David Gleason is set to receive the first-ever Library of American Broadcasting Foundation’s Excellence in Broadcast Preservation Award. The award ceremony will take place at NAB Show New York on October 26, immediately following the LABF’s panel session.
Gleason’s 64-year career in broadcasting took him across various major US markets and 16 countries in Latin America. For the past two decades, he has dedicated his time and personal funds to build an expansive online archive of broadcasting and cable trade publications, books, and other media resources. The archive, dubbed World Radio History, has amassed more than nine million pages, all of which are publicly accessible and searchable online.
LABF Co-chairs Heidi Raphael and Jack Goodman lauded Gleason’s contributions, saying, “There is no stopping him. What David has accomplished – virtually single-handedly — is extraordinary. He’s made an unparalleled contribution not only to the history of broadcasting, but to the story of the modern world as reflected and shaped by the media.”
David Gleason is a tool. He moderates the Radio Discussion website. It appears to me its sole purpose is to serve as a vanity project for him to obtain sycophants to like his comments and be snarky and unwelcoming towards newer non-radio industry contributors and anyone else he thinks challenges him. Told me not to post on his website unless I can provide statistics over an opinion/commentary I posted, which make no sense. How do you provided statistics on an opinion? Then, he flipped out and went spastic rattling off a bunch of radio station call letters to try to prove I was wrong. Additionally, a lot of other people posted opinions and commentaries on the site, none with statistics, but for some reason he singled me out. Said CHR stood for Current Hits Radio when it actually stands for Contemporary Hit Radio. Another poster had to tip-toe around him to correct him. He singled me out on another discussion about the number of radio stations that were changing to religious formats, attributing a comment made by another user to me, which was then obnoxiously mentioned repeatedly in every one of his replies to comments I posted afterward. He wouldn’t let it go. It apparently challenged him when I spoke as a listener about how bad radio stations are for running the same 20 songs into the ground as he supposedly contributed to or supports the researching of those songs and believes that’s what people want to hear. He was totally uninterested in hearing anything from a listener’s perspective; my comments were immediately slammed as wrong. He could educate himself by hearing why a listener such as myself now turns to streaming instead of listening to the radio but instead chooses to believe in what the market research says and discourage any poster’s input that challenges that because he can’t handle being wrong. He’s a bitter, old, obnoxious know-it-all type radio programmer with unsteady employment that fronts his insecurities with arrogance and by treating people who put him back in his place rudely. At least one other user on RD called him out for being a know-it-all, and a user on the Pulse World site commented about the Radio Discussions site saying “Very elitist group of members it seems that deconstruct every post made by others and do not welcome any kind of dissent. I have seen several complaints about the site from others….”
Well deserved!!!