On November 2, 2011, I was riding my bike as close to the barricaded Occupy Oakland’s HQ as possible, listening to live on air coverage of the police brutality from nationally syndicated radio talk show host, Mike Malloy. I felt, again, the revolutionary potential of radio to bring together extrovert activists and introvert idea artists. Experience has taught me that such an alliance is crucial if any grassroots or alternative movement is to have a chance at any kind of sustained success.

My elation soon turned to frustration, however, having to listen to syndicated radio to get more than sound bites of this local event, and once again I missed KUSF. The fact that a city the size of Oakland, able to sustain major league baseball and football teams for over 40 years, does not have even one locally-owned and programmed radio station (whether commercial or non-commercial, music or talk), is itself a direct cause of the corporate control of the US congress, which is the primary grievance filed by Occupy Wall Street.

Since one of OWS’s grievances directly addresses corporate control of the media, John Anderson’s suggestion that the best way to address this situation is “by becoming the media directly” is an idea whose time has come, especially given that the corporate controlled 4^th estate has even more political power than the executive branch of the government. Though it tends to get lost in all the stories of police brutality, Anderson reveals that OWS is at least considering ways to occupy the media. According to an article at DIYmedia.net, OWS has:

established a microradio station at 107.1 FM. The station simulcasts the 24/7 live stream which provides coverage of life inside Zuccotti Park, as well as street-level reportage of daily protest actions in New York City’s financial district. One idea that’s been batted around involves integrating broadcasting into the occupation’s General Assembly, which functions as its governing body. Microradio could be employed to provide a non-amplified public address system – simply plug the speaker’s mic into a transmitter. Radios are cheap, and many smartphones have built-in FM reception capability. Microradio is easily accessible to a large audience and relatively uncomplicated to deploy. Unlike most other tools of protest-media, the critical infrastructure that makes radio work is pretty much self-contained, which adds to its reliability. Microradio is also extremely useful as an outreach tool. The station in Zuccotti Park broadcasts to the occupation and immediate neighbors, which can be useful in the maintenance of good community relations.

In addition, opening up access to the airwaves in such a public manner helps to demystify the act of broadcasting and introduce folks to the notion that the airwaves, too, are a public space…. This leads to the final rationale for incorporating microradio into occupations – it’s an occupation of its own kind.”[1]

Anderson shows one potential way to Occupy Radio, but there are many other possibilities that could help the occupy movement, especially during the cold winter months where many are doing their occupying indoors. We need to continue the discussion on why Occupying Radio needs to be at the forefront of the movement. As Tom Ness puts it:

If we truly want democracy, that means our poorest of neighborhoods must be able to participate. And for our poorest neighborhoods, there are perhaps no better options for expression than radio. We need to provide public access to the airwaves to advance democracy and to promote social stability. We need to defend our legitimate rights to radio as our public property. And the poorest, most vulnerable among us need the unique benefits of radio as a simple survival tool. Community radio is essential to the economic health of our communities, and the right to profit off the public airwaves should not be reserved for the rich. And community radio advances culture, for the fundamental benefit of all.[2]

Radio’s role in the economic health of our communities is crucial; when radio thrived, main-street thrived, but many of us weren’t even born then. The war against the public square is almost identical to the war against locally-owned media outlets like radio. 2011 has been an especially great year for radio if you’re a member of the 1%; their occupation of the public airwaves has lead to the near absolute silencing of any voice (whether talk or music) not sanctioned by the corporate agenda. Don’t let them fool you—they wanted complete control of the radio, and did their best to make you think it wasn’t that important while they were stealing it.

Now, even Mike Malloy’s voice will no longer be heard on Bay Area radio. Why?

Not because he’s being replaced by local Oakland based programming, nor even because his ratings were lower than his conservative talk radio competitors—but Mitt Romney has something to do with it. According to a report by Brad Friedman, over at The Brad Blog:

The only progressive AM radio talk station, Green960-KKGN, in one of the nation’s most liberal cities, San Francisco, is being taken off the AM dial by radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications, Inc. — a media conglomerate now owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, LLC — at the beginning of the 2012 Presidential election year.

Adding insult to injury for progressives in the Bay Area, the 960 slot on the dial is being replaced by Clear Channel with the likes of Glenn Beck, Fox News Radio’s John Gibson and other radical Rightwing talkers. Clear Channel’s San Francisco Director of Operations Don Parker in a press release cites Clear Channel’s “goal of expanding talk radio in San Francisco. We saw the opportunity to expand our footprint in this crucial arena as we head into an election year and a population increasingly engaged in local, state, and national events and activism,”

The expansion will amount to moving Green960′s current schedule of progressive talk shows off the AM band, and on to FM’s HD2 radio ghetto where it will become a largely automated “robo-station,” according to several radio insiders familiar with the station and Clear Channel’s plans for it. The station which was formerly Green 960 will have the catchy new name “FM Progressive Talk 103.7-2″ at its new home, if listeners can find it.

The new Rightwing format taking its place on 960 will be known as KNEW, which is currently at 910 on the AM dial featuring a number of Fox News Radio programs. The 910 position will then be filled with a new talk format being developed by Clear Channel called “San Francisco’s Talk 910 KKSF,” which will also include some Fox News Radio veterans.”

Such market censorship has nothing to do with Malloy’s popularity. The “conventional” wisdom that popularity determines advertising revenue no longer applies in the post Telecommunications Act (1996) era when 4 conglomerates own all the commercial radio stations.[3] Even the station’s KNEW name suggests that knowledge itself must be past tense. The issue is control of content, as Randi Rhodes, at great risk to her career, points out. Only the large corporations can afford advertisements; the advertisements are often for things most listeners can’t afford, yet it’s worth the corporations money to buy them because it allows them control of content, especially on TV, but even radio ads are virtually prohibitive for small locally owned businesses. They’ve been working on it a long time.

