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DRAWINGS FOR ‘THE CURRENT’ BY BARBARA GRANT
KMUN, the only public radio station on the Oregon coast, celebrates its 20th birthday
April 17 squeezed inbetween the 192nd birthday of Astoria (April 12), and the 228th anniversary
of the start of the American Revolution (April 19, 1775). Radio Free Columbia Pacific, '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 is not robot radio.
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 when they were wild and free before commercial competition 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 megamediacrities desire to dominate every
segment of electronic communication (they've already got the pulp media) and force the change
from participatory free & easy io (so-called) professionally staffed, market oriented, expurgated
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 whole.
The battleground is nothing less than worldwide domination 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. Since
the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and most recently the start of the war in Iraq, a taint of Unpatriotic
has also been attached.
If it were up to the Federal Communications Commission, Lars Larson and Mantovani
would 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, and in this new era of the USA Patriot Acts 1 & 2, would
desire to censor all but officially gurgitated information about the American war against terrorism.
It is unfortunate that many people agree with the FCC. They seem to feel there is
already too much liberty in America 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 doesn't wish to disturb or offend anybody
but instead projects a boundless 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.
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, original ideas and experimental broadcasting 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 purchase 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.
The mainstream media has been more than usually banal since 9/11 in its jingoistic
frenzy of unquestioning flagwaving chauvinistically patriotic fervor. Commercial media, much
more than the Constitution, follows the flag — its ambition is to be The New World Media Order
of global communications empire.
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 (and its sister/parent station
KBOO in Portland) 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.
American society undervalues endeavors that do not seek profit. The bottom line of
America 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 who 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 corner 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 depends 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 during pledge drives.
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 for more than a decade sponsored a famous auction.
Silence on radio is known as dead air, which if committed is broadcasting's most unpard
onable 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 truth
fully 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.
In the wake of 9/11 it is essential that ordinary citizens receive the truth of the so-called
War on Terrorism' this country is rapidly engaging in, and only through diversity, debate and real
broadcast independence will that truth be discovered
Radio waves beam out beyond Earth into galactic space. Humanity's reputation might
well rest on which signal reaches other sentient life first — Lars Larson or KMUN, gutsy and
freewheeling Radio Free Columbia Pacific.
- michael M c C usker