>go into those communities, get programmers, give them
>training, see what they want to do. Engage in a process of bringing
>people aboard. Community radio is developing
>an audience and an interaction in a community.
-I'm not sure I buy this. WBAI is full of this sort of talk these days - we need to bring in voices from the "community." I never know what -this means - what *is* the community? It's usually defined -demographically, if it's defined at all. But for these purposes, the -"black community" largely excludes that portion of the black -population that votes Democratic and goes to church.
Which while Doug wants to argue the soft elitist argument that "the people" don't know what good for them, he does emphasize a moral general problem with the Left, that when they don't participate seriously in the Democratic Party or in other mainstream liberal organizations, they are ignoring "the community" far more dramatically than the liberals they usually dis.
Frankly, the average Democratic politician spends far more time going to black community events (or any other kind of community event) than the left activists who spend most of their time telling "the community" to come to THEIR LEFT EVENTS and to THEIR LEFT RALLIES. It may drive lefties to apoplexy but the fact remains that Clinton is considered an "honorary black" (with the official awards to show for it now) while left white heros are considerly pale and stale. Folks may write it off as duping his audiences, but the fact was that he showed up, time after time, at black churches and other gatherings for decades. As they say, showing up is half of life.
I remember going to a Clinton rally back in 1996 in Oakland, an event that was dominated by a far more racially diverse crowd than I saw at most left rallies even in Oakland. While waiting in line I met a nice middle-aged black woman who was there as part of a church choir for the event, who spontaneously gushed to me about how great Clinton was and how suspicious she was of Jesse Jackson. A couple of interesting points there-- the black churches are some of the best media networks in the country and folks like Clinton use them, where the Left doesn't even try to bother. (Also not mentioned in this discussion is the network of black community newspapers). And when a Dem politician holds an event, he knows to invite the choir to participate, because rather than preach to the choir, he uses the choir to bring the rest of the congregation with them.
Folks talk about the overwhelming force of the media, but the dramatically different views of the black community on Clinton-- hard core support despite relentless media attacks -- shows that alternative community information networks are quite powerful.
The left fails to penetrate the media attacks because it is so piss-poor at establishing its own information outreach because it spends its time building rallies who live and breathe mainstream media coverage. To repeat, having all those rally participants spend the same amout of time going out to community events to raise the same issues would have been a far better use of the time and money invested.
When the same people who advocate useless time-wasting mass rallies are also complaining about how they can't penetrate the conservative media, I got to ask when will they finally see the link?
-- Nathan Newman