Adriane Pontecorvo

Indiana University

On July 14, 2023, the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Appropriations proposed a budget that would, among other things, wholly defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) by 2026. In doing so, it would cut off the primary financial support that allows thousands of non-commercial radio stations across the country to maintain their independence from corporate interests and serve audiences across the nation in rural and urban settings alike (Asif 2023). Nearly two weeks later, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee countered this with two bills preserving such funding, directly opposing the House’s bill and leaving the issue unresolved as both chambers adjourned for a month-long recess (Beroza 2023).

This was hardly unprecedented; the always heated political discourse surrounding federally funded media has reached boiling temperatures in recent years. In January 2020, following an on-air confrontation between National Public Radio (NPR) reporter Mary Louise Kelly and then-U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, right-wing commentator Mark Levin slammed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)-funded NPR network on X (then known as Twitter), asking: “Why does NPR still exist? We have thousands of radio stations in the U.S. Plus Satellite radio. Podcasts. Why are we paying for this big-government, Democrat Party propaganda operation” (@MarkLevinShow, January 26, 2020). Then-president Donald Trump amplified Levin’s post with a retweet, adding his endorsement: “A very good question!” (@DonaldJTrump, January 26, 2020). That February, the White House proposed drastic cuts to CPB funding (Johnson 2020). The cuts never made it through Congress—and few expected they would—but the sitting president’s clear stance dealt the non-commercial radio realm a high-profile blow.

As both a volunteer and researcher at the Bloomington, Indiana-based community radio station WFHB, I witnessed my fellow programmers’ and producers’ reactions to each of these events in person and through internal channels. Though many expressed anxieties, most were unsurprised. Non-profit radio has always been a political lightning rod. Publicly funded radio series themselves, Jacquie Gales Webb’s Black Radio: Telling it Like it Was (1996) and Katie Thornton’s The Divided Dial (2022) each trace over a century of on-air and off-air segregation and polarization along lines of race, gender, and ideology. Today, this partisan push-and-pull remains an increasingly perilous game in an era that Andrew Hartman argues is marked by the renewal of the so-called culture wars as “angrier, more tribal, and more fundamental than ever before” (2018). Questions of federal support implicate not only NPR but U.S.-based community radio, consisting of “independent, civil society-based media that operate for social benefit and not for profit” (Buckley 2011, 7). Community radio is made by and for members of its eponymous community, a body increasingly geographically fluid in an era in which “things are speeding up, and spreading out” through internet streams (Massey 1994, 146). As such, it aims to pave the way for “the poor and dispossessed to get on the air, to have a chance to speak and be heard outside the next room, the next block” (Milam 1975, 19). Each station is a grassroots experiment in democracy specific to its listening audience in which low-budget stations and typically inexperienced broadcasters coexist with their corporate peers on the air and online. Amid continued high-profile attacks on their funding, I argue that community stations remain critical as accessible sites and tools of worldbuilding for many in the U.S. Moreover, detailed, context-specific listening serves as a method through which sound scholars can learn how and why they still matter. I take as my central case here the changes in on-air performances I witnessed on WFHB in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and how these shifts signaled ideas of community through sound.

Radioscapes

Career broadcaster Quincy McCoy discusses his first childhood radio as glowing “like a jewel in the night, filling the area around my bed with a safety blanket of radiance” before becoming “a close friend, one who always had a smile on his face, good news, and a joke or two to share” (1999, xiv). In doing so, he invokes what Vidali-Spitulnik calls “twin discourses of technological mystique and no-nonsense technical manipulation” (2012, 250). Indeed, the affective dimensions of radio—senses of human presence and communion in the radio voice, magical qualities inherent in its acousmatic nature—and the medium’s practical mechanisms in delivering sonic content are inseparable. It is the relationships between those aspects and their many elements that shape our experience of listening to radio.

Foregrounding the importance of such relations, Fairchild frames radio within the Deleuzian concept of the assemblage, discussing “that particular combination of sonic, discursive, material, technological, social, and historical mediations that defines each station” (2012, 164). To listen to radio is to connect to people and places as part of an assemblage of assemblages, a sort of radioscape, that serves as one of “the building blocks of… imagined worlds, that is, the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe” (Appadurai 1996, 33). Ascertaining such phenomena goes beyond organizational schematics and requires us to think through sound.

