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KMUNITY RADIO
THE MOUTH OF THE COLUMBIA
BY MICHAEL McCUSKER
Big money radio broadcasts for big bucks Public radio
scrounges for loose change to stay on the air Community radio
stations like KMUN are always looking for a dollar so they can
broadcast It is a listener sponsored station that depends on its
funding primarily from listeners, which is why its listeners are
subjected a couple of times a year to promotions, pitches, pleas
and whines for new and old members to pledge cash, also puts
on fundraising benefits with local and traveling musicians and
performers and each year sponsors a famous auction
“KMUN was never meant to be musical wallpaper
KMUN continues to stimulate and exasperate, to excite and
irritate, to give ourselves a place to express ourselves and
allow others to do the same "
~J oseph S tevenson ,
FORMER PROGRAM DIRECTOR
Silence on radio is known as dead air, which if committed
is broadcasting's most unpardonable blunder. Radio created the
demand for every picosecond* filled with noise and insistent din.
No time is granted to reflect on anything heard the previous
picosecond Dead air is more truthfully the shock of not finding a
familiar and perhaps favored station at its usual spot on the radio
dial.
The line of communication is tenuous and expensive.
Listeners argue about the cost and value of the satellite menus
as well as the local venue — but that is what community radio
is all about, undaunted by megamedia and the self-interested
cynicism that underlies our bottom line society.
Think universally, act locally; a majority begins with one
— What a person does, reads, listens to and thinks about form
the character and ideas necessary not only for a personally
gratifying life but one that assists in alleviating the poverty or
oppression of other lives.
Perhaps that is too heavy a burden and too extravagant a
promise to place upon a radio station like KMUN. Yet it is a voice
that not only attempts to reflect a community but also to inform it,
to present ideas, thoughts and opinions that commercial media
finds unprofitable and thus shuns as if they were diseases.
Ironically, despite outrageous claims by corporate
megamedia that it alone represents democracy and the First
Amendment, a small public radio station like KMUN depends
upon true democracy to survive, and it does survive because
ordinary citizens keep it alive
Radio waves beam out beyond Earth into galactic space.
Humanity’s reputation might well rest on which signal reaches
other sentient life first — Rush Limbaugh or KMUN, gutsy and
freevtfieeling Radio Free Columbia Pacific.
"KMUN is a gift, a jewel, a miracle I love you."
~A KMUN L istener
The only public radio station on the Oregon coast
celebrates its 17th year of broadcasting at the beginning of its
second century Astoria's KMUN-FM, 'The Mouth of the Columbia
River has been on the air since April 17, 1983
Broadcast from the Tillicum House near the Astoria
riverfront, KMUN reaches north into Washington and south and
east along the Oregon coast and into the coastal mountains
KMUN operates through a subscription economy and is plugged
into the world via satellite programming. This quantum lurch into
the 21st century is expensive and controversial and is not paid
for by the usual advertisements for the banal and botulistic.
KMUN depends primarily upon revenues provided by listeners
and functions as a non-profit entity.
KMUN offers just about everything a radio station can
attempt to do and operates daily on the cultural edge where
megamedia fears to follow. It broadcasts an eclectic smorgasbord
of imaginative, provocative, exotic, and occasionally dreadful
programming. It is seldom bland or boring.
KMUN, like most public or eccentric radio stations, is
at the far left of the FM dial. The left side of the dial has for years
been casual, even libertine, similar to the early years of computer
internets v/ien they were wild and free before commercial com
petition began coveting the wide open cyberspaces
The open range of the lower FM is being crowded with
radio imperialists who wish to drive away the little/or non-profits.
These infotainment megamediacnties desire to regulate every
segment of electronic communication (they've already got the
pulp media) and force the change from participatory free & easy
to (so-called) professionally staffed, market oriented, censored
and insipid commercial radio. The people who chase a buck
tolerate no other purpose in life Their attitude toward public radio
is to swallow it vdiole.
The battleground is nothing less than worldwide domin
ation of infotainment fought over by huge ambitious commercial
media cartels. Profits promise to be as astronomical as the
competition for the money is fierce and merciless No place for
compassion or even sensibility, only relentless combat in a
corporate world war that will destroy the media village to rule it.
KMUN is obviously small fry, a mouse underneath the
feet of rampaging rhinocerai. Yet the large consequence trickles
down to the least considered
Masking blatant greed with hypocritical ideological rubric,
commercial media moguls attack public radio and television as
Liberal, Socialist, and Elitist, a rather insoluble mix
If it were up to the Federal Communications Commission,
Paul Harvey and Mantovani vxjuld be the standards of radio
broadcasting. Sex & Shock Radio in particular convulse the FCC
into apocalyptic frenzy, and the Commission is not especially
fond of the First Amendment, regarding it as too liberal and
libertine.
It is unfortunate that many people agree with the FCC
They seem to feel that there is already too much liberty in Amer
ica Incorporated, that it disrupts the sacred American dream of
everlasting purchasing power and blessed consumption, and that
it espouses bizarre ideas and equally esoteric lifestyles that
threaten to bewitch, bother and bewilder them
Commercial radio is of course no problem. It does not
wish to disturb or offend anybody but instead projects a bound
less Land of Oz & Harriet, easily attained with Master Charge.
A few chilling commercials exemplify the dismal wasteland on the
AM and upper end of the FM dial, advertising motels in which no
one is surprised or radio stations that say the same thing about
their programming — nothing new, imaginative or provocative,
just the same old twaddle about adolescent love and tears and
car crashes to ensure perpetual cranial remission and pimply
midlife orgasms.