When “Uncle Sam paid the Reagan debt by selling off the broadcast spectrum to the highest contract” with The Telecommunications Act of 1996, it “allowed a bevy of elite media corporations to ravage the airwaves with impunity, sweeping aside the remnants of local radio culture and replacing it with an endless stream of scientifically manufactured drivel to befuddle and distract the American people from their duties as citizens.“[4]

In 1998, FCC Chairman Michael Powell snidely flaunted his disregard for the democratic process when he said, “The night after I was sworn in, I waited for a visit from the angel of public interest. I waited all night, but she did not come. And, in fact, five months into this job, I still have had no divine awakening and no one has issued me my public interest crystal ball.”[5]  In fact, lobbyists for the large corporations stormed into the FCC offices, stole the crystal ball and shattered it, at our expense. As long as such “taxation without representation” is the norm on the corporately owned media, radio becomes, as Anderson puts it, mystified to the point where people forget that it is a public space.

From a corporate perspective, Green 960 and others like it were an experiment.

“Maybe we can allow progressive voices on the radio again as long as they are forced to read advertisements that contradict their ostensible message; they talk about how we need to restore the commons, but have to do advertisements for gold because ‘The dollar’s future’s baked into the cake’ (Hartmann) or stamps.com because ‘going to the post office is a hassle’ (Rhodes).” This way Clear Channel could still make its money, and still seem liberal enough on the surface to keep people’s attention diverted from their grand theft of the public airwaves.

The problem, from a corporate perspective, was that many of these progressive talk commentators did far better in any head-to-head contest with their conservative counterparts in the ratings war. They also were able to translate their influence into palpable electoral results in the 2006 and 2008 elections, despite being outnumbered roughly 100 to 1 on the national airwaves. Even when Air America went bankrupt (on the same day of the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision), Ed Schultz, Randi Rhodes and even Thom Hartmann were more popular than ever.[6]

Clearly, these progressive radio personalities are being denied access to the cultural means of production because they’re a threat to the one percent, yet the corporations are not entirely heartless. They’ve been stepping up the push for HD Radio as a new “upgrade” for a while. The Best Buy Ads for Insignia HD radio are everywhere now; and yes radio is still much cheaper than the computer. But people aren’t buying, and it’s not just because everybody’s broke and in debt (in part because they’re now hooked to more expensive computers for their news and music)—it’s because nobody sees much of a point; we’ve been given no reason to believe HD radio will provide better programming as long as the ownership is in the same remote-control hands.

None of the corporations are in a hurry to start local underground community music or talk programming on their HD stations.[7] Yet, if they force the most popular national talk show hosts onto this new format, maybe they can actually sell more of these HD Gadgets made with Chinese slave labor, and lure progressives away from the public airwaves that a lot of “swing voters” like to listen to on those long lonely nights on the highways they’re trying to privatize. The corporate conglomerates have had success with this before (for instance, letting “alternative” indie-rock in on the condition it helped people make the transition from LPS to CDs, and once consumers were hooked to the CD, go back to trickle-down pop music like in the 80s)–they win either way, even if HD radio dies a quick 8-track-player death.

The death of Progressive Talk Radio is a fitting end to a disastrous year in Bay Area radio for all but the 1%. At least progressive talk radio has been self-reflective about the buy outs, music radio has not been allowed such ‘luxury.’ The ongoing war against music radio is even more draconian, as formats change without advance warning, so listeners are forced into passive acceptance. January 18, 2011, the same day lobbyist-bought FCC “regulators” permitted Comcast to buy MSNBC, KUSF, the University of San Francisco’s award winning community oriented radio station, was illegally taken off the air by Entercom. Across the country, 2011 saw what remained of the once glorious independent national college music network get mostly sold off to the highest bidder.

The ongoing (if somewhat demoralized) SAVE KUSF and national SAVE COLLEGE RADIO movements need to join forces with the OCCUPY MOVEMENT, and the OCCUPY MOVEMENT needs to understand that these two struggles are the same.

It gets worse. In the Bay Area, 2011 saw the loss of its long-standing oldies station (KFRC, which had already been syndicated out to the True Oldies Station) and 1510 KPIG, the only two music stations on the AM-Commercial dial. Syndicated talk radio has already successfully taken over the AM dial, and is now making inroads into the FM dial, with their shakier, more fragile, signals. Pirate Cat Radio, which broadcast local music and news for a vast underserved demographic at 87.9 FM for most of the last decade was levied with heavy fines and met its demise. Even contemporary country station 95.7 The Wolf, was unceremoniously dumped in favor of The Bay Area’s First FM Sports Talk Station.

Sure, 95.7 was a corporate owned station, and played a well-regulated playlist of “contemporary country,” and thus not as aesthetically pleasing to me as KUSF; at least sometimes it had a rock and roll beat, or a tear-jerker pop ballad; and it was mostly contemporary. It was also very white, but the corporate-run contemporary black targeted stations were now playing the heightened roboticism of Auto-tunes, a device invented by Exxon and now used to “cover up” (like Corexit) any traces of the kind of “bad notes” that characterizes the best r&b or hip hop.

More profoundly, the struggle for the airwaves is not strictly a matter of “taste;” nor is the politics strictly in the content. It affects, directly or indirectly, virtually every aspect of our lives. Given music radio’s auspicious history in the 20^th century as debatably the single most powerful agent of working class racial integration, which the 1% always felt threatened by, it’s not too difficult to see this War Against Music Radio as a form of state-sponsored terror[8] that parallels the corporate war on “progressive talk radio” and locally-owned radio stations, whether commercial or non-profit. Due, however, to the myth of “taste” and “niche marketing” when it comes to music, the plutocrats have been able to effect their occupation of the music industry largely under the radar, with no need to make their Goebbels-like regulations blatant.[9] In a December 2011 article “Farewell Black Radio,” Natalie Hopkinson writes:

for generations, black radio has been a driving force of black culture and politics, the modern day drum for communities of African descent as William Barlow explains in “Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio.”….I learned about the latest public service campaign against infant mortality, which disproportionately affected black people. I heard about anti-violence rallies taking place far from my suburban community. I mastered the art of taping hit singles by artists like Full Force, New Edition and Bell Biv Devoe off the radio…. Paul Porter of the media think tank Industry Ears, recently explained in his essay “Why Black Radio is So Damn Bad” on RapRehab.com that the community connection to black radio slowly began to unravel with the 1996 passage of the Telecommunications Act, which turned formerly black-owned stations into publicly traded commodities. The rise of syndication expanded the reach and influence of personalities such as Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, but muted local voices and news. Porter further explains:

