Vanishing Indie Radio

We've heard a lot lately about Congress' defunding of NPR, but there's another, more troubling trend afoot in radioland. In an effort to raise money, cash-strapped colleges around the country are selling off campus radio stations to the highest bidder. Twelve have been sold recently, and another 14 are on the chopping block, according to Ken Freedman, station manager and program director at WFMU in New Jersey.

WFMU and nine other independent, freeform stations staged a minute of on-air silence April 28 to protest the sales. The most notorious is the recent sale of the University of San Francisco's legendary KUSF, which saw staffers locked out after the abrupt announcement in January that the station would become a feeder station for a national network of classical music stations. With this sale, an institution important to rock music history and a cultural bastion of the city was stripped of all local control and character (the university plans to move operations online, though in what form is not clear).

As funding for education continues to erode and colleges seek cash windfalls from selling long-held radio frequencies, outlets for eclectic, free-form music and cultural programming vanish, replaced by the sort of formula-driven fare one can find in every corner of the land—the cultural equivalent of the spreading geography of nowhere.

The KUSF situation is "a non-commercial microcosm of the the 'Clear Channelization' of the FM band," Freedman noted.

Often bidding for these frequencies are deep-pocketed religious groups, looking to replace free-form programming with preaching. Their main competition, according to Freedman, is a nonprofit group that sets up NPR feeder stations (often in areas that already have NPR), rebroadcasting news and talk produced elsewhere. To me this is telling: two monolithic cultural entities butting against each other, one from the left and one from the right, at the expense of a messy, amorphous, creative outlet for non-entrenched ideas.

This is happening everywhere. In politics, education, religion, business and the media, people seem to fear ambiguity, as if allowing some "play" poses unacceptable risks. A less insecure culture would worry less about niche audiences, targeted results and direct outcomes and want to support artistic, cultural and scientific eclecticism.

Isn't that what universities are supposed to be for?