No Community Voices Wanted
Belief:
Why I Want to Turn Religious People Into Atheists
Greta Christina
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace:
4 Myths About Taxes, Debunked
Paul Buchheit
DrugReporter:
The War on Weed: Marijuana Is Basically Harmless -- The Monumentally Stupid Drug War Is Not
Jim Hightower
Environment:
White House Garden Won't Make Up for Obama's Nomination of Pesticide Lobbyist for US Chief Agriculture Negotiator
Jill Richardson
Food:
Don't Be Scared of Food: Are We Being Needlessly Hysterical About Food Safety?
David E. Gumpert
Health and Wellness:
47,000 Women Could Die As a Result of the New Mammogram Guidelines
George Lakoff
Immigration:
Hate Group, FAIR, Is Looking for "Ethnically Ambiguous" Actors to Amplify Its Racism
Adam Luna
Media and Technology:
The Memory Scrub About Why Ft. Hood Happened Is Almost Complete ... If It Weren't for Archives
Mark Ames
Movie Mix:
The Yes Men: Pranksters Out to Fix the World
Mark Engler
Politics:
White House's Ties to Health Care Industry Deeper Than Visitor Records Show
Daniela Perdomo
Reproductive Justice and Gender:
Why Can't We Look Away From Sarah Palin?
Vanessa Richmond
Rights and Liberties:
Citing "National Defense Needs," Obama Administration Says it Won't Sign Ban on Land Mines
Amy Goodman
Sex and Relationships:
Hot Mormon Muffins and Models for Jesus: What's With All the Sexy Christians?
Liz Langley
Take Action:
G-20 Meetings: Nothing Much Happened in the Suites, and There Was Too Much Punch in the Streets
Laura Flanders
Water:
Poseidon's Financial Shell Game: Why Is a Private Desalination Plant Asking for Public Money?
Peter Gleick
World:
Is Obama Following in the Footsteps of Bill Clinton?
Jeff Cohen
The campaign for the "professionalization" of radio is surreptitiously removing community voices from the dial. National Public Radio affiliates nationwide have been devouring locally produced community and university stations as educational institutions seek to end financial support for their stations.
The use of the takeover form known as a "local management agreement" is growing nationwide. Minnesota Public Radio, for example, has used these to take control of two college radio stations in California. Carol Pierson, president and CEO of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, believes that the takeover of these small community stations "is sometimes a good thing because [NPR affiliates] will bring in a lot of money and be able to upgrade the operations." In practice, however, upgrading operations and bringing in money often means elimination of community programming, because these shows rarely raise as much money from individuals, and especially from corporations, as standardized NPR-style programming.
WYMS radio in Milwaukee is licensed to the Milwaukee Public School System. For decades it has been broadcasting locally produced jazz, news and ethnic community programming. Recently, WYMS was almost given to a local university's NPR affiliate, WUWM, in a secret deal between Milwaukee public schools superintendent Spence Korte and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. According to published reports (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, DATE), under the deal, the school system would pay the university $375,000 the first year to operate WYMS, with declining payments over the next five years.
When the terms became public, the deal was killed and Korte was publicly chastised by the board of education; he later resigned. However, instead of returning the station to the community produced jazz and ethnic programming, the school board decided to air Jazz Works, 24 hours a day of satellite jazz. The school board convened a committee to study what should be done with the radio station; a report is due in October.
Milwaukee Public Schools "has a $30 million deficit and we want to make sure our kids can read, write and do arithmetic," said schools spokesperson Don Hoffman. But a source involved in WYMS operations (who asked not to be named) noted, "We had just completed our spring fundraiser during which we were able to raise over $100,000 dollars ... This had nothing to do with economics; it was purely political -- they did not like the individuals running the station."
"There are already two other stations that air NPR programming in Milwaukee; why is there a need for a third?" asked Jim Denomie, a WYMS producer and member of the Bad River Chippewa band. Denomie's program, the only show that deals with Native American news and issues in Milwaukee, had been serving the community for five years. The station's ethnic programming serves very distinct sectors in the Milwaukee market: German, Ukrainian, Polish, Italian, Jewish, Irish, Latino and Native American. Nowhere else on the dial are these communities' voices heard, particularly in their native languages.
Voice of Diversity
Chicago's Loyola University currently owns and operates WLUW, "Loyolas Voice of Diversity," as the station is known. In the 1990s, Loyola's communications department decided to stop broadcasting non-stop dance music and instead directed the station to engage the very heterogeneous community that surrounded the university and become a social justice advocate.
WLUW currently broadcasts to Vietnamese, Guatemalan, Polish, Haitian, Bulgarian and Native American communities in native languages. The station also carries Radio Nation, FAIR's CounterSpin, Making Contact, Labor Beat and Free Speech Radio News -- programming heard nowhere else in Chicago.
In December of 2001 Loyola's president, Father Michael Garanzini, announced that the administration had decided to "de-fund" the station. The administration, he said, had come to this decision because the university is running a $20 million deficit, but TV and film professor Jeff Harder sees another agenda: "The conservative administration has never appreciated the pro-social justice curriculum put forth by our department, and by removing the radio station the administration removes our departments connection with these communities."
On June 27, 2002, the administration notified the staff at WLUW that the radio station was in preliminary discussions with WBEZ, Chicago's NPR affiliate, to complete a local management agreement and take over operations. The administration also notified the staff that after the end of August their services would no longer be required and that a new format would be put into place.
"We lose the only outlets these communities have to local media," says Craig Kois, station manager at WLUW. "Because of concentrated ownership in the media in Chicago, our function at WLUW becomes even more important."
Tracy Jake Siska is a freelance journalist from Chicago. This article was published in EXTRA!, a magazine published by the media advocacy group FAIR.
Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »
| More News and Analysis: | ||
|
Bailed-Out AIG Forcing Poor to Choose Between Running Water and Food Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace: Thanks to AIG, some of the poorest residents of rural Kentucky learned you can always be made poorer by corporate villains. By Yasha Levine, AlterNet. November 26, 2009. |
White House's Ties to Health Care Industry Deeper Than Visitor Records Show Politics: The White House released records cataloguing 575 visits by health care industry heavyweights since Jan. 20. The ties run deep. By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet. November 26, 2009. |
Why I Want to Turn Religious People Into Atheists Belief: Atheism isn't an attack on diversity, it's a defense of reality. By Greta Christina, AlterNet. November 26, 2009. |
Support AlterNet
Do you value the information you're getting from AlterNet? Please show your support with a tax-deductible donation.
Feedback
Tell us how we're doing.