“Black music has suffered a systematic demise and Black radio is a major compliance. The youth in America, get a steady diet of bitch, hoe and bling. The once undisputed music leader now follows the lead of the powerful recording industry. Commercial hip hop is the format of the lyrically challenged but the youth are too young to notice.”[10]

As Hopkinson, Barlow and Porter make clear, critiques of contemporary commercial hip hop artists like Jay-Z, whether coming from the black community or recent articles like Rapublicans,[11] miss the point. The issue is the illegal and immoral means by which content is seized by the 1% to disenfranchise the working class (and sell it as progress or at least a quick fix). For Hopkinson, the plethora of other choices, such as Pandora, iTunes and satellite radio do not compensate for the local rootedness radio once offered, in addition to still being a much more affordable option. As Brad Friedman puts it, “The Telecom Act was sold by legislators and lobbyists on the premise that it would increase competition in the market place. The net effect has been the exact opposite:” increased disenfranchisement and less diversity.

While some of these stations now broadcast Spanish, Chinese or serve other non English speaking populations, and thus invoke diversity, usually they broadcast as Spanish or Chinese version of Rush Limbaugh[12] as the owners sit in boardrooms contemplating how they can rid us of community stations like KPOO, which still provides almost the perfect balance between music and talk, local and international & entertainment and politics.

You could say I’m over-reacting. After all, “we still got KALX,” as many Bay Area musicians tell me, and KALX has been good to me, but the burden on KALX to represent the field of musical diversity that is excluded from the rest of the FM/AM dial has watered down its effectiveness as a purveyor of music that’s contemporary, independent, and local.[13] It was never intended to stand alone. My interest in mid-century locally owned commercial Top 40, country and R&B stations as well as the heyday of community and college radio stations later in the 20^th century is primarily to look for precedents in considering ways the 99% can re-occupy the public airwaves, but we need to have a meeting (that’s also a kick-ass dance party and pillow fight) to consider other possibilities.

The ongoing SAVE KUSF and national SAVE COMMUNITY RADIO movements need to join forces with the OCCUPY MOVEMENT, and the OCCUPY MOVEMENT needs to understand that these two struggles are the same.

So, what is to be done? What can we do? Alas, like most of my creative friends, I am better at why than how. Of the proposals that have crossed my piano desk in the last year, I am especially intrigued by Tom Ness’s suggestion of a microradio “mass turn on:”

First, we need to convince Congress and the FCC to take this matter seriously. And that task is utterly enormous. We must convince Congress and the FCC that they simply have no choice but create a meaningful community radio service. This will be terribly difficult for them, for example, because ultimately it may require the most powerful interests to actually give up their spot on the dial in some cases. Certainly no one in Washington can imagine that today and that’s why they will only respond to this issue when our elected officials and public servants are convinced they have no other choice.

The question of how we might convince Washington to take this seriously leads directly to the matter of civil disobedience. I believe in the rule of law. I also believe in a regulated broadcast environment. Much to the dismay of my anarchist and libertarian friends I’m sure, let me say that I respect the authority of the FCC. Because without a regulated broadcast environment, I’m pretty sure that Westinghouse will build a gazillion-watt transmitter and an antenna that reaches to the moon, and when we turn on our radio we will hear nothing else. I believe that without a regulated environment, the poor and working class of this country will never have their turn at the microphone and a spot on the dial. So I respect the authority of the FCC, and believe that our task is that of convincing the agency to put a much higher priority on media democratization. I believe citizens are duty-bound to speak up, and lobby for change. And that’s precisely what we did with community radio between 1996 and 2000. But having exhausted every avenue and finding oneself still burdened with an unjust law, citizens are left with but one honorable option, and that is civil disobedience… Flipping the Switch as Last Resort: This won’t work if it is merely a bluff. So at some point, we may have to decide that this is it, and on a certain day or week, we are all going on the air together.

Ness’s proposal of effective civil disobedience was presented to an audience of disenfranchised radio folks (many who had been professional DJS before the Telecommunication Act, but were now trying to unite in the cause of LPFM community radio stations), but this is not simply “Pirate radio as an end in itself.” The threat of jamming, or occupying, the airwaves is a means to negotiation with the FCC. “Underground” is a legal, not moral status; he would rather be legal. Just as OWS’s main demand is the repeal of corporate personhood, and getting money, big and small, out of politics, Ness has a central demand, from which all else follow: “The presumption of license renewal must go. I’m rather certain of that, regardless of how ridiculous it sounds to some. If the FCC approaches even just one of the corporations in a city, and politely insist they surrender the license of just one of their massive stations which covers our entire region, even just one will make room for dozens of small stations.”[i]

In the meantime, Ness is open to compromise positions:

One possibility is that the FCC might carve out an entirely new portion of the spectrum for community radio. This will be painful because spectrum is already scarce and subject to enormous competition. And then of course, we will all need new radios which can receive that part of the spectrum. All very, very difficult but on the other hand, people happily bought FM radios the last time a major change like this occurred. Another option I’ve heard is for the FCC to mandate that radio manufacturers produce receivers of much more exacting standards, capable of defining many more signals in the same given amount of spectrum. Again, this would mean that listeners would need a new, more modern radio.

Of course, even these proposals will be met with resistance by Big Media, because their power derives from the control of the finite broadcast spectrum. HD Radio, for instance, in theory, does exactly what Ness calls for, but as long as these “adjunct” stations are controlled by the same de-regulated media conglomerates, we still need to come up with strategies and tactics to make our voices heard. So here’s a possible DEMAND for OWS to consider at the July 4, 2012 conference in Philly:

The primary legislative demand of Occupy Radio is immediate reinstatement of the regulations that forbid outside owners from owning more than 2 radio stations in any given market, as well as other anti-trust regulations abolished by the Telecomm Act. Such re-regulation would immediately create more jobs in radio broadcasting, since stations that are largely automated now will be required to hire radio personalities in their communities. It will re-establish radio as two way form of communication, in which local listeners had some say in their programming, and make radio programmers more responsible to their listeners than what Clearchannel HQ demands. It will allow small-businesses an arena in which to advertise currently denied by the anti-democratic and even anti-capitalist plutocrats, and marshal the productive forces of the currently large population of high-quality unemployed and underemployed musicians, entertainers, artists and ‘culture workers’ to the service of the community, boosting morale, lowering crime and recreating the artistic middle class that grew under FDR and Ike and has been abandoned since at least Reagan.

