Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

“Semi-Organized Chaos”: WFHB and the Changing U.S. Mediascape

Beginnings

Though WFHB did not start broadcasting until 1993, the idea for it began germinating much earlier. It was in 1975, just two years after WQAX became an independent entity, that a handful of young Bloomington residents started to get serious about what they called the Bloomington Community Radio Project (or, at times, the Clear Creek Radio Project, named for a body of water that cuts through campus and drains most of Bloomington) that would later become WFHB. “We put the cart before the horse,” said one of WFHB’s founders to me about that early era (Interview 20). “We had no idea, honestly, no idea, either of what was technically involved, legally involved, or anything else.” What they did know was crucial: they were interested in making radio. Two members of the early group had radio operator licenses and a deep love of music, and after a successful initial fundraising benefit, “money and overconfidence.” As less successful ensuing events stalled their progress, it took connecting with the wider community radio world to put their project back on track:

The big turnaround was, then, we ran across Sex and Broadcasting [1975] by Lorenzo Milam and read that, and were sufficiently blown away with, like, this guy’s wacky and fun and irreverent, and this is totally, totally relevant and inspiring. And also, he mentioned NFCB. So there was a National Federation of Community Broadcasters. It was the first time we actually realized that there really were other people that had already done this and that there might be a way to reach out. And through that contact, then, we sort of figured out there was a second National Alternative Radio Konference coming up. (ibid.)

The 1976 NFCB conference (also known as NARK 2) in Telluride, Colorado, was eye-opening for the Bloomington Community Radio crew, which then consisted of Mark Hood, Jeffrey “Sundog” Morris, Jim Manion, Nick Brubaker, and Robyn Carey. Over the course of the conference, they witnessed arguments (especially between participants at KPFA, which was “in the midst of a great civil war about diversity, equity, and inclusion and voices on the radio”) and made connections with broadcasters from small community stations across the country. Lorenzo Milam delivered the keynote (now archived online in audio and patchy video formats), a characteristically entertaining but deeply impassioned speech touching on a range of poetic radio-related topics: the ecstasy of broadcasting, the listener’s ear, contact with the air. “Dearly beloved in the Lord, let us play,” he began; “remember, there are other people out there and they’re listening to you and they need you,” he said in closing.

Even in retrospect, the talk is a rapturous listen, filled with thoughtful musings, colorful anecdotes, and a stunning passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory. It does little, though, to counter accusations of elitism. Throughout the keynote, Milam criticizes the conference’s emphasis on organization and finance talk over discussions of aesthetics, conceding that while money may be important, it is less worth discussion than the affective dimensions of broadcasting—the thrill. “You remember the first time you got in front of the microphone, right?” he prompts, presumably leading his audience into a collective thrall of individual nostalgia. It’s an understandable detour; certainly, money cannot and should not be the motivation for community radio organizations. Even so, how many of the attendees at that year’s NFCB conference had the luxury of being able to set aside financial concerns, especially during a rare opportunity to learn from other stations? It is a dimension of the talk worth some skepticism, even as the rest of Milam’s speech offers the broadcasters in attendance an important morale boost.

Spurred on by their experience at NFCB, the Bloomington project continued. Largely using their own money, the individuals that comprised the Bloomington Community Radio project at the time bought broadcasting equipment and filed paperwork over the course of the next two decades. In applying for licenses to build and eventually broadcast, radio organizations are required to precisely map out the area their signal will reach to avoid interfering with other operations’ signals and to make clear what population they are serving. In the 1970s, before digital technologies, this was an especially painstaking process. One of the Bloomington Community Radio Project founding members explained it to me in this way:

The only thing I could get was I’d go to the IU library, and the Broadcast Yearbook, which is this thing like a big phone book, which listed all the stations, their frequencies and longitude and latitude and power… I got, what, 16 geosurvey maps, the quadrants, and I took it to the local printer. Or I had some friends to get them to photograph it and make them into one of, like, 11 by 10 or whatever, put them all together, so I would have the right area… I measured out ten miles in all directions, and then measured the elevation along all those lines into a graph of each one of those things. (Interview 8)

In 1975, the Broadcasting Yearbook was 734 pages long. It included advertisements, a brief overview of broadcasting, directories of every officially operating radio and television station in the country listed first geographically and then by call letters, and sections with information on some advertising and equipment service providers and relevant government agencies. Three stations are listed as serving Bloomington, Indiana: WFIU, WTTS, and WTTV-FM. The latter two are radio and television stations, respectively. These stations are still in operation as of May 2026 and indicate a very polarized 1975 Bloomington radioscape.

