Isn't the word ghetto an expression of contempt or self-contempt, referring to a place not fit for human habitation? You also spoke of your perception of the problem as "confining ourselves to a ghetto," the issue being "mass appeal." "Self-ghettoization" isn't a problem, though; you live in a ghetto because you don't have money and power, not because you prefer to live in a shabby place. No one wants to have smaller rather than larger audiences, and expanding audiences for left-wing discourse is important (on which everyone agrees), but the question is *how* to go about it, and that's what the Pacifica struggle, for instnace, has been all about:
***** ROBERT McCHESNEY Media Matters: Monopolies, Pacifica, NPR & PBS Interviewed by David Barsamian Boulder, Colorado, November 10 & 11, 1999
..._The Pacifica leadership says it wants to build audience. They want to get beyond the choir. They want to expand their listenership so that they can be a viable and prosperous entity in the twenty-first century. What's wrong with that?_
There's nothing wrong with that. I've been a big advocate of community stations working to expand their listenership. But what they're doing doesn't track with that claim. There's a disconnect there, on a number of levels. First of all, if that is your goal, you should be working with your listeners, staff members and volunteers to talk to them and have a discussion about how you want to do that. There are different ways to approach that. You don't just go into a secret meeting and come out with a secret plan, fire everyone and implement a plan. That's no way to run a community radio station. Secondly, if you look at the Houston and the Washington stations that they are most sympathetic to, they're the two that have stripped out almost all the public affairs and have gone to music and light entertainment programming, taken all the identity that Pacifica historically stands for, and removed it. So it gives cause for concern that their vision of a Pacifica is not going to be the vision that has the dissident voices on the Middle East or on the WTO, that's going to provide a voice to those sectors of the community that are boxed out of the commercial system. The record instead, from what we can actually see, is that their version of Pacifica is going to be a sort of NPR Lite, with music and almost no or totally lightweight public affairs. The solution here isn't to badmouth or castigate them. The solution is to set up a new structure that is accountable and democratic. I think you can expand audience without sacrificing your politics. Pacifica can learn from stations like KGNU and WORT that have done this successfully in their communities. You can put music and entertainment on that people like. You can also have your politics. Politics aren't turning people off. That's not my experience. What's turning them off is unprofessionalism, incoherence, factional fighting and programming that has no interest beyond one or two people in the audience. The concern, though, is that the Pacifica board has zeroed in on the tradition of feisty public affairs and journalism as what has to go if they want to please the grant makers, foundation heads and politicos in Washington. That seems to be the only audience they care about.
_What might be some strategies for getting beyond the choir to the congregation?_
Who do you want to reach? You want to expand your audience. There are a thousand different directions to go. Let's say that there are groups you want to reach that you're not currently reaching in the community, go into those communities, get programmers, give them training, see what they want to do. Engage in a process of bringing people aboard. That's the only way you can really do it that I can think of. The way not to do it is to hire some high-ticket demographic expert from the advertising industry who comes in with reams of charts and statistics, telling you, Play this song and you get this audience. That's not community radio. That's the whole logic of commercial radio. One-way flow. The whole idea is to grab people and hook them to listen to ads. Community radio is developing an audience and an interaction in a community. You talk to people, bring programmers in. That's the way to do it....
<http://www.radio4all.org/fp/122199mcches-barsam.htm> *****
At 1:15 PM -0600 12/3/02, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:
>so far, your argument is primarily that venezuela has more powerful
>left-wingers than the us and they don't own the media, ergo it can't
>be done here.
You haven't proposed anything practical that rank-and-file organizers and activists like myself can do in the USA, though. Most of us are not and will not be mass media workers like Rod Sterling. -- Yoshie
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