And here’s a possible demand for Occupy Oakland (or insert your city, village, or rural county here):

We demand, at the very least, the reclamation by the City of Oakland of at least 2 radio stations from the monopolistic thieves who have robbed us of jobs, a tax-base, a grass-roots culture, economy and even civic pride. In this decolonization proposal, one of the stations will be more mainstream, reform-oriented, and commercial–highlighting local programming from the wide spectrum of Oakland residents & locally owned businesses. No national outside conglomerates will be allowed to advertise or buy sponsorships on this station. If that sounds draconian, remember they have every other station. Costs of advertising will be adjusted (deflated) to be affordable to the advertising budgets of locally owned businesses.[14]The station can be run as a public/private partnership with full transparency and accountability. The key is for the station to develop what Thurston Moore calls “a great neutrality,” without getting too big. Government will not determine programming, but will only intervene to protect it from corporate predators.

The second station could be much more revolutionary, more like the existing non-commercial 10 watt radio stations, the last vestiges of independent radio that are being gobbled up. Call it KOWS, or WOWS if you want; Laney College could use one that’s not mere podcast. While such stations, as outlined above, have been absolutely crucial for the formation of sustainable local cultures (from musicians, stand-up comics, and even urban planners) since the early 1980s, it’s important to remember that their autonomy came with the price of being non-commercial, which decreased their effectiveness as sustainable forces when the high hospital bills, for instance, came in. So-called “college radio” itself was a compromise position, and while I lament its loss, we must demand more than its return to achieve the ends of democracy.

If the city of Oakland used what little muscle it has left to stand up against Entercom, Clearchannel and the like, and invoke federal regulations still on the book, that long atrophied muscle will grow; the mayor would have the support of the vast majority of the 99%. Let the corporations sue—we have your back. We may not have money, but we got numbers and are willing to work. Lawyer’s fees are less costly and divisive than the teargas taxes you’ve wasted. Many might even feel okay about paying a parking ticket if the city actually gives something back. We need a city at least open to radical possibilities—air the debate out; any transparent good faith proposals are welcome.

Thus far, however, Mayor Jean Quan claiming that she has “been supportive” of the occupy movement is an example of hypocrisy worthy of the lower rungs of Dante’s Inferno. Quan has been as deaf to reasoned proposals to Occupy Radio as she is to Russell Quan, the drummer from the Mummies and other local bands frozen out from the corporate media. Still, at least rhetorically, we can appeal to the city.[15] Some of us are willing to compromise, and understand how reform may be more radical than mere revolution. Radio won’t disturb your curfew…

The Mayor and City Council might do well to remember the origins of Radio itself as a compromise between business and labor. Business benefitted by the increased commodification of music, and labor benefited by the regulated environment in which local ownership created as many jobs as the new format of radio had robbed from pre-electric live entertainment culture on the streets. The city benefitted by radio’s seductive ability to decrease night-life street culture, but as long as radio was locally owned, musicians had more friends in the government than we do today: there was more locale culture and less crime.

So, here’s one final demand to the Mayor and City Council of (insert radio market here) to supplement, not replace, the demand for the locally owned radio stations:

We demand that the City of Oakland explicitly prohibit places of business open to the public, especially retail businesses that are not owned locally (and who have received unfair incentives to undersell and buy out locally owned businesses) to play canned music not made locally without first considering all the options for locally grown live in store performances.[16] This would not only save the businesses money, and boost worker’s morale (the workers would have the choice of what music they’re forced to listen to while working), but also rejuvenate Oakland’s tax base, especially given the city’s notorious lack of viable, legally sanctioned live venues for music. It would establish better relations, and heal wounds, between the city, its citizens and small business by restoring a commons and give Oakland a positive cultural export. I, for one, am less worried about the fairness of the taste of a cashier or clerk than I am of the corporate “music” pushers and their undercompensated focus groups.

Yet, as one fed up with the city’s lack of support, and even actively undermining any attempt to form a true commercially viable cultural export in the decade I’ve lived here, we should unite in occupying indoor and outdoor public spaces for dance crazes, pick up truck tours (and when we start making money, we’ll give back to the city in taxes, which is more than can be said for Kaiser Permanente). In the spirit of civil disobedience, but also in the spirit of fun:

Musicians & Stand Up Comics Unite! (For Peter Ivers) 

Musicians and other culture workers don’t “unite” like they used to back in the days of the middle class. The 1% did a damn good job of changing the meaning of “indie” to “every band for themselves.” Even the President astutely points out to teenagers, “you’re probably not going to be L’il Wayne,” but instead of enjoining young rappers to unionize, Obama, like Clinton before him, rather tries to usher them into technology, with disastrous results. Because the vast majority of great live local musicians are cut out from the increasingly monopolized corporate channels, and the banks aren’t offering loans to small locally based labels or venues, music has increasingly become an “in the red” proposition for most unless of course you happen to have come from upper-middle class (or upper-upper), or are more left-brained than right-brained.

Coupled with increased gas prices, tours that only a few years ago were at least breaking even are now a losing proposition. No wonder college radio has been so colonized by the corporate labels: a war against music? Nah, it’s just not that important anymore….right? Hell, even many of best musicians accept it, as they play their oldies instead of each other, but we don’t have to like each other’s music to be played on the same station of form a diverse, yet locally grounded small MP3 singles-label.

If we can’t have the radio, we have to take to the streets as unionized laborers and demand our rights. On an unspecified date in 2012 (why should we give it away?) we will be forced to occupy, en mass, these colonizing businesses, such as Wallgreens, Burger King, Safeway, The Gap, Whole Foods, etc. We will take to the streets peacefully like the second line parades of old New Orleans, and the drums of Congo Square that most American musicologists agree was the birthplace of any American music of worth in the last century. We will be organized to accommodate the widest possible range of music taste. A classical pianist may occupy the part of the mall with the piano store for instance.