WFIU is a noncommercial radio station headquartered on the main campus of Indiana University that is a member of National Public Radio, Public Radio International, and American Public Media, all large national networks. The 1975 Yearbook lists it as operated by the Trustees of Indiana University.  It is distinct from WIUS (from which WQAX emerged) in that it employs paid, professional staff and is currently a member of National Public Radio (NPR). In interviews, many of my WFHB colleagues told me that they listen to WFIU in addition to WFHB, especially for its national news content. “[WFIU news] would be either broader Indiana or a kind of… broader U.S. in general,” said one (Interview 3). Another noted that “WFIU deals more with kind of IU-related stuff, but they’re definitely broad, and we are better, definitely, WFHB, at the local, local stuff” (Interview 4). WFIU’s music programming primarily consists of Western art music and, to a lesser extent, jazz. Kevin Howley notes that IU’s “School of Music exerts considerable influence over WFIU’s format and program schedule” and always has (2005, 89). For many of my colleagues, this emphasis on “classical” music is one reason it was crucial to establish a station in the area with a more eclectic lineup. One WFHB volunteer offered me an especially ideological critique:

One of the things that is the great mistake of, as an example, stations like WFIU is that they play classical music. The problem is they don’t frame the fact that it’s Western European classical music. And because of that, everyone believes the Western European Caucasian dictum of what defines music which, to me, is a violation, a very basic violation, of the tenets of egalitarianism, of being able to embrace the planet and not the inherited dictums of the Western European origins of white people. (Interview 30)

Several colleagues cited a particular contemporary exception to what they saw as WFIU’s largely conservatory-aligned music programming: Bloomington-based lawyer William Morris, Esq., better known to his listeners as Brother William, hosts a program called The Soul Kitchen on WFIU, featuring “sweet soul, funky jazz, old school rock, Americana, and world music” (Indiana Public Media, n.d.).[1] This marks a significant break from WFIU’s history. One founding WFHB member recalled a conversation he and another founder had with WFIU’s station management in 1992, just as the station received its license and was preparing to build:

We sat down with them. And we said, look, we’re starting a community station. It’s gonna be nonprofit. We don’t want to do this with you guys. We want to do this. And they were delighted. And they said, yes, you know, we have a lot of people requesting that we do things that we really just can’t do. Somebody wants us to do a folk music show. Well, we’re not really there. You know, they’re the university’s station. Classical music, jazz music, Jacobs School [of Music] stuff. Which is fine. As it should be. So we were able to take some things off their plate. (Interview 14)

Another founder recalled this contrast between WFIU and WFHB working distinctly to the station’s advantage in asking IU chancellor Herman B Wells for personal financial support:

We’re sitting there talking to Herman Wells about what we’re going to do and he looks at us, he says, what about Dick Bishop’s people? Meaning, Dick Bishop was part of [W]FIU. And we pointed something out to him, that in our talking to people, we learn what was then called the Radio and TV School… The only actual air experience anybody ever got in a four years’ degree? Their senior year, they got to produce one ten-minute newscast with several other people. So we told him that. And that got [his support]. And it’s been that thing, the education aspect. That has been our strength from the very beginning. (Interview 8).

The idea of a “strongly templated, highly walled format of WFIU” (Interview 30) shapes the general perception of the station for many of the WFHB colleagues I interviewed (and many others with whom I have had casual conversations over time). They understand its programming to be institutionally dictated by both IU and U.S. professional public radio aesthetic and content standards. This can be positive or negative; one colleague referred to the “NPR sheen” (Interview 3), while another discussed “the pablum, the soft chew of NPR… almost maniacally center-posed” (Interview 30). Different in terms of organizational hierarchy, the public-oriented nature of WFIU and WFHB nonetheless means that most colleagues view the two stations as complementary and well aligned in terms of political positioning and commitment to independent media, with WFIU working on a larger financial scale to cover its much higher payroll expenses.

