From WNYKRs in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. Last Saturday morning, the shuttle Columbia was destroyed. But if you were listening to one of a thousand automated stations programmed with a variety of formats,

you might never have known. I called both my brother-in-law and sister and told them about the shuttle. They hadn't

heard about it yet. Were they listening to the radio? Yeah, they were listening to a country station.

For Roger Wiggs, a former radio anchor and program director turned ad consultant, who lives

in Raleigh, North Carolina, that call capped a morning of frustration.

He woke up last Saturday to his usual station, W-R-A-L-F-M, owned by Capitol Broadcasting,

playing what's called a hot adult contemporary format.

I get out of the shower and the young lady comes on after one of their three in a row sets and says, stay tuned,

we're going to be telling you more about the shuttle disaster shortly. Well, that piqued my interest.

So I turned the radio up after two or three more songs. Stay with us. We're going to have

some details of that awful tragedy on the shuttle coming up shortly.

I said, this is ridiculous. So then I started punching around the dial. As he punched through

Raleigh Durham's top 10 radio stations, he found soft rock, hip-hop, best of shows, almost none of it

live or local. The market's only news talk

station, WPTF AM, had the story, but Wiggs ended up tethered to his cable TV for the news.

He emailed his disappointment to a chat room for radio professionals called NetTalk.

At radio stations everywhere, he lamented, quote,

the computers were playing hits all of the time as the nation mourn the loss of the

Columbia. It would have worked out better for millions of Americans if we could have followed

this important story live on radio. They're all run by computers now. And if the shows

...