Each of these musicians should be able to at least get one song finished before being arrested. And if we get arrested, we will peacefully go—but the arrest will be on tape or digital live-stream and the world is watching, and maybe even acting, with us. So, musicians and culture jammers, you better make it good. This is your audition! After all, a revolution is nothing if it can’t also pass for a business plan, and music is activism. As Czech dissident Josef Skvorecky wrote in 1977:

when the lives of individuals and communities are controlled by powers that themselves remain uncontrolled–slavers, czars, fuehrers, first secretaries, marshalls, generals and generalisimos, ideologists of dictatorships of either end of the spectrum–then creative energy becomes a protest.”

We only need add “corporate persons” to that list to update it for America. The goal is to bring back the human, face-to-face, interaction; letting the city be a city again, decriminalizing locally based culture by decolonizing the outside corporate influence that has flattened out local differences in ways at least as destructive as  McDonald’s and kept us separated and not equal, and to foster a trickle up culture and economy that has been systematically destroyed by the 1% in the last 30-40 years.

These are but a few modest proposals that are important to begin debating now.

I don’t think it won’t thin out the resources of Occupy Wall Street, since it can bring new people currently skeptical of the movement in, nor do I think it needlessly “politicizes” the KUSF movement. To conclude, this is why the ongoing SAVE KUSF and national SAVE COMMUNITY RADIO movements need to join forces with the OCCUPY MOVEMENT, and the OCCUPY MOVEMENT needs to understand that these two struggles are the same. As Tom Ness puts it, the quality and authenticity of our democracy might well be measured by how many are allowed to use the microphone, instead of only the headphones.

Chris Stroffolino, Occupy Radio

PS–(In the decade I’ve lived in The Bay Area, I have tried whatever means necessary to make a dent in the colonization of Oakland by the LA based industry, but given Quan’s increasing crackdowns, I know many of the best artists are giving up and even considering to move to LA, where at least they passed a resolution banning corporate personhood. It’s a sad day when The Bay Area becomes more placeless than even LA! As Beme The Rapper says, Fuck Oakland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpS_1Y6mOME. He has way better tracks than this, give him a chance, Quan! Okay, My piano is saying “me thinks thou dost protest too much” or would be if I could afford one!)

But, according to CD101, rumors of the station’s death were an exaggeration. Today, Randy Malloy, General Manager and President of CD101, told Columbus’ The Other Paper:

“I can say it until I’m blue in the face — we’re not going anywhere. We’re already booking shows and our normal events for the spring and summer, Big Room shows, and we’re already in talks for CD101 Day,” he said.

“Lesley James is the program director and Andyman’s protégé. Lesley will continue to program the station exceptionally,” said Malloy.

“We have no intention of changing the same format that we’ve stuck to for 21 years.”

Both RadioInsight and some commenters on the Radio-Info.com Message Boards noted that while CD101 and Southeastern Ohio Broadcasting are renewing their LMA agreement, the fact remains that WWCD Ltd. (formerly Fun With Radio, LLC, which, incidentally, is a name I’ll miss seeing when reading about CD101.  It’s radio’s whimsical equivalent to David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants) is still leasing the frequency from another organization.  But the fact of the matter remains that the CD101 brand isn’t going off the airwaves anytime soon.

I had the chance to visit Columbus this week and spent some time listening to CD101, which is rare for me since the station doesn’t stream online and I only make it to Columbus, at most, once or twice a year.  The station continues to sound unique and presents the left of- enter modern rock format in a way that’s accessible to a wide audience, as evidenced by a consistently solid showing in the Columbus ratings.  Personally, I think this is one the hardest traits to master for stations that don’t just play the commercial alternative hits.

During my time listening to CD101, I heard MC5’s “Kick Out The Jams,” (a song that, while recorded in 1969, sounded fresh next to tracks that are mere months old), new songs from CSS and M83 (two artists that, while critically-lauded, have failed to find widespread airplay on commercial radio) and a smattering of modern rock oldies usually reserved for “Flashback Weekends” or other branded programming (specifically great to hear was Edwyn Collins’ “A Girl Like You”).

CD101 is also the radio home for the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets.  When I attended the Blue Jackets game at Nationwide Arena on Tuesday night, it was a nice surprise to see CD101’s Ice Cream Truck parked outside the stadium. And, as a fan of both the station and independent radio in general, it was downright exciting to find CD101’s logo throughout the arena, accompanied by a full-page ad in the free program handed out to all spectators.

I truly hope CD101 can resume their online stream in the coming months; in the meantime, we can celebrate that an innovative, independent station continues to survive.

It’s vitally important to recognize that every time a new audio distribution technology comes along, the word “radio” comes along for the ride. When the first live audio streams went online in the mid-90s, did everyone call this “streaming internet audio?” No, they called it “internet radio.”

In the early 2000s when Sirius and XM first lit up their satellites hovering above the earth did they call it “satellite audio?” That’s right, they called it “satellite radio.”

Sure, “podcasting” doesn’t have the word radio in it. But the one-time neologism was built upon the conflation of “iPod” and “broadcast.” The latter word is certainly very related to radio, which was the first form of electronic broadcasting.

What this all means is that we see radio as a thriving, evolving and growing set of media united by the common application of distributing–or, broadcasting–audio programming to masses of people. Radio is the transmission of audio entertainment, information and art across a variety of media and formats.

Reading this one might wonder, “well, then, doesn’t that make records, CDs, audiobooks and album downloads some kind of radio, too?” My answer is that they’re close to radio, but don’t qualify as radio.

While services like Spotify and Rdio have blurred that line between listening to an album and listening to radio, radio is still a different experience. Music radio, in particular, is about delivering a curated experience that is more spontaneous, less processed, and more ephemeral than an album, which is comparatively crafted and composed. Sure, progressive rock radio often featured album sides, but the more frequent programming were carefully chosen DJ sets. Music radio is about the mix. And even though Pandora and last.fm deliver a mix programmed by an algorithm, the listening experience is more like that progressive rock station than a CD.

It’s not for nothing that Spotify calls its automated music streams “artist radio,” and Rdio is a semi-contraction of “radio” that needs to buy a vowel.

A point that’s hard to avoid is that these forms of radio all hearken back to the modes of presentation first pioneered in broadcast. The DJ, talk show and music set all originated with broadcast. Internet and satellite radio unambiguously crib these forms with the only big difference from broadcast being their method of transmission.

