Pearl River When we’re talking about radio these days, I wish it was because we all got excited about the most recent song, we just discovered, or an interesting and provocative interview. Or, maybe the amazing discovery by astronomers around the world that was just reported about the monster radio wave observed finally, as it travelled through space through time immemorial.
As the AP reported,
At double the width of our Milky Way galaxy, this jet of radio waves is the biggest ever detected so early in the history of the universe, astronomers report. Radio jets like this are not uncommon in our cosmic neighborhood. The double-sided radio wave is estimated to be at least 200,000 light-years across. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles. Discovered just a few years ago, the quasar powering this jet formed when the universe was just 9% of its current age — within the first 1.2 billion years. Some of the brightest objects in the universe, quasars are galactic cores with gas and dust falling into a black hole, releasing a tremendous amount of energy that makes them exceedingly luminous. The mass of this quasar is equivalent to 450 million times our sun with a black hole that is not particularly massive.
Amazing, right?
Instead, our “radio watch” is less about that phenomenon, than it is about continuing seismic shifts occurring in Washington, D.C., which are shaking the entire country and the world. For all of the headline atrocities under Trump II with news of deportations, threats to citizenship, financial takeovers, firing threats, and more, without any pretense of following the law or even acknowledging there are any limits, maybe the worst of it is that there seems to be no stone left unturned in the assault. While they tilt at their dragons and bogeymen, they are also targeting other institutions and publicservices,s small and wide.
A good example is the indication that an FCC investigation is being demanded of the PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service, and NPR, the National Public Radio. The allegation is that they are not living up to their non-commercial license requirements and are running commercials. Of course, that’s not the real beef. Conservatives have long alleged that our public media institutions are biased against them.
The aftershock of this attack is being most acutely felt in the community of progressive non-commercial radio stations. There was a warning in my in-box this morning by the nonprofit Community Media Assistance Project calling for an “FCC Action Alert,” so that stations could prepare themselves and monitor other investigations, wherever they might break out. They caution that these baddies will be monitoring FCC websites for any complaints filed against other non-commercials, most of which will similarly allege that underwriting is advertising. This is serious, obviously. A sister station of ours in Dallas, KNON, told me the story a couple of years ago of how their license renewal was being held up, very expensively for them, because a DJ had filed a complaint, when he didn’t have his show continued on the air. A weirdly saving grace for many non-commercials may be the fact that religiously-oriented stations wildly outnumber the small footprint of progressive and community radio outlets. Maybe we will be protected, because they may not want to go after their own.
What we are seeing is that the fear of hearing their footprints coming reverberates down to the grassroots. We need to worry about how chilling that can be to the independence and free voices on community radio as vital local institutions. Maybe one strategy is keeping our eyes on the sky, rather than Washington, and, while being prepared and alert, remembering that, like this giant radio wave, this too will pass.