By Steve Breyman

I headed off to Madison, Wisconsin for the first-ever National Conference on Media Reform (NCMR), November 7-9. The purpose of the NCMR is to bring as many media activists and community organizers together as possible, in conjunction with policy makers, elected representatives, leaders of NGOs, and funders. Many of us involved in the work against the FCC rules change, and for the Indymedia movement, believe the time is right for a gathering to catch our breath and look ahead. People are excited about the media reform movement's immediate prospects. We've got momentum and the possibility of real change is in the air.

What follows below comes from the conference website www.mediareform.net/conference.

Moving beyond critique to action, the NCMR is a groundbreaking forum to democratize the debate over media policymaking. A broad range of media reform activists joined members of Congress, the FCC, and leaders of major groups working for civil rights, women's rights, rural renewal, the environment, labor, community development and other issues to mobilize new constituencies, strengthen coalitions working in Washington and at the grassroots, develop unified action plans for immediate and long-term reforms, and generate policies and strategies that will structurally improve the media system.

The conference included workshops, panels, and concerts addressing:

- Public broadcasting
- FCC media ownership rules
- Media and antitrust claims
- Low-power radio & TV
- Internet governance
- Copyright issues
- Children's media regulation
- Regulation of advertising
- Cable/satellite and public access
- Billboard advertising
- Advertising in schools
- Political advertising/campaign finance
- IndyMedia Centers as a policy issue
- Community media watches

"If we are serious about democracy," says conference organizer Robert McChesney, "we will need to reform the media system structurally. This reform will have to be part of a broad movement to democratize all the core institutions of society."

Some of the strongest voices in the media reform community appeared, as well as representatives from a broad range of media reform, civil rights, labor, and activist organizations. Over the event's two days, conference participants took part in panels, plenaries, keynote speeches and workshops; enjoyed performances by internationally famous artists; and had an opportunity to meet with other activists to build a stronger and more effective grassroots network.

By Steve Pierce

The intrepid Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students and residents of the surrounding area who run WRPI are part of a college-based community radio movement that extends far beyond Troy, NY. Since many of us are not fully aware of our place in this larger picture, I decided to do a little research on how WRPI fits in. The effort took me to an unlikely spot this summer: to Winnipeg, Manitoba on the great Canadian prairie!

On the weekend of June 20, 2003 I joined the attendees at Canada's annual National Campus and Community Radio Conference — this year put on by the student management of the University of Winnipeg’s college station CKUW-FM. Not knowing exactly what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised to find an extraordinarily ambitious, well-planned and almost flawlessly executed event! Family matters have taken me close to Winnipeg numerous times over the past decade but I’d only made it as far as Grand Forks, North Dakota – two hours south. Winnipeg is quite a contrast: large, urbane, bustling and extremely diverse culturally.

The Winnipeg Jazz Festival was in full swing when I arrived – and luckily CKUW had arranged free passes for conference delegates, in addition to organizing nightly music blowouts showcasing Winnipeg’s thriving alternative rock and hardcore scene at local clubs. But, as at WRPI, college-based community radio in Canada is about more than just music.

To demonstrate its commitment to news and public affairs programming (lumped together north of the border as “spoken word”), CKUW also sponsored a well-attended talk on immigration and corporate globalization featuring one of Canada’s best-known young activist intellectuals: Jaggi Singh. He has attracted a large following, particularly after being jailed on charges including catapulting teddy bears over the barricades at the 2001 FTAA Summit in Quebec. His remarks (reported at www.umanitoba.ca/manitoban) were received with enthusiasm by the capacity crowd at Winnipeg’s Mondragon Bookstore and Coffee House, an “anarcho-syndicalist, non-hierarchical, libertarian workers collective” that has become something of a local landmark.

The next evening, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman was the speaker at an on-campus event attended by hundreds of supporters who had begun listening to her show when it debuted in Canada on CKUW just a few months earlier. (A transcript of Amy’s talk that night is online at www.ckuw.ca/archives)

With all this activity I felt lucky to be able to squeeze in the conference itself! There were production workshops, volunteer management sessions, fundraising panels — even a self-contained “Women in Radio” symposium designed to promote diversity at college/community stations. Surrounded by inspired and inspiring young people from across Canada, I learned that this vibrant sector of broadcasting is actually mandated by law.

Many “Friends” have told me how fortunate they feel to have an outlet like WRPI in the Capital Region — but for our neighbors to the north, such stations are almost commonplace. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) says its “primary objective for the campus radio sector is that it provide programming differing in style and substance from that provided by other elements of the broadcasting system, particularly commercial stations and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.” It’s not just the programming philosophy at WRPI that echoes in the CRTC’s campus/community radio rules; they describe “a campus station with programming produced primarily by volunteers who are either students or members of the community at large. The training of professional broadcasters is not the station’s primary objective.”

One of the highlights of the conference was the Standard Radio Awards of Excellence night, at which an executive of Canada’s Standard Radio commercial broadcasting chain announced large cash prizes for a number of college stations. “I see our stations as using the same technology for completely different purposes,” he said. In the turbulent U.S. media environment, with commercial radio consolidating at a fever pitch and “public” stations struggling with the challenge of increasing their audience while staying true to their mission, it’s encouraging to glance across the border for confirmation that there is another way.