Podcasting is a particularly curious case, because in my opinion its invention reignited interest in radio forms by making it so much easier to distribute programs. Podcasting also gave listeners a kind of radio TiVo by relieving them of having to tune in to a station or stream at a particular time. The clever innovation of the automated download freed radio from the tethers of the cable and the electromagnetic wave, be it FM, AM, wi-fi or cell.

In fact, the rise of podcasting breathed life into forms of radio programming that had barely been heard from since the 70s, like radio drama and long-form comedy. Turns out that the international reach of podcasting means a particularly esoteric show can find hundreds or thousands of listeners, even if there may barely be a dozen potential fans in the broadcast radius of a single station.

This is just my long-winded way of saying that here at Radio Survivor we take all forms of broadcasted and transmitted audio programming. We think that makes our website unique. There are plenty of sites that do a good job of covering the broadcast industry, a particular radio personality or music and radio. But we haven’t found any that consistently look at the whole wide world of internet, satellite and broadcast radio. To us, it’s all RADIO.

This also means we intend to keep expanding our coverage, writing more about new online services, ways to improve the listening experience, new radio technologies, along with our continuing coverage of broadcast. In particular I hope to see us write more about podcasts and podcasting, since we’re seeing more artists, personalities and producers make the decision to completely bypass the broadcast and satellite gatekeepers, self-producing and distributing podcasts directly to audiences.

Back in August we made a call for writers and contributors, and we’re still looking. If you’ve considered writing about podcasting, satellite radio, internet radio or other radio forms–not just broadcast–then drop us a line.

London shelter children, circa 1940-41

“There is no such thing as an ‘illegitimate child’,” early public radio producer Elsa Knight Thompson once said. “There may be illegitimate parents.”*

Thompson made this remark during the Battle of Britain in 1940. Raised in Seattle, she had married an Englishman and come with him to Europe. She was evacuating children from London when someone asked her if her group took “illegitimate” kids.

“Yes we do,” she added after making the comment. Someone at the BBC heard Thompson’s authoritative voice and asked if she would help staff its international affairs desk, which she also did. Then she returned to the states and became a public affairs producer for the Pacifica radio network in the 1950s and 1960s.

NPR was about a dozen years old when Thompson died in 1983. At the risk of speaking for the dead, I suspect that it would have dismayed her to read NPR’s new ombudsman announce that he wants to launch an open ended discussion about the appropriateness of the i-word for children.

“Start the debate,” Edward Schumacher-Matos titled his latest post in response to listeners irked by the use of the term on a Weekend Edition report. The illegitimate label was used during a recent Q&A between Scott Simon and NPR reporter Eleanor Beardsley about the marriage of Prince Albert of Monaco to Charlene Wittstock—former Olympic swimmer from South Africa.

SIMON: Is the new couple under some pressure to produce an heir?
BEARDSLEY: You know, I don’t think it’s pressure. I think that’s what they want to do. I mean, he’s 53, he has two illegitimate children. . . .

Some listeners didn’t think that this was appropriate.

“I would suggest that this language is no longer acceptable,” Schumacher-Matos quotes NPR listener Sigmund Roos protesting. “I am the parent of two adopted children, both born to unmarried parents. I understand the origin of this word, but I think that it implies a cultural value that no longer has any currency, and can be seen as insensitive—or even—offensive.”

NPR’s ombudsman followed the listener comment with an interesting discussion about his own family background. “Pejorative birth labels attached to children were never fair, but may have been defensible—or at least acceptable—under once-dominant religious and traditional family values,” he noted.

“But given that 41 percent of the children born in the United States in 2009 had unmarried parents, according to a preliminary report by the federal government, and that the proportion continues to grow in a long term trend here and in Europe, media tags such as ‘illegitimate,’ or ‘love child’ or ‘born out of wedlock’ now seem out of step.”

Well put. Seventy years ago one of the forerunners of public broadcasting already thought that these terms were “out of step.” Maybe a new “debate” about them is, too.

*The Thompson quote comes from Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (Temple: Philadelphia, 1999), p. 177.

The latest round of the ongoing battle over public broadcasting has concluded, and lo and behold, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lives. The new budget preserves funding for the CPB at $445 million for 2013, albeit with drastic cuts to smaller public media funds, and the complete elimination of the Department of Commerce’s Public Telecommunications Facilities Program.

This particular chapter of the war was quite colorful, in a nasty sort of way. It included the great Juan Williams firing brouhaha, which ultimately took with it the head of the NPR executive who dumped him. Then there was the Ron Schiller fiasco, in which the development director’s comments on the Tea Party’s alleged Islamophobic xenophobia brought down not only him but NPR’s CEO Vivian [no relation] Schiller.

Yet here we are, and NPR and NPR stations continue to get money from the CPB, which continues to exist. Needless to say, this battle will continue through the decade. The “conservative” case against NPR will thrive. People who call themselves conservatives will continue to insist that NPR has a liberal bias, and that this bias shouldn’t get money from the Federal government.

And NPR backers will counter with statistics that show that most NPR listeners either classify themselves to the center or right.

Which side do you count?

“The facts show that NPR attracts a politically diverse audience of 33.7 million weekly listeners to its member stations on-air,” declared NPR’s Steven Inskeep in a late March op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. “In surveys by GfK MRI, most listeners consistently identify themselves as ‘middle of the road’ or ‘conservative.’ Millions of conservatives choose NPR, even with powerful conservative alternatives on the radio.”

source: NPR

Sure, but you can also read NPR as a network in which most listeners consistently identify themselves as “middle of the road” (25 percent), “somewhat liberal” (19 percent), and “very liberal” (13 percent). Such was the finding of MRI’s survey of NPR listeners in 2007. That majority was the biggest, taking up 57 percent of the audience, as opposed to Inskeep’s array of columns, which in 2007 counted for only 54 percent.

Basically NPR is a liberal entity. Many of its stations broadcast to university town audiences. And in an ironic way, conservatives force the liberal label on NPR by insisting that Federal funding is an inherently liberal concept. But NPR and NPR stations do try to reach out to conservatives, albeit crudely sometimes (see interviewing David Horowitz about Howard Zinn after the latter’s death).

