Disclosure: Steve Neavling was a 910AM Superstation host and social media manager from 2017 to 2018.
The wealthy white owner of 910AM Superstation, a predominantly Black talk radio station in metro Detroit, shocked his unpaid hosts and dwindling audience by abruptly changing the format to sports.
Without notice, the station sent an email to the hosts at 8 p.m. on Friday, notifying them of “a format change” and warning them not to return to the station’s property in Southfield.
“Your show will no longer air on WFDF 910AM Superstation,” station manager Kevin Coles wrote in the email. “All access passes have been revoked and you are no longer allowed on the premises. The guard has been notified not to give you entry.”
The terse email and sudden change infuriated some of the hosts and prompted others to accuse the owner, millionaire Kevin Adell, of exploiting Black people by turning racial anxiety into entertainment and failing to pay the hosts for their shows.
The station had an ever-revolving door of hosts who often clashed with Adell over his brash, impulsive style.
“I feel like Kevin took away our voice,” Meeko Williams, a community activist who hosted a one-hour show on Sundays, tells Metro Times. “This is sick. It dropped my heart. We have nowhere else to go to communicate our message.”
Williams claims Adell offered to extend his show to two hours if he paid the station $1,000 a month.
Adell purchased the 50,000-watt station from Radio Disney in January 2015 and launched the talk show format, pitching it to a Black audience. He blanketed the region with billboards promoting 910AM, which he dubbed, “Detroit’s only urban talk station.”
In an interview with Metro Times, Adell says the format was no longer profitable and only attracted about 2,100 listeners a month, an abysmally small audience for a radio station.
“When you look at it, no one supported it,” Adell says. “I couldn’t get the community to support it.”
Adell also defended the curt email and abrupt change.
“I didn’t have an obligation to anyone because no one was getting paid,” Adell says.
Former supporters of the show say Adell ran the station into the ground with a series of missteps and heavy-handed tactics. His approach was to gain listeners by promoting controversy, a strategy that civil rights leaders decried as self-serving and exploitative.
The station featured a revolving door of controversial hosts, including former Detroit Councilwoman Monica Conyers, who was sentenced to 37 months in prison for bribery; Christine Beatty, former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s one-time mistress; former Wayne County Circuit Judge Wade McCree, who was removed from the bench following allegations of misconduct, including having sex in his chambers; Todd Courser, a former state representative who left office after a sex scandal with a colleague; and journalist Jack Lessenberry, who was accused of sexually harassing students at Wayne State University.
Adell encouraged hosts to be combative and even attack each other. The more entertaining, he said, the better the ratings.
When a Deadline Detroit reporter was working on a story about the station’s controversial brand, Adell ordered the hosts to call the reporter on the air and even announce her cell phone number.
This all came at the expense of the Black community, says Rev. W.J. Rideout III, a former host who was fired from his 910AM show after blowing the whistle on three Detroit journalists accused of sexual misconduct.
Rideout says he’s not surprised Adell didn’t bother to communicate with the hosts or the Black community about the station’s format change.
“It shows how he felt about the Black community,” Rideout tells Metro Times. “He only wanted to use the Black community to get the publicity that he wanted. It shows you it was the style of the slave plantation and the slavery movement. It also shows that God is not playing with him.”
“I didn’t have an obligation to anyone because no one was getting paid,” Adell says.
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Adell, who is Jewish, also owns The Word Network, a global Christian television network featuring Black pastors. In October 2019, Adell admitted he sent an offensive meme to a North Carolina pastor who hosted a show on The Word Network. The meme depicted Adell draped in a white fur coat and fur hat with four Black pastors and a Lamborghini behind him.
Former 910AM station manager Denise Dody Johnson, whom Adell often denigrated in front of hosts and staff, said Adell was insensitive, and the station “is on a collision course for implosion.”
“In this scenario African Americans no longer served their usefulness,” Johnson wrote on Facebook on Saturday. “The owner’s sole ability to discredit himself over and over again rendered the media properties non effective and further diminished the reputation of anyone who continued to do business with him.”
Johnson predicted “shocking revelations” about Adell and the station will be forthcoming.
“We fooled ourselves into thinking this was something it was not,” Johnson said. “Others fooled themselves into thinking they were untouchable and had [Adell’s] ear. This has been a pattern.”
Karen Dumas, a podcaster and former spokeswoman for Mayor Dave Bing, responded to Johnson’s post, “The plantation is closed. Move along.”
The station’s website is offline, and the shows’ archives have been removed from Facebook.
“Not only have they destroyed the future of these shows, they destroyed the past,” community activist Scott Boman wrote on Facebook.
Adell drew criticism from listeners when he suspended the show of popular community activist Steve Hood in 2017 and replaced him with conservative firebrand Nolan Finley, the snarky editorial page editor of The Detroit News.
“It really fell apart after that,” Williams says.
In 2019, Adell fired Finley, saying he was “boring” and failed to attract listeners.
Former host Sam Riddle, a community activist and longtime associate of Adell’s family, was more forgiving and says he and others met with Adell to explore the possibility of a sale to retain the format.
“He did offer. He approached me and others to pull together a team to buy the station,” Riddle tells Metro Times. “It’s not like this is something new or sudden. That’s to his credit, not his detriment.”
Riddle says the inability to find Black investors speaks volumes about Detroit, and the change in format leaves a significant void.
“We don’t have enough Black wealth evidently interested in buying a radio station in the Detroit area,” Riddle says. “No one was able to assemble the wherewithal to buy the station. When we look at the situation of Black folks in the metro Detroit area and Michigan, we remain one of the most impoverished areas in the nation. By and large we don’t have any credible Black media. We don’t own a major radio or TV station.”
The station’s most popular host, journalist and activist Bankole Thompson, did not return messages for comment.
Adell says he respects the Black community and pulled the plug because the format was unsustainable.
“I’m already at the bottom,” Adell says. “I can’t fall from the floor. That’s my story. I’m sticking to it.”
The station now plays non-stop ESPN Radio.
In April, the IRS alleged Adell owes $17.8 million in unpaid estate and gift taxes from his inheritance. The federal government is seeking a court order to sell his $3.7 million home.
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