Fewer of my colleagues discussed commercial station WTTS in much detail. WTTS and WTTV are listed in the 1975 Yearbook as owned by Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. Engineer-turned-media magnate-turned-Monroe County GOP Chairman, Sarkes Tarzian began his career working for major electronics company RCA (Radio Corporation of America). In 1944, he founded his competing manufacturing company in Bloomington and soon branched out into developing broadcast stations, among other enterprises (Draughon et al., 2024). In the 1950s, Sarkes Tarzian, Inc., was one of the largest employers in Bloomington. One of my WFHB colleagues, who grew up in Bloomington, remembered WTTS as important for being one of the only radio stations on the local airwaves in the 1950s, and certainly the only one to play popular music. “Back then it was all local country music,” remembered this colleague, “and then they hired a guy named Gene Sherman to do a jazz show” (Interview 21). This same colleague noted that jazz was not, at the time, pedagogically sanctioned by the university, and so WTTS offered traces of a jazz education.

Structurally, however, Sarkes Tarzian, Inc., was far from progressive. As union activity grew nationwide in the 1950s, the company began building plants in “largely rural [areas, which] opened up a possibility of additional women workers who were less likely to unionize” (Draughon et al., 2024). Tarzian himself once recorded and pressed a 45-rpm record titled A Personal Message to You from Sarkes Tarzian for distribution to his employees. The format of this message encouraged employees to listen to it in their own domestic spaces, with their families likely present; the message itself was a warning that things would get much worse for employees if they were to join a union. In 1967, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that Sarkes Tarzian, Inc. engaged in discriminatory actions against employees involved with union organizing (Sarkes Tarzian, Inc., vs. National Labor Relations Board). The company nonetheless still exists, operating WTTS among other ventures.

Figure 1.1: A plaque commemorating Sarkes Tarzian in Bloomington’s Fountain Square Mall.

Today, WTTS programs a “triple-A” or “adult album alternative” format, a vague term that often refers to stations that play music marketed as pop and rock but which are not yet popular enough to qualify as “top” hits. The difference in scale, according to radio consultant Paul Marszalek, is tenfold: “The entire universe of the AAA audience is in the low millions. You start going to Top 40 [radio] and you’re now into tens of millions” (in McCabe, 2018). Like any genre or format classification, the idea of what constitutes AAA fluctuates. My colleagues, though, have clear enough ideas of what they understand to be the WTTS sound. “I don’t want to listen to Tom Petty anymore. I don’t want to listen to Led Zeppelin. I’ve listened to those. I’ll put them on at home if I want to. But I want to hear what’s going on, what’s being created,” said one colleague about preferring WFHB to WTTS (Interview 12). Another noted that “there’s so much more outside of what [WTTS programmers] play” (Interview 5), indicating a strict perceived limitation to the WTTS sound. A third colleague, who referred to WTTS as “Top 40,” conceded that WTTS is “okay at times” (Interview 31). Regardless of personal preferences, WTTS has long stood as an organization that is both aesthetically and ideologically different from, and perhaps even opposed to, WFIU and later WFHB.

Along with the stations and their ownership, the Yearbook also lists antenna tower heights (WFIU’s tower was 590 feet high; WTTS/WTTV’s much taller at 1090 feet), which correspond to signal strength: important information for anyone looking to find an unoccupied frequency on which they can broadcast without interference. The first and second attempts to map out a broadcast area failed to garner a permit. Per a founder I spoke with, the library’s most recent Broadcasting Yearbook was already out of date by the time they filled out the first application; in the meantime, another station aimed at serving nearby Nashville, Indiana, had filed its papers and took precedence because Nashville, unlike Bloomington, had no other stations. In the 1980s, a second permit application was denied because of a conflicting application from another (commercial) station. Though this station was over 100 miles away, over the state border in Louisville, Kentucky, its recent upgrade from 10,000 watts of broadcasting power to 50,000 expanded its reach to the point that Bloomington Community Radio’s proposed signal would now interfere with it.

The United States spent most of the 1980s, meanwhile, under the administration of Republican president Ronald Reagan. During the Reagan era, as Barlow writes, “deregulation became the FCC’s major preoccupation, superseding the goal of diversity” (1999, 260). Rules limiting the number of stations a single company could own were loosened, allowing for giant media conglomerates to buy or push out smaller outlets at will. An article from a 1984 issue of national publication Time magazine frames this as “freeing” the airwaves, citing the FCC’s conclusion that because radio and television stations had proliferated so rapidly in the decades since the so-called 7-7-7 Rule (established in 1953 and limiting any given company to owning seven AM stations, seven FM stations, and seven TV stations nationwide, with stricter limits within a single local market), there was no longer any need for the rule to stand, as U.S. media diversity was no longer under threat. This ruling quickly threatened media diversity in the U.S., as it made it possible for large nationwide corporations with sufficient economic capital to purchase more outlets in more areas and broadcast the exact same content on each one regardless of local interests and needs.