Bottom line: conservatives would lose out if the NPR solar system were defunded.

Core vs everybody

I’ve heard a lot of happy talk about a defunded NPR. The service only gets about two percent of its funding from Uncle Sam, it is noted, and the NPR stations only get ten. There are all sorts of creative, innovative ways these stations could get by without that money, say the pro-defunding experts.

source: NPR

But I know what most of the university town NPR stations will do if defunded—deemphasize or dump conservative programming. Faced with budget shortfalls, they’ll appeal to their liberal base, and their liberal base will demand changes.

Every public radio station struggles with something like the same audience problem, trying to satisfy its core, subscriber listenership, while reaching out to the broader population. The core listenership never likes that. It wants NPR to say liberal things with liberal voices. The staff know that that’s a dead end that results in bubble radio—liberals boringly talking to themselves.

Federal funding allows public radio stations to reach out beyond the core liberal audience with which public media is historically associated. Without it, NPR stations would have no choice but to move their politics to the left.

Rural stations would be the exception to this rule. Ironically, they’re more conservative and more dependent on federal funding. Many of them, especially those with CPB supported TV signals as well, would be forced to retrench beyond recognition.

Conservatives would lose out in this scenario. Maybe defunding NPR has become such a sweet goal that they don’t care. Maybe Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and CBS AM radio are enough for them.

I hope not. It all reminds me of the old joke about a Russian farmer to whom God appears.

“I am here to grant you any wish of your desire,” God says. “But keep one thing in mind. Whatever I give you, I will give your neighbor twice.”

The Russian farmer thinks for a minute, then answers.

“Make me blind in one eye,” he says.

wikimedia commons

NPR has announced the use of a new comment filtration process in an article innocently dubbed “The Right Chord With Less Discord.” Comments left by new website users will temporarily undergo review from a “community manager,” a process that NPR predicts will take less than 15 minutes:

The vast, vast majority of our community members have been model citizens, and nothing will change for you — your comments will be posted immediately. Our community manager will review the comments of a small number of current users — fewer than 2% of active users — who have demonstrated a history of breaking the discussion rules. Once these consistently adhere to the discussion rules, we’ll stop reviewing their comments before they are posted.

This decision has obviously been a problem for some people, but I’d like to make a very important point: there is filth on the internet. If you don’t believe me,  look up a website called “4chan” and go to the “Random” (known by its users as /b/) forum. That specific forum is something that I often define as the “ghetto of the internet,” although I defer to Encyclopedia Dramatica’s description.  NPR, like the New York Times and other respectable organizations, should be allowed to protect itself from said filth, regardless of whether or not some people feel that it’s violating their First Amendment rights. NPR has rights too, and if you don’t want to deal with or accept that fact, no one is forcing you to leave comments on NPR’s website.

Furthermore, if one were to read NPR’s Community Discussion Rules, one would discover that, aside from a questionable statement about reserving the right to “edit” posts, it’s really more of a statement about NPR’s rights as an organization (not about what you can’t do as a user). Most of the listed restrictions are common sense, such as no swearing, no personal attacks, no plagiarism, and no advertising. Although the freedom of speech technically allows for these sort of things (a civil court might disagree), banning them creates a basic level of civility on NPR, which should allow the site’s intellectual community to breathe a sigh of relief.

On Tuesday, the outfit put out an action alert calling on its supporters to let the Berkeley, California listener supported station know that they like the signal’s new volunteer “Morning Mix” lineup, which replaced recently purged hosts Aimee Allison and Brian Edwards-Tiekert:

“[a] new show, ‘Morning Mix’, hosted by several volunteers, including Project Censored’s own, Mickey Huff, is in place at 8:00am. Mickey is a supporter of all things truth and will undoubtedly have us on as a guest if the show is continued. AE911Truth is highlighted in the last 3 Project Censored books. However the new radio show’s tenure is in jeopardy. We need your help.”

So calling all 9/11Truthers, continues the message—tell KPFA’s new General Manager and Program Director that you dig the new show! But, well, maybe leave a few details out of your e-mail:

“For this particular show of support,” the missive concludes, “we should refrain from mentioning 9/11—a very contentious issue at KPFA. Discussion of it in this circumstance will only complicate and thwart our efforts to keep the ‘Morning Mix’ on the air.”

Yeah, the whole truth always complicates things. Better just to omit minor deets like the real actual reason you support the new program out of your message of support.

I wonder if there are other truths that 9/11Truthers around KPFA think that it’s best to keep on a low profile.

There are two controversies raging in radioland right now over the appropriateness of words broadcast across the airwaves. One of them is playing itself out in Canada; the other in the United States. The Canadian debate involves the word “faggot”; the US involves the articulation of the word “gringo.”

Following these discussions, I’m wondering if there’s any tolerance for context anymore in either country.

The Canadian brouhaha comes in the wake the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council’s decision to declare Dire Straits song ‘Money for Nothing’ “unacceptable for broadcast” over the 760 private radio and TV stations that it represents. The CBSC made this call when somebody complained about a stanza in the tune after hearing it streamed on an FM station in Newfoundland:

“The little faggot with the earring and the make-up / Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair / That little faggot’s got his own jet airplane / That little faggot, he’s a millionaire”

Invoking its Code of Ethics the CBSC’s Atlantic Panel determined that “[L]ike other racially driven words in the English language, ‘faggot’ is one that, even if entirely or marginally acceptable in earlier days, is no longer so.” Thus the song had fallen “into the category of unacceptable designations on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status or physical or mental disability.”

But critics of this decision noted that the song doesn’t endorse the epithet. Rather, it is sung from the perspective of a bitter kitchen appliance mover bitter and jealous at the easy lives of rock stars.

The Gay/Lesbian news site Xtra concedes that ‘Money for Nothing’ is offered from “the perspective of a homophobic dick,” but argues that it “certainly doesn’t glorify him or his detestable opinions. Rather, it ridicules his viewpoint.”

Now Canada’s main broadcasting regulator, the Canadian Radio-Television Telecommunications Commission, has received so many complaints about the CBSC decision, that it has asked the Council to reconsider.

I’m arguing with myself over this controversy. One side of my brain acknowledges that the word in question is an incitement to violence. But the other side thinks that media associations and regulators have to pay at least some attention to the context in which words are said before they effectively ban them from their respective realms.

