An open letter to the radio guys.

How can you guys sit around bitching about your tiny raises, your shrinking sales, or the quality of various brands of earphones, when eight of your bosses just got together and, in the name of "HD Digital Radio" promotion, effectively quashed programming competition and creativity? Their new cabal reportedly intends to decide who gets to do which format on their stations' new digital subchannels. And they're inviting the rest of your bosses to join their "alliance."

I guess they figure the FCC's too busy debating indecency to be bothered with questions of licensees handing off programming responsibility, and the Justice Department's too tied up with unsuccessful terrorist prosecutions to notice flagrant antitrust violations.

Sure, it's hard when two satellite companies can slip a whole new radio operating system into your formerly captive dashboards. But the solution isn't more consolidation, no matter how logical this seems. The real problem here is that the Wall Street radio geniuses have just shot radio in its other foot, your best foot, the local programming foot that you might have put forward. Where's Eliot Spitzer when we need him?

How about you licensees of the other 10,000 stations just saying no to the Gang of Eight?