elsewhere in his essay Hill writes:
"...Anyone can understand the rationale of listener sponsorship--that unless the station is supported by those who value it (*i.e. the 'community'), no one can listen to it including those who value it. This is common sense. But beyond this, actually sending in the subscription, which one does not have to send in unless one particularly wants to, implies the kind of cultural engagement, as some French philosophers call it, that is surely indispensable for the sake of the whole culture. When we have a radio station fully supported by subscribers who have not responded to a special gift offer, who are not participating in a lottery, who have not ventured an investment at 3 per cent, but who use this means of supporting values that seem to them of basic and lasting importance--then we will have more than a subscription roster. It will amount, I think, to a new focus of action or a new shaping influence that can hardly fail to strengthen all of us." http://www.pacifica.org/about/lhtheory_1951.html
and as John Whiting has written:
"It was this sense of "engagement", as Lewis Hill called it, quoting the French Existentialists, that not only made KPFA's audience intensely loyal, but gave them a significance in the community which a mere head count, had it been possible, would have grossly undervalued. (A moment's reflection makes it obvious that head counts reveal nothing of a group's importance, except as a standard for setting advertising revenue.)" http://www.radio4all.org/fp/vincula.htm
Doug, try not to think of community as a bad word just because Bernard White utters it. Reclaim it from him. Community is good.
Joe W.
p.s. You might also want to read 'A Short History of Community Radio" http://www.weft.org/station/history.html
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: RE: [lbo-talk] Report from KPFA CAB meeting
>Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2005 19:15:12 -0400
>
>Joseph Wanzala wrote:
>
>>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.
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