Multisensory scholars like ethnomusicologists are especially well equipped to take on such research through on-the-ground fieldwork and listening with attention to detail. Vazquez writes of details as “those fugitive and essential living components that contribute, in very specific ways, to an event and its aftermath” (2013, 19). In radio, each day is made up of numerous sonic events woven together in a richly textured fabric of voice, music, news, and other sonic elements, none of which exist in a vacuum.

A radio station’s format, including whether it is commercial, has implications for how listeners experience it within the broader radioscape. In the U.S., what generally sets community stations apart from commercial or (similarly non-commercial) public stations is a sense that participants on either end of the airwaves belong to some shared group; that most off-air and on-air personnel are volunteers from the immediate geographic area of a given station rather than paid professionals implies, rightly or wrongly, a minimal gap in expertise between broadcasters and listeners. Community stations’ financial dependence on listener contributions further emphasizes how integral individuals are to the diversity of their local radioscape. Katie Moylan sums up these phenomena well in writing that the “cultural, expressive, societal and political” value of community radio “transcends its constituent parts” as a medium (2023, 245). By listening to the details of WFHB broadcasts with a sense of their social-spatial context as gained through my own participation and research, I understand what it can sound like to build and maintain community using radio.

Sounding Community

On March 14, 2020, a month after the White House proposed defunding the CPB and one day after the United States declared the COVID-19 pandemic a federal emergency, WFHB temporarily closed its studio doors to all 200 of its volunteers, replacing live programmers with automated music and asynchronous news broadcasts to encourage local safety. Staff recorded and aired messages explaining the station’s current protocols, informing listeners why they were hearing slick, uniform transitions between digital files without the usual live and at times unpredictable community voices. Volunteers working from home still chose music and reported news, but it reached listeners with a software-borne sheen of “effortless circulation” (Steingo 2018, 554). While such sonic fluidity may be expected of most contemporary media, community radio programmers are typically not required to be formally trained before their onboarding. In such cases, the “living components” Vazquez embraces may thus include moments of friction—dead air, signal dropouts, vocal tics, mystery hums—indicators not of lack of expertise but of presence, “personally involving and socially valuable” for being “‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune’” (Keil 1987, 275). During the early months of COVID-19, the nature of audible friction changed on WFHB. One Saturday morning, for example, listeners tuning in for the nature program Inside Outdoors instead heard the thrash and doom metal of Friday’s late night music show, caught in an overnight loop on the automation software. I sometimes heard the software stack identical announcements or freeze altogether. These glitches and their resolutions signified presence of an asynchronous kind, growing pains of building or implementing the automation software. Frequent COVID-19 updates offered important information relevant to southern Indiana residents; the dearth of live voices advised listeners to stay cautious. The station’s approach was thus one of care both behind the scenes and on the airwaves, the audible shifts reflections of immediate circumstances meant to guide the community toward the best possible outcome.

By September, the state of Indiana had reached the final stage of its “Back on Track Indiana” plan, allowing and encouraging businesses and events to operate at full capacity even without a vaccine ready for use (King 2021). On a federal level, meanwhile, the CPB had already meted out emergency funds, allowing WFHB to procure equipment for remote broadcasts. Gradually, willing and able personnel began programming from home, filling the airwaves with false starts and stutters, white noise, dead air, inconsistent volume: the sounds of trying out new technologies in real time, of human programmers working in isolation to try and build their own outposts of the station. In October, WFHB had enough live programmers to hold its annual fall fund drive, during which on-air personnel spend significant amounts of airtime explaining to listeners why they should pledge money to the station (the CPB only gives funds to stations who meet a certain threshold of listener donations). I recorded thirty-five live programs from the webstream to listen for throughlines and compile a sampler:

Strong narrative threads ran through the pitches as programmers working mostly from home discussed local identity, remote broadcasting, the return to the studio, and methods of long-distance listening. Even more interesting to me, though, were the sonic artifacts, the spectrum of audio quality making it clear that WFHB’s programmers were still far apart, using slightly different configurations of equipment in slightly different circumstances. The white noise, hisses, apologies, and static were signs of life, drawing links between the WFHB signal tower, its studios, and homes of personnel and listeners.

