By Bill Bernardoni
I don't care which clock we keep — I just want the twice-a-year switch gone. But on a dark January morning, some small-town AM stations wouldn't be allowed on the air yet. Congress can fix that in the same bill.
There's a particular kind of quiet in a small-market radio station on a winter morning. The coffee's on, the school closings are stacked on the desk, and you're watching the clock. Not the one on the wall. The one that tells you when the sun comes up, because that's when the FCC lets you turn the power up.
I thought about that this week. On Monday, President Trump told the Senate to "TAKE A VOTE!" on making daylight saving time permanent, USA TODAY reported. The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act 301-117 in July. The Senate left town without acting, and we all fall back on Sunday.
Here's my take. I'm very much in favor of ending the change. I don't care whether we land on permanent daylight time or permanent standard time. Stop changing the clocks and be done with it. But while Congress is at it, somebody in the room should ask what happens to the small-town AM station that carries the school closings — especially if the vote goes the way the House already went.
The Public Has a Point
Count me with the people who want this done. We're the majority.
AP-NORC polling, as reported by TIME, found 47% of Americans oppose the twice-a-year change and only 12% support it. Asked which clock to keep, 56% picked permanent daylight time and 42% picked standard time. Supporters in both parties want an end to a ritual nobody enjoys. I'll take either clock. I just want one of them.
Steve Herman and I just dug into how we got here on America at 250: Due Diligence — our episode "It's Time," with historian Michael O'Malley and physicist Chad Orzel, on how America went from sun time to standard time to daylight saving, and why we still fight over the hour.
Radio Lives on Sunrise
Here's the part that doesn't come up at rallies. Thousands of AM stations have to sign off, cut power, or switch to a tighter signal pattern at night so they don't interfere with each other. For them, sunrise is when the station comes alive.
Permanent daylight time — the path in the House bill — pushes winter sunrise an hour later on the clock. TIME cited an AccuWeather projection that Indianapolis wouldn't see the sun until after 9 a.m. on Jan. 15, 2027. For a daytime-only station, that's most of morning drive gone. Permanent standard time wouldn't create that morning hole. Permanent daylight time would. So if that's the clock Congress picks, the AM fix has to travel with the bill.
When the Senate passed a version of this bill in 2022, Randy Miller, whose Miller Media Group then ran daytime AMs in Clinton and Taylorville, Illinois, told Radio World: "Our expanded local newscasts air in each market at 7:10 a.m., which means they won't be heard." He was thinking about snow days. Kids and parents would miss the closings. His local advertisers would lose the morning, too, with what he called an "8:15 a.m. sign-on."
I worked for Randy during COVID — morning show host, helped with the news, and hosted on a few of his music stations too — so I know how seriously those stations took the morning newscasts. He no longer owns them. When he said the 7:10 news wouldn't be heard, he wasn't making a talking point. He was reading his schedule.
At the time, the FCC counted 1,011 daytime-only Class D AM stations, per that same report. Many of them are in towns like Taylorville.
The National Association of Broadcasters' October 2026 issue sheet makes the same point in plainer terms. Permanent DST would delay "the time many AM broadcasters could come on the air in the morning, thus depriving their local listeners of critical news and information during morning drive time."
The Fix Is Already on the Books
The good news is that this is a solvable problem, and it shouldn't slow the bill down.
Stations would get some afternoon back in winter, when some of them now have to power down before the evening commute. Plenty of AMs also simulcast on an FM translator, and that softens the hit. And we've done this before. During the 1974 experiment with year-round daylight time, the FCC moved daytimers' pre-sunrise sign-on up an hour to make up for the lost morning.
We fixed it once. We can fix it again.
It does take some care. Pre-sunrise operation is capped at 500 watts or less, and AM engineers warn that more nighttime power means more interference. A tiny signal at 7 a.m. isn't the same as a full one.
The Patchwork Problem
There's one more wrinkle. The House bill lets states opt out and stay on standard time all year. That sounds like local control, and it is. It could also leave a radio market straddling two states on two different clocks. NAB warns that drive-time radio in those markets "would suddenly reach only half the intended audience at once."
That's one more reason I'd rather see one national clock than a patchwork. Pick it — daylight or standard — and plan for the stations that carry the school closings.
The Bottom Line
Most of us are tired of changing the clocks. I am too. Pick one clock and stick with it.
But a small-town AM station that can't sign on until 8:15 a.m. in January isn't a rounding error. It's the school-closing announcement nobody hears.
When the Senate takes this up after the election, it should end the switch and — if it goes with permanent daylight time — pair that with a plan, from Congress or the FCC, to keep local AM mornings on the air. That's what we did in 1975. It's not too much to ask now.
Set your clocks back Sunday. And if you've got a local AM station, listen Monday morning. It's on the air because the sun let it.
Bill Bernardoni is the founder of Bernardoni Media & Marketing in Ottawa, Illinois, and co-host of America at 250: Due Diligence with former Voice of America White House bureau chief Steve Herman. Hear "It's Time" on the clock fight.
Keeping a small-town AM station strong through the clock fight? Let's talk it through.
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