Subsequent acts of deregulation in the 1990s took homogenization further, especially under Democratic president Bill Clinton, who passed the Telecommunications Act in 1996 eliminating national limits on media ownership altogether and leading to a “frenzy of mergers and buyouts among radio group owners” (Barlow 1999, 261). Smaller commercial stations, especially those serving local needs instead of catering to national advertisers, struggled; Barlow notes that Black-owned stations, typically smaller operations for reasons of systemic inequity, were especially hard-hit. He quotes Quiet Storm format pioneer and Radio One/Media One founder Cathy Hughes as noting that “in the world of broadcasting, all African American broadcasters are the little guys. So it’s the big fish gobbling up the little fish, and over the past few years, the number of stations that we own has been declining. You either have to buy or you have to sell” (262). Media executive Quincy McCoy, whose experience includes, among other things, eight years as a vice president at MTV Networks and eight years as the general manager of KPFA—the gamut of models where profit is concerned—writes about the creative toll this deregulation has taken on the national radioscape:

Today, radio is an investor-driven business concerned with cash flow and margins. What’s been lost is the emphasis on community and personality; the focus is squarely on improving the bottom line, and companies will exercise the most expedient, cost-efficient ways to get there. The concepts of innovation, creativity, and musical diversity—with the exception of the natural fragmentation into niche formats—have lost out to two short-term paths to profits: downsizing and outsourcing. (1999, 23)

It is worth noting that the above quote from McCoy was written before his time as MTV VP or as KPFA GM. In fact, KPFA and other non-commercial stations had the extra protection of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and regulations reserving a small range of frequencies for non-commercial (“educational”) stations. Only with these provisions could most community stations focus on their wholly unprofitable missions.

After years of back and forth with the FCC, Bloomington Community Radio’s third application was finally approved in 1991, and the Bloomington-based members of the corporation began to reach out to those who had previously been involved in the project. One had left to work in radio in Hollywood, and related a uniquely star-studded experience:

We were doing Norman Corwin’s We Hold These Truths about the Bill of Rights. It was a remake of the show he had done in 1941 for the 150^th anniversary [of the Bill of Rights] at President Roosevelt’s request… we had half of Hollywood there, James Earl Jones and Tom Bosley and Bill Bixby and Brenda Vaccaro and Ed Asner, and on and on and on… So we’re there in the studio. And one day, the phone rings, and somebody says [to me], “it’s for you?” And I’m like, who knows I’m here to be calling? It was Jeffrey Morris. And he said, we’ve got the construction permit, the license from the FCC, here it is, paper, rattle rattle rattle. I started jumping up and down, yelling and hollering, Dave Osman from Firesign [Theatre] and Norman Corwin and Fred Jones and all these people that were there looking at me like I’d gone nuts. I had to explain. And they all came over and shook my hand, patted me on the back, and it was kind of like a blessing for the station. (Interview 14)

So consecrated, the work began, no longer a waiting game but a frenzy that one founding member described to me as the beginning of the station’s still-ongoing “semi-organized chaos.” (This was, my colleague clarified, a compliment.)

A full history of the station’s early years is outside the intended scope of my dissertation and has in any case already been thoroughly and very well recorded by way of former volunteer Kevin Howley’s chapter on the station in his 2005 book Community Media and local Bloomington press. WFHB volunteer Michael Glab, who features local figures on his program Big Talk, has also conducted numerous interviews with founding members on the origins of the station and is working on a complete history of the station. In the next section, I shift from tracing the many strands of radio culture influencing WFHB’s founding to touching on some of the tensions inherent in the station’s setting of South-Central Indiana to understand the stakes of community radio for WFHB’s broadcast area.

[1] Morris, along with WFIU’s jazz music director David Brent Johnson, both started their careers at WFHB. Reasonably, WFIU does not permit its paid employees to volunteer at WFHB in capacities that overlap with their work at WFIU. While some people have participated in both organizations at the same time, it is only permitted at WFIU if the roles are deemed sufficiently distinct, as evaluated on a case-by-case basis.