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Doug struggled with bad decisions and bad management for years at WBAI. They finally scheduled his one hour down to 1/2 I think and put at some weird time. They also took his time slot and put some other bullshit in, citing `community' concerns.
KPFA has him scheduled at 10:00a on Saturday morning which is not the best slot, but it's liveable. At least it's not 2:00a on alternate Tuesdays.
I only listen to the evening news 6:00p--7:00p occasionally and Doug's program on Saturday mornings. I don't like KPFA very much. It is a very distant shadow of itself in the 1960s-70s. I used to watch KQED the public tv channel here, but over the years that dried out too.
The whole public media mentality morphed into something near profoundly stupid, a kind of middle brow, take no chances, never say anything that would politically upset the vaguely liberal sensibility. This kind of sensibility and programming is the direct result of turning to corporate advertizing that wants to develop their image. Chevron is actually good for wetlands! Bank of America builds the American Dream, ADM produces all our best food, as a picture of happy Mexican kids skip along in the grass next to a cornfield. Handsome Old Couple gaze into eachothers eyes, a life well planned by Humana Healthcare.
The old lefties who fought for and got public broadcasting died out by about the mid-70s and its been bullshit pretty much ever since. In my early 1970s radio phase, I used to listen to KPFA and a commerical station KSAN. The DJs had names like Rumbled Foreskin and Dusty Street. Her knowledge of the music business was phenomenal. Never heard anything like it, except on KJAZZ and their DJs who knew the jazz business like a bad cousin. All this media talk had a real (to me) political element and helped me understand art as a commerical product. Musicians were political. Later I went back and studied (listened) Duke Ellington and his 30s--50s work. I played some of these tracks over and over until I saw the `story' line. Read like a fucking novel or poem---who knew?
Well public radio as I knew it disappeared. It's last silver age was the 1970s San Francisco Newspaper strike. KQED stepped in and ran a round table local and national news discussion each night. The format was a large table with a moderator who moved from each reporter to create a picture of the day. It was like what I imagine was an editors meeting before the morning edition.
It was great at first but slowly morphed into non-spontaneous presentations that we see today at various PBS tv news magazine programs---obviously structured by some bullshit production `values'.
While I was writing this I was listening to the Pacifica evening news on KPFA read by locals. Afterward was a good talk by an older woman about the ignorance of economic history displayed by the establishment. She was obiviously an old lefty of some sort. She was off too soon and they switch so something else.
I switched back to KCSM with Kathleen Laughten with a good jazz history program featuring a long track from Ron Carter with selections from Ravel. This jazz + classic was part of Duke's spectrum---a love affair with late 19th C European romantic composers. I mean its gentle compared to Coltrane and expressionism, but hey. The real attraction of the Impressionists isn't their beauty, but their extraordinary isolation. Those flowers and gardens are from a life in exile.