Audacy has filed for the cancellation of the FCC license for KDWN-AM, known at the end of its life as “The Talk of Las Vegas.” The longtime talk station is better known as the original signal where Art Bell started West Coast AM, which would become Coast to Coast AM.
The station originally signed on on April 7, 1975.
Starting as an overnight shift in 1983, Art Bell’s discussion of the paranormal and conspiracy theories alongside politics boosted the show’s popularity, leading to its national syndication in 1993. Initially broadcast from KDWN’s studios at the Plaza Hotel, the show later moved to Bell’s home studio and found a new home on Las Vegas’ KXNT-AM.
KDWN also played a pivotal role in Rush Limbaugh’s early syndication growth, becoming one of his first affiliates in 1988.
In 2006, Beasley Media Group acquired KDWN. The station introduced new shows and carried Raiders games until 2019. Beasley traded KDWN to Audacy in October 2022, who sold its transmitter site five months later for $40 million. KDWN signed off on March 1, 2023, with programming continuing on KMXB-HD3 and an FM translator.
Audacy applied to cancel KDWN’s license on March 11 after a year of silence. With the AM’s shuttering, KXNT – also owned by Audacy – is now Southern Nevada’s Primary Entry Point station for the Emergency Alert System.
Alongside the end of KDWN, comes the cancellation of Audacy’s KXST-AM license as well. The sports station came with the Entercom/CBS Radio merger, and shared the tower site with KDWN.
If the licenses of KDWN and KXST are cancelled, nobody can buy them. The FCC will have to open a filing window and the religious broadcasters (or anyone else interested in the frequencies) will have to bid in an auction to win the construction permits.
It’s just simply another way to silence conservatives who are deemed white supremacists, anti-immigrant (as illegal aliens are not immigrants), racist, or homophobic for wanting our laws enforced, the mass birthright citizenship rort that is closing or bankrupting hospitals due to the tremendous costs of prenatal care and record numbers of child births to self-designate their children as citizens. These children have grown up to become politicians born to illegal alien parents and elected to office by their illegal alien countrymen who they consider their only constituents. They are the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. Now American dissent is considered toxic to the leftist liberal criminal Demoncat Party and the National Council of La Raza to secure electoral hegemony while simultaneously handing Latinos (regardless of immigration status) as per the anti-Republican Big Tech “community guidelines” and to deem calling criminals who enter our country illegally as illegal aliens, hate speech. How better to silence Americans you don’t agree with than to take hold of the means they get or share their dissent? The automotive manufacturing arm of the liberal Demoncat Party has even decided to eliminate AM radios from their new vehicles…
I truly doubt if politics had anything to do with this. I point the blame on simple economics and the popular preference of technology. The 1980s song “Video Killed the Radio Star” comes to mind. Except here, the Internet is killing radio, as it is killing newspapers. I half expect some religious broadcaster to buy up KDWN and KXST’s frequencies and start satellite-fed Gospel stations few will listen to.