There is a local AM station about five miles from me, more or less, that should have (IMHO) signed off and thrown in the towel a couple years ago. The station began as WPVL on 1460 kHz in 1956, and was a top-40 station most of its life through about the late 1990s. It was still top-40 in 1998, but by the end of the decade things changed dramatically; the station dropped its music format in 2002 or so and began simulcasting a Cleveland classical FM, then, after a couple years, it dropped the simulcast, was sold, changed its call sign, and is now an automated black-gospel station that sounds awful; overmodulation, hum on the signal--and it is on their signal, as I listened to it on several different radios, even battery-powered transistors, and still heard the hum--and other distortion that is not allowed, under any circumstances, on the signals of any commercial AM or FM radio station. Doesn't the FCC care about AM radio anymore, or are they waiting for most AMs (except perhaps the big 50kW all-news stations) to go silent so they can reassign most of the AM broadcast band to some other service?
I really don't know why the local station here is still on the air. IMHO, I think the FCC should have cited its owner for overmodulation, hum and other signal problems, or else revoked its license. Maybe the FCC did cite them for these violations, but the station's current owner may be a company operating on a shoestring budget that literally cannot afford to upgrade their transmitter or repair their current one, although there was talk of installing an AM stereo transmitter when the station was retransmitting the Cleveland classical music FM. The stereo conversion never came to fruition, however, and the simulcast ended a year or so later. Then the monkey business started: the sale of the station, the new owners (who do not seem to know the first thing about broadcasting, given the horrible quality of the signal) changing its call sign and format almost immediately after assuming control, and so on.