leaving when the winter comes and I'll be originating the show from Florida."

Dahl added that he has now become a much more disciplined performer. "When I tweet about food, I'm glad that I have to do it in 140 characters or fewer. I wind up eating less, too, because there's less room to talk about eating. Twitter disciplines me."

But while Dahl twitters away his time, he is no longer a radio presence, and he believes he has been damaged. He may be joined in the lawsuit by WGN radio, which has disappeared in the target demographic except when Cubs games are on.

"WGN ran into the same problem that I did. All those years people were just writing down that they were listening to WGN because, well, listeners are a lying pile of sh--, I guess. I don't know. Or they're lazy. So 'GN just kept adding more and more commercials, and the ratings were still high. I mean I always knew that the late radio rascal Bob Collins and former  radio rascal Spike O'Dell were unlistenable. I just couldn't prove it," Dahl said.

One legal expert, former radio rascal Janet Dahl,  an attorney, characterized Dahl's lawsuit as "groundbreaking, and that's being charitable," but she added that anything is possible. In fact Janet Dahl herself scored a major victory several years ago when she garnered what was estimated as a seven-figure settlement in her own lawsuit, Dahl v. Emmis Broadcasting.

In that lawsuit Dahl (Janet) claimed that radio rascal Mancow Muller had defamed her by accusing her of adultery and fornication, including but not limited to sex with her mailman and a dog (but not necessarily sex with the mailman while he was being attacked by a dog, this not being the state of Utah which frowns on but looks the other way on Big Love).

At first, legal experts laughed off the lawsuit as Dahl's attorney purportedly argued that Dahl was not a public figure even though she had been on her husband's show hundreds of times over the years, which would certainly make her more public than about 90% of the radio "personalities" in the history of Chicago radio, since her husband's show was quite popular.

(Well, popular by the ratings method of the era. It is quite possible that if the lawsuit were to be filed in this era, Dahl could argue that she was not a public figure because few were really listening to her husband's show.)

How certain legal questions were disposed of by the court are not known because the case was settled with the parties apparently agreeing not to mention the suit in public (such reticence follows the Howard Stern rule of broadcasting which stipulates that one may talk endlessly about the size of one's genitalia but must be modest about the size of one's income).

So it's not known whether the court ruled that Janet Dahl was a public figure or whether the defense would have been  allowed to try a theory analagous to "piercing the corporate veil," which the defense was going to call "piercing the wedding veil," an attempt to show that Janet and Steve Dahl were one entity, basically a radio team.

In fact, Dahl's entire family is part of his team and he has brought shame and ridicule on them for things he actually did, as opposed to the obviously fabricated Muller satire, amateurish as it was.

That any adult would believe what Muller had said about Janet Dahl strains credulity. But it is possible that Muller's audience, composed largely of idiot teenagers, could have believed some or all of what Muller said, and those teens could have taunted the Dahl children.

Thus, a basis for collecting a seven-figure sum, hypocritical as it might seem for the Dahls, who have made their living by Steve Dahl's often tasteless humor. Didn't he say almost immediately after Bob Collins was killed in a plane crash that he (Dahl) was now the king of Chicago radio?

Ok, sure, that still is funny, especially since Collins found Disco Demolition abhorrent, but finally, 20 years after Dahl had first uttered the word "suck" on the air, Collins felt it was safe to come out and say it. The yellow bastard. You go, Steve. Never mind about all the foregoing. You're still the greatest.

Matter of fact, sue me. I'll bet there are some people who won't get this far in this piece and will actually think you are suing Arbitron, which makes you look like an idiot. Alas, the ratings service for blogs is deadly accurate. So I don't think there will be much damage.

The term radio rascal is owned by Sun-Times columnist Michael Sneed (gesundheit).