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Sunday, March 28, 2004
Go refigure 
| | The Deaning of America is Micah's latest in The Nation. ...to glimpse where all this goes next, you have to look beyond the efforts of a few leaders and wade through a sea of Dean-inspired activist networks that are basically hubs of independent Democratic activism. |
| | Try this on for size. Go to BlogForAmerica (now titled "Democracy for America") and count the numbers of comments on the posts. They run in the hundreds (like Slashdot), just like they did when the campaign was a campaign. |
It's even creepier than it appears
| | We'd suggest that no small part of the reason for the right wing's political success in the US over the past couple of decades is the ever-increasing web of religious stations that, along with the gospel, deliver a daily dose of reactionary politics. As we noticed during a recent cross-country drive, there are parts of the US where it's difficult to tune in a radio station that isn't a religious broadcaster. |
| | I'm not sure I agree with her first premise (they're preaching to a small choir, methinks). But she's right that preaching is about all you hear on the noncom band through long stretches of interstate. Worse, she adds, |
| | As anyone in noncommercial broadcasting will tell you — especially someone who works at a station that has translators to take its signal past the area of its main transmitter — religious broadcasters have for years been encroaching on the signals of public broadcasters and sometimes (legally) replacing public radio service with the broadcasts of religious stations. |
| | Look at the situation this way. At least Clear Channel tries to bring some diversity to the airwaves. So do NPR, PRI, public radio, Pacifica, college radio and other secular purveyors of noncommercial radio in the U.S. Religious broadcasters, however, have exactly one point of view, one "educational" agenda. Yet they're the ones packing the dials with signals, and getting approximately zero resistance from the FCC. |
| | Credit where due: They're really good at it. They're kicking the pants off the rest of the folks listed in the last paragraph. And they've been doing it for a looong time. |
| | Bonus link: Against God: The Full Story of the Lansman-Milam Petition. That's for those who don't remember the dawning days of KTAO, KCHU, KPOO, KRAB, KDNA, KFAT, KBOO and other fun & fine stations. Nobody ever understood what good could be done with noncommmercial community radio than Jeremy Lansman and Lorenzo Milam. They fought the religious broadcasters; but lost, basically. They were heros. We should remember them more often, and better. Lorenzo's Sex & Broadcasting was the how-to book for setting up community radio stations. And it was obsoleted when NPR lobbied successfully for the elimination of the entire class of 10-watt ("Class D") community stations, to pave the way, ostensibly, for larger "professional" noncommercial stations to grow their signals. I don't know how much killing off the Class D stations helped NPR (all the big public stations I can think of were already big at that time the ruling went down), but it did blow up the on-ramp over which many of those big NPR stations first drove onto the air. |
| | By the way, KPOO and KBOO are still alive. The lnks above go to the stations, and not just memories of better times. |
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