pick up again, Barton says, “’Car Talk’ is,
whatever you think about it, a much more
popular program in terms of the listener-
ship for it.”
“Some people don’t like us using audi-
ence data, but it’s better than using cocktail
chit chat to decide what we should be
doing,” Heine says.
But community members such as
the station grew, reaching more towns
across the state, the station tried to pull
board members from those towns. But as it
became more evident that not much was
getting accomplished at the meetings,
Barton says it was hard to keep asking
people to drive great distances to attend the
meetings.
Barton also says there is a desire to
‘We’ll listen to what people have to say, but it
doesn’t mean we’re going to agree and
respond to it. There are so many different
opinions that it makes it hard.’ — Steven Barton
UO Cultural Forum Presents
Hollman and Zupan totally disagree.
“They may say that the Arbitron ratings
say people love the show,” Zupan says,
“but that just goes to show how out of
touch they are.” He believes that the peo-
ple who make the programming decisions
need to sometimes pick shows that do not
appeal to everyone, again citing the need
for a labor issues program like KBOO’s.
Heine stands by his statement that “it’s
the listener who’s the most important per-
son in the equation.” He notes that
KLCC’s listeners feel extremely invested
in the station because of its history in the
community. But he says his decisions will
undoubtedly not please everyone.
“Anything I decide to do is going to vio-
late some stakeholder’s feeling of right,”
he says.
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urrently, all of the programming
decisions at the station are han-
dled by Heine, Sommer,
Michael Canning (the music director), and
Barton. Heine says he bases his decisions
on a combination of Arbitron data, listener
input and his own 20 years of experience.
But that doesn’t help Hollman and the
other community members like her who
still feel slighted. Hollman says she joined
the advisory board, which was unofficially
disbanded about seven years ago, at the
invitation of Heine. Hollman counted her-
self as a dissatisfied listener after “Pacifica
News” and “This American Life” were
discontinued. According to Hollman,
Heine says the advisory board would be a
good place to register her complaints and
try to get these shows back on.
“I wanted to put my two cents in and
what I found was that nothing occurred at
those meetings and there were very few
meetings,” she says. “It appeared to me
that it was a waste of my time and that they
were doing it because it was on their by-
laws or something.”
Barton says a number of years ago,
public radio stations were required to have
an advisory board in order to receive
money from the Corporation of Public
Broadcasting. He argues that they main-
tained the committee for a number of years
after that, but found it to be ineffective. As
bring the advisory board back, but notes
that making programming decisions based
on that kind of input is difficult. “We’ll lis-
ten to what people have to say, but it does-
n’t mean we’re going to agree and respond
to it,” Barton says. “There are so many dif-
ferent opinions that it makes it hard. Who
are you going to serve? It may appeal to a
lot of people but it may turn other people
off.”
Heine was even more critical of the
board. “The advisory board wanted to tell
me how to do my job. They wanted to talk
about programming and the advisory
board needed to be advising the station,”
he says. “The problem with a community
advisory board is how do you select people
who truly represent more than just their
own personal interests? And how do those
people take on the charge of representing
not just their personal interests and not the
interests of their friends but of the 60,000
people who listen to KLCC.”
Siporin somewhat agrees with Barton
and Heine in this regard, but goes on to
say that they would have meetings with
staff members where programming issues
were discussed, but no votes were ever
taken. “I think that if you’re trying to run
a place day to day and a lot of people who
want to give input are only there once a
week as a volunteer, you have to move
more quickly than that. And I think that a
lot of the decisions can’t go through the
democratic process. Somebody has to say
this is my area of expertise. But to have
zero democratic input is just flat out
wrong,” he says.
Jenny Newtson, a former KLCC staff
reporter now living in Portland, also sym-
pathizes with Barton and Heine and the
difficulties they face in making station
decisions. However, she says, it seems as
if they’re betraying the community model
that KLCC once stood for. “I guess I can
understand what Don and Steve are saying
about running a business. But the tradition
that we worked so hard to build at KLCC
was about doing that [building a commu-
nity model] through people feeling heard.
We always sold it to our community at
Radiothon that what they think matters,”
she says.
ew
Media Watchdogs
The Eugene Media Action Committee is a local media watchdog group that
has been working with KLCC management for years, providing input and
advocacy for news and opinion programming. The group holds regular month-
ly meetings in Eugene and the next is 5:30 pm Thursday, Nov. 3 at Growers
Market upstairs, 454 Willamette.
“We welcome old and new folks concerned about media bias, and really
putting the public back in public broadcasting.,” says David Zupan. For more
information, call Zupan at 484-9167.