>Doug, it is really a question of whether you fundamentally support
>the 'idea' of community radio or whether you are always looking for
>reasons to rain on its parade. Perhaps you should not be at WBAI if
>you don't support the essential idea behind it.
What is that? Pacifica founder Lew Hill's? I don't see the word "community" in that document - which Bernard White urged us all to read and take to heart when he took over as Program Director at WBAI. An excerpt:
<http://pacifica.org/about/lhtheory_1951.html>
>America is well supplied with remarkably talented writers,
>musicians, philosophers, and scientists whose work will survive for
>some centuries. Such people have no relation whatever to our
>greatest communication medium. I have been describing a fact at the
>level of the industry's staff; it is actually so notorious in the
>whole tradition and atmosphere of our radio that it precludes anyone
>of serious talent and reasonable sanity from offering material for
>broadcast, much less joining a staff. The country's best minds, like
>one mind, shun the medium unless the possessor of one happens to be
>running for office. Yet if we want an improvement in radio worth the
>trouble, it is these people whose talent the medium must attract.
>The basic situation of broadcasting must be such that artists and
>thinkers have a place to work--with freedom. Short of this, the
>suffering listener has no out.
>
>It may be clearer why I indicated at the outset that listener
>sponsorship involves some basic concerns. This is the first problem
>it sets out to solve--to give the genuine artist and thinker a
>possible, even a desirable, place to work in radio.
>
>[...]
>
>The problem was, you remember, not whether you as a listener should
>choose what you like or agree with--as obviously you should and
>do--but how to get some genuinely significant choices before you.
>Radio which aims to do that must express what its practitioners
>believe to be real, good, beautiful, and so forth, and what they
>believe is truly at stake in the assertion of such values. For
>better or worse these are matters like the nature of the deity which
>cannot be determined by majority vote or a sales curve. Either some
>particular person makes up his mind about these things and learns to
>express them for himself, or we have no values or no significant
>expression of them. Since values and expressions as fundamental as
>this are what we must have to improve radio noticeably, there is no
>choice but to begin by extending to someone the privilege of
>thinking and acting in ways important to him. Whatever else may
>happen, we thus assign to the participating individual the
>responsibility, artistic integrity, freedom of expression, and the
>like, which in conventional radio are normally denied him. KPFA is
>operated literally on this principle.