“A new spatial imagination,” writes Sonjah Stanley Niaah, “allows for a reading of its structures or surfaces of articulation, which include the body, the cosmos, and the city” (2010, 30). Such structures are all enmeshed in the radioscape. As a grassroots operation aiming to represent disenfranchised groups, WFHB, like other community media, facilitates the performance of sonic counter-cartographies, which Dorr describes as reimagining dominant “capitalist space and/or narratives of how social space can or should be understood, organized, and occupied” (2018, 9). By facilitating at-home broadcasts, with all their technical imperfections, WFHB personnel rejected the state’s capital-driven initiatives to reopen despite public health risks, instead imagining Bloomington as a space willing to prioritize community safety over profits while remaining connected through webs of federally supported mediation and active community membership. During the height of COVID-19 restrictions, Moylan argues, “the intimacy of the radio voice, speaking directly to the listener, became newly valuable, perhaps because more expressive than scrolling onscreen updates” (2023, 247). The capacity of community radio to focus on neglected concepts of the local makes it especially worth listening to for a sense of here and now that diverges from hegemonic narratives. As I listened to WFHB, I heard voices from bodies audibly scattered throughout the city in a community-based microcosm centered around health and wellness.

Today, WFHB is largely back to in-person programming; 2023 marks its 30th year on the air. The station’s fate, to some degree, will always hinge on the politics that surround CPB funding, and so the fifty-thousand-foot view will always matter in studies and practices of community and other non-commercial radio. At the same time, exploring the meaningful ways people engage with radio requires more than a broad overview of the “thousands of radio stations” and other audio media across the country. It takes well-situated listening practices to understand how people reimagine and subsequently enact their worlds through the ethereal conduits of their radioscapes. Doing so can help us to understand why community radio makes for such a useful counter-hegemonic building block—and why it persists in the face of fierce political opposition.

References

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Asif, Sidra. 2023. “‘Dark Day’ as US Public Media Faces Funding Axe.” Public Media Alliance, July 25, 2023. https://www.publicmediaalliance.org/dark-day-as-us-public-media-has-funding-axed/.

Beroza, Cait. 2023. “The Status of Public Media Funding.” Protect My Public Media, July 27, 2023. https://protectmypublicmedia.org/blog/2023/07/27/the-status-of-public-media-funding/.

Dorr, Kirstie A. 2018. “Introduction: Thinking Site in Sound.” In On Site, in Sound: Performance Geographies in América Latina, 1–24. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Hartman, Andrew. 2018. “The Culture Wars are Dead: Long Live the Culture Wars!” The Baffler, no. 39, 48-55. https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/culture-wars-are-dead-hartman.

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Keil, Charles. 1987. “Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music.” Cultural Anthropology 2, no. 3: 275–283. http://www.jstor.org/stable/656427.

King, Channing. 2021. “Our Year of COVID: Key Dates in Indiana’s Fight Against the Coronavirus.” Indianapolis Star, March 18, 2021. https://www.indystar.com/in-depth/news/2021/03/18/indiana-covid-timeline-key-dates-states-fight-vs-pandemic/6813412002/.

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Milam, Lorenzo W. 1975. Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station for the Community. Berkeley, CA: Dildo Press.

Moylan, Katie. 2023. “Greater than the Sum of its Parts: Community-building Approaches Across Community Radio.” In The Bloomsbury Handbook of Radio, edited by Kathryn McDonald and Hugh Chignell, 245–256. London: Bloomsbury.

Stanley Niaah, Sonjah. 2010. DanceHall: From Slave Ship to Ghetto. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Steingo, Gavin. 2018. “Actors and Accidents in South African Electronic Music: An Essay on Multiple Ontologies.” Contemporary Music Review 37 (5–6): 554–74.

Vazquez, Alexandra T. 2013. Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music. Refiguring American Music. Durham: Duke University Press.