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JOAN BRAMBILLA DAVID
Rather than hands-on radio, the commercial stations
reduce their listeners to consumers and treat them as empty-
headed children amok in toy stores
Controversy, onginal ideas and experimental broadcast
ing are anathema to commercial radio which depends instead
upon innocuous pabulum focused on a primordial mental range
to hype the unnecessary and the indigestible
The endless saturation of high-pitched patter put out by
commercial media sugarcoats the brain The inane music and
schlock squeezed grudgingly inbetween insipid commercials is
hardly memorable enough to interfere with the dense airwave of
consumer capitalism.
The pervasive influence of advertising is much greater
than the more ballyhooed TV violence or shock radio. Listeners
and viewers are prodded several times an hour to pérchase and
consume a bewildering variety of products that purport to satisfy
every craving or longing, every passion and desire Advertising
blends into a general perception of life, no longer separate
pitches to purchase individual products but instead a miasmal
cultural warp; an unconscious assumption of life as advertised
overtakes the sense of life as it really is. attempting to mold and
define whoever is within range of its brain-dead contagion.
*One/trillionth of a second
JUST THE FACTS
Defining journalism is slippery this year 2000 because
the profession seems to be emerging from a long period of
stagnant obsession with the impossible quest for objectivity,
always questionable at best, a deceitful masquerade at its
worst.
Journalism is bursting out in a variety directions, some
like infotainment and simulated events unfortunate — but other
spinoffs act as stimulants to broaden the definition and scope
of journalism, and that includes active advocacy in response to
theoretical objectivity
The staunch era of objectivity in reporting humanity's
daily turbulence has never been entirely successful. The rules
were that personality was to be left out of reporting the facts
of events. Human minds, however, are not autonomic; they
are colored with imagination and point of view which is synon
ymous with angle of reference.
The pursuit of objectivity as the comerstone of journal
ism was promulgated by such well-placed commentators as
Walter Lippman in the early years of the 20th century The bad
old days of reckless and unsavory partisanship by the main
stream press were declared over and the era of 'Just the facts?,
as Joe Friday used to say on every TV show of 'Dragnet', was
ushered in as the new form of American journalism Editorial
commentary was separated from reporting in essence as well
as in sections of newspapers and later on radio and television
news broadcasts.
Objectivity in reportage is a fine ideal but human
beings who record events, or as Gene Fowler said, journalists
who "Shoot history on the wing" are creatures of their cultures,
classes and education, and their attempts at unbiased witness
are yet shaped by conscious and/or unconscious prejudices
and inculcated values.
The insidious aspect of objectivity is that inevitably the
form is used to disguise very partisan ideas and perspectives,
most notably by those who manage and rule society and own
the major media.
Commercial media is allied with the political and religious
right in its wish to pamper the American brain as a willful child
and desynapse its thoughtweaves while cleansing it of reason
and maturity. Public and listener-sponsored media such as
KMUN intend the opposite, devoted to stretching and amplifying
the American brain This is anathema to commercial media
whose only purpose is to sell products Corporate capitalism
in league with political and religious ultra-conservatism shuns
diversity, though the contradiction between sensual materialism
and ecumenical tyranny might ultimately be disharmonious to the
alliance.
Public broadcasting does not intend to remanufacture its
listeners and viewers Cradle to grave consumerism is neither its
means nor its ends Instead its attempts to counter the trend of
perpetual adolescence with appeals to thought and intellect are
serious and varied and shaped to adult responsibility in an
increasingly complex and corrupt democracy
Amencan society undervalues endeavors that do not
seek profit. The bottom line of Amenca is The Bottom Line
From childhood most Americans are taught that money and its
purchase power are society's vitality and the only true pursuit of
happiness.
Yet there are among the busy self-interested population
many v4io wish for generous community interaction and equity
rather than couch potato apathy and home shopping Their
voices seem lost on the floor of the national stock market and are
at present shoved aside KMUN reflects a few of those voices. A
small radio station at the bottom of the FM dial in a far off comer
of the nation. But it is here. On The Air. where incredible varieties
of ideas incubate and are sounded
The problem with "community radio" is also one of its
most attractive features Instead of commercial sponsors who
buy airtime and impose their Babbitry upon the content of
programs, KMUN and its sister/parent station KBOO in Portland,
depend upon a community of listeners for financial survival They
are KMUN's (and KBOO's) lifelines That is why programmers,
virtually all of them unpaid volunteers, grovel and beg dunng
pledge drives
The partisan press is at least open about what it repre
sents and the axes it grinds A reader knows exactly vtfiere the
editors and reporters of an advocacy publication (or broadcast
media) stand In the bad old days when the mainstream press
was unabashedly partisan, readers were exposed to a vigorous
variety of ideas and opinions For all its renowned excesses,
prejudice and hysteria, the partisan press was in thunderous
opposition with itself while under the rubric of objectivity today's
media cautiously imitates itself
The concept of objectivity might be regarded as a
conspiracy of projecting a status quo, w4iich is a particular way
of viewng things and is obviously a partisan operation, and
disagreement with this agreed upon fiction is dismissed as
naive or dangerous partisanship or advocacy on the far-out
fringe of American journalism Yet it is the fringe that is
vigorously redefining the ideas, concepts and principles of
contemporary journalism
The central purpose is to inform — but that is not
a passive occupation The purpose of informing presumes a
consequence, an action or reaction regarding the information
that is disseminated
The broadest definition of a reporter, therefore, is
anyone who has something to report, regardless of whether
they are schooled or employed in journalism
ft
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