Check out the National College and Community Radio Association website (www.ncra.ca) for more information about how they do it in Canada! And, of course, thanks for your support from all the folks at WRPI Troy!

By Gerald Zahavi

Most of us know something about the use of propaganda during World War II, but how many of us know about the important role radio and radio drama played during the War?

Such radio programs as An American in Britain, Lux Radio Theatre, New World A 'Comin, An Open Letter on Racism, Passport for Adam, This Is Our Enemy, Uncle Sam and many other shows were central elements in a widespread campaign to bolster domestic loyalty and to sway American hearts and minds during the War.

Besides buttressing home-front morale, these programs also challenged Americans’ racial, ethnic, and gender prejudices. This was not surprising in light of the fact that many of the radio writers and actors involved in these shows were liberals, progressives, and generally associated with the American Left. Their association with Left-wing causes and groups—including the Communist party in some cases—was not overly problematic to station managers, sponsors, and Federal government officials during the War, when the Soviet Union was an ally.

But the story changes dramatically after the surrender of Japan and the defeat of Germany. The radio blacklist began; progressive radio personalities soon found themselves targeted by networks, the government, and fellow right-wing actors and writers. Actor Ward Bond, for example who took an active role in helping to blacklist his colleagues on the political left once told a radio director, "We know Norman Corwin was not a communist, never was a communist. But he'll do until one comes along."

On Tuesday, October 28th, 2003 at the Arts Center of the Capital Region, 265 River St., Troy, Howard Blue told the story of World War II radio drama and the post-War blacklist–at a Friends of WRPI benefit at 7 pm. Blue, an educator, translator, and writer, is the author of Words at War: World War II Era Radio Drama and the Postwar Broadcasting Industry Blacklist (Scarecrow Press, 2002). A two-part interview with Blue aired on WRPI’s Talking History (October 9th and 16th, respectively, at 10:00 AM and available at www.talkinghistory.org).

Blue’s interest in radio drama was first stimulated while listening to BBC radio drama every evening during a 1973 sabbatical leave in London and was subsequently reinforced by his engagement in Cold War era studies and his activist work on civil and human rights while a high school teacher. His first major writing project was a master's thesis about former Soviet Cold War leader Nikita Khrushchev.

In the 1970s, he established the first Amnesty International group in an American high school. Blue also served as a board member of Amnesty's American affiliate and he wrote an unpublished history of the human rights organization. Words at War discusses commercial drama series such as The Man Behind the Gun, network - sustained shows such as those of Norman Corwin, and government-produced programs such as the Uncle Sam series.

The book is largely based on the author's interviews with Corwin, Arthur Miller, Pete Seeger, Arthur Laurents, Art Carney and dozens of others associated with radio during its golden age. It also discusses public reaction to these broadcasts and the issue of blacklisting. The book weaves together materials from FBI files and from archives around the country to tell how the nation used a unique broadcast genre in a time of national crisis.

Words at War, as one reviewer wrote, is “an enthralling, documented, and thoroughly ‘reader friendly’ history of radio broadcasting in America during World War II and the subsequent Cold War-era politically oriented crackdown that left a blight on the creative talent of on-air vocal drama that was quite as pervasive and detrimentally corrosive as the better known blacklists in the Hollywood film industry.”

For all who are interested in the history of radio, World War II radio drama, government propaganda, censorship, and the cultural history of the American left, Blue’s visit and presentation was truly a treat.

By Dan Spillman

Senior Democracy Now! producer and independent journalist Jeremy Scahill spoke at RPI’s West Hall in early September after the premiere showing of the Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center’s documentary “Independent Media at a Time of War” (online at www.hm.indymedia.org). Scahill provided the several hundred people who attended the event with first hand information from his independent coverage of wars in Bosnia and Iraq over the last seven years (carried by WRPI's flagship daily news and public affairs programs Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News).

Jeremy discussed a November 1998 trip to Basrah, Iraq, a trip that will live forever with him. He said Basrah was once the “Venice of the Middle East,” but that it had been the center point of destruction under Saddam Hussein and during the first US/Iraq war, and the sanctions that followed. The area was now a human and environmental disaster, with military machinery still in the location of its destruction, hospitals filled with ill and mutilated children, with many deceased children having died from diarrhea and other preventable “diseases.”

Jeremy spoke of being in Kosovo when 1200 journalists arrived in Bosnia with US and NATO forces dressed in their desert fatigues. To the people of this region, the journalists were seen as being part of the occupying forces. Jeremy reflected also on Serbian people comparing the coverage of one major US media outlet, during the US led invasion of Afghanistan, with the former government run news under Slobodan Milosevic.

Jeremy closed by discussing his more recent observations from Iraq, and also the huge role that independent media plays around the world. Though the independent media in the US is looked at as “weird tree huggers,” we have the numbers around the world to be the majority, and be part of a much bigger movement.