Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

Media Capitalism

Jimmy James: Advertising is what made this country great. What was the Constitution of the United States?

Lisa Miller: A document—

Jimmy James: No! It is an advertisement! An advertisement for liberty! “When, in the course of human events,” I’m telling you, that’s right up there with “put a tiger in your tank” and “where’s the beef!” Hell, if it wasn’t for advertising, you know what you two’d be doing? Huh? You two would be giving out Sesame Street tote bags during PBS pledge breaks, except, except they wouldn’t say “Sesame Street” on them, no, no, they wouldn’t say that; if they said that, that would be advertising! Hell, if you had your way, there probably wouldn’t be any Sesame Street, would there?

—NewsRadio, season 3, episode 12, “Rap” (1997)

The above quote from NBC sitcom NewsRadio (1995-1999) features eccentric billionaire character Jimmy James (played by Stephen Root), owner of fictional AM radio station WNYX, fiercely touting the values of capitalism as he encourages ambitious reporter Lisa Miller (played by Maura Tierney) to participate in what she sees as a frivolous and sexist photoshoot (“Cutest Reporter in New York”) that he sees as a chance for free station publicity. It’s an intentionally bizarre and exaggerated rant that nonetheless emerges from some of the very real forces shaping the national mediascape. Jimmy’s misattribution of the first line of the Declaration of Independence to the U.S. Constitution,[1] his comparison of it to successful slogans used by Esso Gas and the fast food chain Wendy’s, and his equating of branded PBS premiums to for-profit commercials—all delivered with gusto by a key character summed up later in the season as a “logic-impaired hayseed”—are pitch-perfect send-ups of late 20^th century consumer culture and the reduction of people and their skills to commodities. The resonance between Jimmy’s initial assertion that “advertising is what made this country great” (played in the episode’s script as clearly ridiculous and obviously meant for laughs) and the enduring Trumpist slogan “Make America Great Again” is neither coincidence nor clairvoyance but a reminder that the discursive links between exclusionary ideas of American supremacy, capitalist hegemony, and mass media are not new.[2]

Communications scholar and philosopher Thomas Klikauer writes that media capitalism “is defined by ideological and highly concentrated corporations condensing the ‘free-ideas’ marketplace to an ideological non-marketplace owned by a few media corporations” (2021, 22). It is a means of consolidating power over the background noise and foreground narratives that flow through everyday life for an increasingly large proportion of people; per Forbes, 94.6% of U.S. Americans had access to the internet as of 2024, where much radio and other media consumption takes place (Pelchen 2024). The idea of the deregulated free market, of course, privileges those parties with preexisting material and economic capital while placing blame for failure on those without, and accordingly the role of media in the framework of media capitalism is to uphold this viewpoint and corroborate the entire capitalist paradigm. In the (translated) words of Bourdieu, capital “is what makes the games of society—not least, the economic game—something other than simple games of chance offering at every moment the possibility of a miracle” (1986, 241). His enumeration of three key categories of capital is worth noting here:

Depending on the field in which it functions, and at the cost of the more or less expensive transformations which are the precondition for its efficacy in the field in question, capital can present itself in three fundamental guises: as economic capital, which is immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property right; as cultural capital, which is convertible, on certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications; and as social capital, made up of social obligations (“connections”), which is convertible, in certain conditions, into economic capital and may be institutionalized in the form of a title of nobility. (243)

By definition (and often by legal regulation), non-profit radio stations like WFHB do not set accumulation of economic capital as their primary goal, as to do so could compromise the station’s independence and force shifts in content toward the interests of advertisers and other such stakeholders. In community radio, the stakeholders are listeners and participants, whose interest is often made manifest through donations and underwriting; in some community radio organizations, volunteer participants are also required to pay dues. Using Bourdieu’s framework, these donors are key in converting what might be considered community radio’s social and cultural capital, which consists broadly of its connections to extant local imaginaries and its own contributions to them, to economic capital. This conversion has in the past been both direct and indirect. The immediate impact of donor and underwriter funds is that they directly contribute to non-commercial station budgets. The secondary and less direct impact of these funds between 1967 and 2025 was no less important: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting required non-commercial stations to reach certain donation thresholds, thus demonstrating community support, to qualify for federal funding. In this sense, the cultural capital of a community or public station would be rendered into economic capital through fundraising, the economic capital would be rendered again into social capital as a representation of its place in local networks, and the social capital would be rendered once more into additional economic capital from the CPB. This was the case for several decades in the United States.

Late at night on Thursday, May 1, 2025, the White House released Executive Order 14290, titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media.” It ordered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to end its financial support of NPR and PBS. The position it takes in its first paragraph is one that falls perfectly in line with the media capitalist phenomena Klikauer critiques:

Section 1. Purpose. National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) receive taxpayer funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Unlike in 1967, when the CPB was established, today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.[3]

The argument here—that the sheer quantity of available platforms is sufficient to diversify the media ecosystem—is one that hinges on the acceptance of the free market as equitable. Like the Constitution/Declaration of Independence as Jimmy James invokes and interprets it in NewsRadio, this order is an advertisement for liberty, an insistence that the U.S. mediascape is already free, and that it would be unfair to allocate economic capital to stations that do not generate much of it themselves. It is true that non-commercial media does not typically accrue enough direct economic capital to sustain itself without federal support. This, though, is not a failure but a feature of the model. Non-commercial radio rejects the idea of economic capital gains as a fundamental goal; community radio often even rejects dominant notions of social and cultural capital in maintaining a focus on grassroots community diversity. The new ideas of social and cultural capital that emerge do not always translate into economic capital to the extent needed to sustain anti-capitalist aspirations in a capitalist society. In the next sections of this chapter, I ground these ideological abstractions in histories of community radio in the United States. By elucidating the values and affordances of community radio and how and why they have emerged as they have against a social backdrop of U.S. American neoliberal capitalism, I aim to offer perspective on issues of the ‘free market’ relative to mass media. This sets the stage for the specific systemic development of WFHB—and the ‘lightning’ it has attracted throughout its existence.

[1] Credit goes to my older sister and history teacher Teddi Pontecorvo for pointing this out in our family group chat.

[2] Further indicative of the familiarity of such discourses, the season 3 premiere of NewsRadio features Jimmy James running for president. While many characters are skeptical, others are sure he can win solely because he is a billionaire. (He drops out of the race when it is revealed he has only started his campaign to meet women.)

[3] “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” The White House, May 1, 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/ending-taxpayer-subsidization-of-biased-media/.