On 7/22/05, Nathan Newman <nathanne at nathannewman.org> wrote:
>
> What left group has that amount of money? If WBAI became a grant making
> operation, it would become probably the largest left-oriented, movement
> oriented foundation in the country.
-They could give the money to Air America.
How about giving the money to a whole range of youth and minority collectives to produce radiocasts for the Internet? Helping the communication efforts of community and grassroots groups?
The reality is that a large part of the fights at Pacifica are over scarce radio time on air, so it's all a zero sum game. But if the focus became on really helping a range of different people produce media, that could be distributed in a whole range of ways outside the radio scarcity constraints, maybe the politics of Pacifica would stop being so insane.
A bit of seed money to a range of grassroots media groups would payoff in multiples.
Just imagine $12 million per year in media grants to progressive and leftwing organizations. The results would be phenomenal.
I'd far prefer to have access to the range of media that would be available under that scenario than being stuck with the one voice that won squatting rights this particular hour of the day.
Nathan Newman