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Friday 5 November 2004

Things just get better and better

WESU may become an NPR affiliate. Hey, I've got a fun idea! Let's re-do all the battles of the 60's but have the conservatives win this time! We can start by replacing student radio with corporate drivel! Take that, free speech movement!

The Unitarian minister who presided over my marriage told me that he fled the US under the Regan administration and that he'd never regretted moving to Canada. He kept talking about how much saner it was. How *is* the music program at McGill? Also, Unitarians are cool.

Yes, I just called NPR corporate drivel. If you can tell the difference between an NPR news boradcast and a corporate radio news boradcast, it's only because real corporations ahve gotten so much worse. NPR is sliding to their level with a five year delay. (Why am I talking about news, because certian unnamed lame-ass NPR affiliates in San Francisco don't play anything but news. The ones that play music often play boring, conservative music. If you put KQED and KDFC together, you get a normal NPR affiliate. bah) There already exists a NPR affiliate in the middle of Connecticut, with a wide broadcast radius that reaches every place that WESU reaches and already has the NPR audience. But even if they were talking about making WESU a Pacifica affliate, I would still be opposed, because the idea is coming from the top down and being imposed on the Wesleyan radio station against the will of the people who are actually doing it. Say goodbye to freeform student radio. Say hello to hegemony. This idea is coming from the college president, Douglas Bennet. why not drop him a line and tell him what you thing about college radio staying in the hands of students:

Dougals Bennet
Wesleyan University
Middletown, CT 06459

dbennet at wesleyan.edu

 

current mood: depressed about politics

1 comment:

Charles Céleste Hutchins said...

There are TWO npr affiliates serving Middletown CT. I don't see why having a third one is valuable. I do see why student radio is valuable.

I listened to one of our NPR affiliates this morning. They read a bunch of government press releases and called it news. They did a story about the religious conflict in Thailand and the ONLY Muslim they talked to was an english-speaking journalist. If you want news, listen to KPFA or WBAI.

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