The same goes for the food fight over the use of the word “gringo” on National Public Radio this month. Everybody got all bent out of shape when writer Daisy Hernandez did a POV commentary in which she mentioned how relieved Arizona Latinos were that the man who shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords wasn’t one of them.

“My eyes scanned the mobile papers,” she confided. “I held my breath. Finally, I saw it: Jared Loughner. Not a Ramirez, Gonzalez or Garcia.”

“It’s safe to say there was a collective sigh of brown relief when the Tucson killer turned out to be a gringo. Had the shooter been Latino, media pundits wouldn’t be discussing the impact of nasty politics on a young man this week— they’d be demanding an even more stringent anti-immigrant policy.”

Following the resultant uproar on Fox News and elsewhere, NPR Ombudsman Alicia Shepard weighed in on the controversy.

Hernandez “made a valid, thought-provoking point. If only she hadn’t used the word ‘gringo’,” Shepard noted. “Instead of a thoughtful discussion, the conversation on npr.org, in the blogosphere and on Fox News focused largely” on the use of that word. A “distraction,” she called the term, and “not effective journalism.”

Sadly, if it wasn’t effective journalism, it’s because people don’t want to think. Is there any question but that Latinos in Arizona use the word “gringo” to describe white people? Is there any doubt that when some atrocity happens, ethnics in big cities scrutinize the identity of the culprit to make sure he wasn’t one of them, and employ a variety of epithets to express their anxiety or relief, including “goy,” “honky,” “nigger,” “spic,” “yankee,” or similar terms in reference to themselves or others?

There’s no doubt in my mind that this happens every day. But as long as nobody acknowledges it on the radio, we are fine. Does context mean anything any more? Or, mindful of our increasingly polarized sensibilities, should we just ban all coarse but honest references from the airwaves?

NPR’s Ombudsman Alicia Shepard wonders out loud how much coverage NPR should give groups like Westboro in this post.

The broadcast raises issues regarding the obligation of a network like NPR to dedicate time even to a radical group with a small following and extremely offensive views. Does this type of broadcast represent the public interest? The term “public interest” has always been a bit weighted, so it may be best to view this through analogy. The Ku Klux Klan, for example, traditionally has held a number of extremely offensive views, yet, legally, even they have the constitutional right to assemble. Similarly, the Westboro Baptist Church, although its small following holds a number of extremely offensive views, is also, in theory, entitled to enjoy the benefits of a public radio network.

NPR’s original description of the Westboro Baptist Church went like this:

Members of Westboro Baptist Church plan to protest the funeral of Elizabeth Edwards on Saturday. As NPR’s Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports, the fundamentalist church says she brought on her cancer by doubting God.

The Topeka based church run by Fred Phelps is best known for its view that God hates gay men and lesbians… and frequently pickets military funerals. Now they’re turning their wrath on Elizabeth Edwards, the estranged wife of former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards. They plan to picket her funeral in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her crime? After her son died in a car accident in 1996, she said that God could not protect her boy… and that she was not asking God to cure her cancer. The Westboro website said because of this, she is, quote, a resident of hell.

It may also be helpful to consider the following coverage of the Westboro Baptist Church by NPR, the only additional coverage by NPR since the original spot. In this article on Elizabeth Edwards’ funeral, the group received a relatively brief mention:

People came out with posters and banners to create a line of love, to block an anti-gay group from Kansas picketing the Edwards memorial service. The Westboro Baptist Church is known for protesting outside military funerals. But there was far more love than hate at this gathering. Cate Edwards wanted her mother to know that.

Should NPR really be expected to uphold such a high level of equality? People should know that idiotic, radical groups like this exist, but the question remains: How much time should they receive? What do you think?

For example, on December 3, Limbaugh noted that hundreds of unemployed people stood in line for assistance at a community center in Atlanta, Georgia to apply for financial help with their heat and power bills. They’re having a bad cold snap in that city. Eventually officials let applicants come into the building, because the temperature outside that early morning was freezing.

“Standing in line for assistance,” Limbaugh repeated as he read the newspaper article on the story. “I just wonder if they would stand in line for jobs?”

Limbaugh didn’t bother to read the article one paragraph further.

“I’ve had three jobs this year, and I’ve been laid off from all three,” one applicant was quoted as saying. “I’m grateful just to get any type of help they’ll give me.”

Then the Rushbo offered this gem:

Here’s the media tweek of the day. We always announce these and it always works. This story raises very unpolitically correct questions. If people cannot even feed and clothe themselves, should they be allowed to vote? Should they be voting? If people who are receiving government assistance, that is, taxpayer assistance, if they weren’t allowed to vote, could you imagine the difference in the political makeup of this country? Can you imagine that?

This is just a think piece. I’m just putting this out there for you to ponder.

So let’s ponder the question. This would mean that a large percentage of the population on Wall Street would be disenfranchised, given the huge quantity of “taxpayer assistance” that a number of prominent financial firms recently received. It would mean that the parents of every county in the U.S. that receives federal aid for schools would lose their right to vote—not to mention the parents in states receiving federal aid for universities and colleges (and not to mention all the employees of these institutions).

It would mean that just about every veteran who takes advantage of VA benefits would lose their voting privileges. It would mean the same for Americans who are receiving extended unemployment benefits.

And, of course, something close to the entire agricultural industry would lose their right to the ballot, given the pervasiveness of agricultural subsidies—$20 billion per year to farmers in “farm income stabilization.” That would also go for the proprietors of the thousands of small and medium sized telephone companies that receive support from the Federal Communications Commission’s Universal Service Fund, and all the recipients of their services.

I could go on and on. Yes, Limbaugh’s proposal would eliminate the franchise for a huge portion of the population of the United States besides the poor whom he and his admirers obviously hate with a passion. And that would make quite a difference in politics. Sure thing. In fact, hardly anyone in this country would get to vote.

But rather than eliminating their right to the ballot, perhaps we should just take away Limbaugh’s and those of his fans, a not insignificant but smaller percentage of the populace whose evident moronic viciousness would not be missed in many quarters.

This is just a think piece, of course. I’m just saying. I’m just putting this out there for you to ponder. Have a nice day.