Robert McChesney(moderator)…and now Lynne Chadwick

Lynne Chadwick: Thanks. I’d actually prepared some nice, typed remarks…as this conference has gone on, I’ve been writing all over them, so bear with me as I try to do this. 

I guess one thing that I want to say is that in my job as President of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, I really think that I have the privilege of working for one of the most diverse organizations that I know of, and every speaker at this table is affiliated some way with community radio…and that’s remarkable and that’s something I’m proud of. And while I’ve been listening to the other speakers at this congress talk about the need to get access to the airwaves, or access to media, I reflect upon the wisdom of the founders of community radio…that that’s what they decided to do – to build radio stations, so that we could have our own airwaves, and provide all that space.  

Um, when the public broadcasting act was passed in 1967, and next Wednesday there’s going to be a thirtieth anniversary celebration of it on Capitol Hill, community radio had already been on the air for 18 years. KPFA had gone on the air in Berkeley in 1949. 

Um, I think the reason behind this panel is obviously for us to talk about the politics of community …public radio and community radio, and one of the things that we’re really good at in this movement is criticism of ourselves, and of our friends…um, and of the military and the media-industrial complex out there…but I guess one of things I want to say as I start out is how proud I am of the people who have volunteered and worked in this field for all those nearly fifty years…and I expect almost everybody in this room has been in contact with a community radio station, and I just want to tell you how proud I am of you and I hope that we reflect on that between ourselves and among ourselves at this congress. I’m talking about paid and unpaid, the producers, the people who put the stations on the air, got burned out, went away, came back…I was just talking to Helene Rosenbluth outside the door, the woman who’s doing the tapes, and I remembered that about twenty years ago I went to an NFCB conference and she was giving the workshop on burnout…twenty years ago, and she’s still here and so am I. 

Community radio was founded on a political idea: the idea that communities should have control of their media, and the idea that the listeners should fund that media. The idea that stories and cultural events that were not marketable in the mass media should have a place on the airwaves…the idea that voices unheard in the mainstream media, voices against the grain should be heard. Stations like the Radio Bilingue Network that Maria was talking about earlier thought that the farm workers should be on the air.

So, the conundrum was there in the beginning, that unmarketable stories should be on the air…that stories that didn’t have a large audience should be on the air…that we had to ask people to voluntarily contribute to the stations to support them…and that we would be based on volunteers able to come forward to produce the shows. And I just wanted to state that at community radio stations about 60% of the income comes from listener donors to this day. I think Pat was referring to entire public radio model. 

Well, I don’t know, when you think about those principles. All of them this founding ideas [sic] created some serious internal politics from the beginning. Radio has a limited shelf space. There’s only 24 hours in the day, there’s only seven days in the week. Not everybody that comes forward is probably gonna get a show on the air. It’s a tough thing to do. 

One of the ways that we solved this in the early days of community radio was to wait for volunteers to come forward with ideas. Not everybody in a community is in the position to be able to volunteer, to spend the time to learn how to produce radio and to continue to spend that time producing the shows week after week, and that has created some of the other issues about who’s at the air…who’s on the air at the radio station. 

One of the ways that we solved this idea in the early days of community radio was to wait for volunteers to come forward, and as more and more people came forward we created something called patchwork programming, so that we could give a show to one group every third Thursday of the month, and you all know those kinds of programs…it worked great for letting everybody, or many people in the community have a radio show.

But it didn’t work very well for the audience. 

It’s real hard to remember to turn in your radio on 3:30 on alternate Tuesdays in months that begin with an "R", or end with an "R." And I’m only half exaggerating but you know that’s true. Of course we could hold all these discussions in those early days of community radio just around political ideals, and I admit, and I’m proud of it, that I came to public radio as a volunteer doing a women’s show that I was privileged to have on WPFW in Washington DC, and they let me, at a station that was dedicated to the Black audience in Washington DC be on the air, because they thought that the women’s show was a good idea. 

But I was definitely out of order in their programming line-up.  

Anyhow, we could continue talking about this stuff in a political environment until about ten years ago when public radio lead by NPR began to seriously look at audience research. We started learning about how people use radio and the facts revealed some things that some people prefer to ignore and others of us want to use. And I guess in my position I’ve been urging stations to think them through…because there are two dynamics that continue here: there’s our mission and the ability to fulfill that mission, the mission to present diverse viewpoints but to present them in a way that actually serves the audiences that we’re trying to reach and in a way that raises enough local money that we can continue to be on the air. 

So instead of having programming meetings based on politics, we started hearing phrases like "building audience" and in face of examining the mission in terms of what the research was telling us about our audiences, many stations began realigning their program schedules in order to present programming in a way that better served listeners. 

I remember working with a station in major market whose goal was to serve the African American community in that market, and I was looking at their program schedule, and every morning from 7-8AM, they had a serious documentary on the air. And I said to them, this is an interesting programming idea, how did you come to choose this?

And they said, this is important programming and people should listen to this, ought to listen to this. 

And I said, what are you doing between 7-8 in the morning? You’re probably making lunch, taking a shower, getting shaved, putting the kids to school and everything else. You’re probably not going to be able to sit down and listen to an hour long documentary. Do you think your audience can do that? 

Anyhow, that was a tough question, and they had to sit down there and say, well, you know, but if we change that programming, somebody who’s doing that show is going to have to stop doing that show, and somebody else is gonna get to do it. Enter the internal politics. 

Enter the politics of self-interest. This is an important issue to throw out there, because in our reliance on volunteers, we have relied on individuals who have given generously of their time ---I mean those people that get up and are on the air at 6am regularly, who I have tremendous respect for, and then we said to them, we’re realigning our program schedule, maybe we’re gonna have to move your show, maybe your show doesn’t belong in the schedule anymore. That’s a hard thing to say and it’s a horrible thing to hear. 

Anyhow, that did go on. So, anyhow, in the face of this developing idea about audiences and growing audiences in public radio, external politics joined the picture. The gulf war was very, very good for community radio. 

Pacifica National programming started providing a very alternative view of the war, alternative to even what was being heard on National Public Radio. Audiences started finding our stations. They found our stations without advertising campaigns, without billboards, without a whole bunch of stuff…they found them because we had something on the air that was important and compelling. And all of a sudden, our audiences boomed. 

Fundraising boomed too. We had some of the best fundraisers ever going on on the air. And that’s because people were listening and they were hearing something important. So programming was shifted. People said, OK we’re going to have to make some programming decisions if this is important we’re going to displace the programming. It was OK, it was tough but we had a compelling reason for it. We could see … anyhow, the war ended. Community radio stations had learned that probably what the research was saying ws right around providing consistent programming. Could we continue it? Or should we revert back to the old patchwork model? Many stations have continued their programming changes around focussing to larger audiences. The genie is out of the bottle. 

Anyhow, I guess what I wanted to say is that sometimes when we criticize each other, criticize ourselves, its important not to shoot ourselves in the foot, it important not to feed our enemies – and there are enemies to public broadcasting, to community radio. There are people who want the valuable stations, so let’s be clear about what we are succeeding in, let’s be clear about what’s important here and let’s continue to support the stations in every way we can. 

I want to say that the focus of our politics should continue to be the vision that we hear at the opening of this session, that we hear all the time, that is heard on our airwaves. It is not easy to set aside the politics of self-interest for the politics of producing a truly progressive message and getting the audiences to listen to it. I think we are, if not a sleeping giant, a drowsy giant. We’ve got a lot of outlets out there and I would like to see them important in our media landscape.  

Thanks.