If I have to listen to ONE MORE mention of boobs or bikinis or what a gf should do I’m going to vomit into my mouth.
seriously. Never ever do the female DJs say’ ooooh, there is a beach party , lets go look at some big bulged speedos’ The guys are ALWAYS talking about themselves…how they did this and that, how they are feeling etc. And that guy screaming along to heavy songs? OUCH
Even when they were talking about bike riding and bike paths the guy had to throw in he likes to go biking to look at girls bums.
I’d rather listen to the hour long Buddhist chants. Done with that stupid station.
It probably depends on what time you listen. I have been listening in the morning on the way to work and I haven’t noticed any talk like that. Just Jeff Mendish, Gavin Phipps, and Bill Theisson doing the weather and sports. (I don’t know how to spell thier names. Sorry.) But if you listen to ‘Ron’, I can imagine. It wouldn’t hurt to send them an e-mail.
All I know is that most of their DJs make serious pronunciation blunders, especially of names of very well know people. A few years ago I even heard Jopseph Lin and his female co-host (can’t remember who she was) REPEATEDLY pronounce WIMBLEDON as WimbleTon on a segment sponosred Gram English of all companies!
Can’t say I blame them, however, for sounding enthusiastic about female bums and boobies as I’m rather partial to them.
ICRT used to hire professional DJs from the US. But like everything else in this giant race to the bottom that we call Formosa, it must get perpetually shittier.
With the exception of “helpful” cabbies, I don’t think I’ve ever listened to ICRT. It was crap in 2003 when I first came here and I can’t imagine it’s improved since.
ICRT has always been consistently cringingly awful for decades. OK, Nick Gould’s Issues show was mildly interesting, but that was almost 20 years ago and an exception that proves the rule.
The more interesting thing for me about ICRT though is how it stopped being profitable. Deuce says there is a race to the bottom, but my understanding is that back in the 1980s ICRT only had to compete with a few moribund state and military run dinosaurs. At a time when Taiwan was still under martial law and cut off from the outside world, ICRT had a monopoly on the airwaves to play foreign music and provide at least some form of contact with the world through the medium of English. Remember, this was back when learning English was cool!
ICRT was profitable (enormously so?), so foreigners were allowed to run the show and had fat contracts.
So what happened? Competition. In the 1990s, Taiwan issued new commerical licenses to Mandarin-language stations like UFO. These professionally-run operations blew fat, complacent ICRT out of the water. ICRT lost is listeners not because it was too cheap, but because it couldn’t or wouldn’t compete. And also perhaps because there just isn’t a very large market for English-language media in Taiwan, as has been proven time and time again.
That’s my reading from the outside. Maybe someone here knows more of the inside story.
I like Groove In the City and the UK Beat…That’s it. Used to enjoy the rapport between Rick and Bill in the morning on occasion, but even that has met its end.
[quote=“Feiren”]ICRT has always been consistently cringingly awful for decades. OK, Nick Gould’s Issues show was mildly interesting, but that was almost 20 years ago and an exception that proves the rule.
The more interesting thing for me about ICRT though is how it stopped being profitable. Deuce says there is a race to the bottom, but my understanding is that back in the 1980s ICRT only had to compete with a few moribund state and military run dinosaurs. At a time when Taiwan was still under martial law and cut off from the outside world, ICRT had a monopoly on the airwaves to play foreign music and provide at least some form of contact with the world through the medium of English. Remember, this was back when learning English was cool!
ICRT was profitable (enormously so?), so foreigners were allowed to run the show and had fat contracts.
So what happened? Competition. In the 1990s, Taiwan issued new commerical licenses to Mandarin-language stations like UFO. These professionally-run operations blew fat, complacent ICRT out of the water. ICRT lost is listeners not because it was too cheap, but because it couldn’t or wouldn’t compete. And also perhaps because there just isn’t a very large market for English-language media in Taiwan, as has been proven time and time again.
That’s my reading from the outside. Maybe someone here knows more of the inside story.[/quote]
Good analysis, Feiren. Also the fact that ICRT moved from their downtown office to the boondocks (is it Wugu?) goes to show that.
ICRT always had a couple decent people, and the rest was awful. I don’t recall complaining about Jeff Mendish or Bill Theisson, for instance. I used to like the news, and the jazz show. Otherwise I hated the station. That was 15 to 10 years ago. I haven’t listened to it in at least 10 years.
Do what I did – turn on a local station like the education station, and leave it on for 5 years. It’s good for your listening comprehension.
I think there’s two different things going one here. One is the Battery9’s objection to the sexist bent of some DJs. Then there’s whether you think it’s a good station or not.
