Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

November 2024

The outcomes of the national elections, namely the election of U.S. president Donald Trump to a second non-consecutive term and a majority of Republican representatives to Congress, were perhaps less surprising than the September lightning strike. Still, the concerns they presented for the U.S. non-profit radio sphere were unprecedented, even after decades of deregulation in support of the neoliberal notion that consumer demand should be the primordial determinant of what exists rather than understanding how what exists shapes consumer demand. In addition to literary sources cited earlier in this chapter, non-commercial media itself has tracked this pattern. 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), for example, each trace over a century of on-air and off-air segregation and polarization along lines of race, gender, and ideology.

In the last several decades, however, the discourse surrounding such policies has become blatantly partisan. 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-first-term-president Donald Trump amplified Levin’s post with a retweet, adding his endorsement: “A very good question!” (@realDonaldTrump, January 26, 2020). That February, the White House proposed drastic cuts to CPB funding (Johnson 2020). The cuts did not make it through Congress—and few expected they would, at the time—but the sitting president’s clear stance dealt the non-commercial radio realm a high-profile blow.

Every congressional budget since has included proposals to wholly defund the CPB. It has been a push-and-pull that is increasingly perilous 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). While NPR tends to be the radio entity most frequently attacked as “Democrat Party propaganda” and similar, the CPB also provides the bulk of funding for community stations like WFHB, allowing them to stay independent and to “operate for social benefit and not for profit” (Buckley 2011, 7). Local community radio rarely, if ever, takes center stage in the national narratives surrounding CPB cuts, but it is nonetheless always swept up in their outcomes. This has been the case with both Republican and Democratic presidents in office, but the Republican Party victories in the 2024 elections combined with these mounting threats made it more feasible than ever before that the CPB might be gone within a matter of months or years.

When staff gave their reports at the final quarterly meeting of 2024, these two events came up in various ways for nearly every department. Some of the discourse surrounding them was expectedly sobering—we were still only 95% recovered from the lightning strike, we couldn’t count on a natural disaster to save us at the end of every slow fund drive, we might soon lose the CPB—but each speaker talked about the station’s prospects with an overall sense of calm. We had, said Board of Directors treasurer (and station co-founder) Mark Hood, substantial financial reserves to help cushion us against even blows as major as the potential loss of the CPB, at least for a time. Jar pointed out that this is not the first time the CPB has been under threat, and that right now, all we could really do was pay attention and ready ourselves for change.

Unique possibilities might even emerge from the chaos. The lightning strike, noted our program director, had opened up opportunities for us to update our equipment and facilities in addition to drawing attention to our fund drive. Both storm and election would encourage us to be increasingly strategic, said our treasurer. And, as our news director wrote in his report, this was, more than ever, a time when WFHB could step in and speak truth to power.

It's not surprising that the staff didn’t write reports designed to make personnel panic; it’s common sense to try and highlight successes and potentials in trying to keep morale strong, especially when an organization is held together by volunteers. To gloss over or obviously downplay the seriousness of our material and political losses would have been an obvious mistake. What I found interesting about the way the staff structured the meeting discourse was perhaps best encapsulated by Mark Hood as an aside during his report: “We want to make sure we stay as weird as we are.” He was talking about wanting to be strategic with our funds rather than conforming to some mainstream media zeitgeist, alluding to the dangers of feeling too financially comfortable as a station, of buying in to such high levels of convenience in terms of equipment that we would no longer need volunteers to actively engage with the station or listeners to actively engage with the volunteers. Our quirks, our rough edges all came from unpolished voices plugged in to a rugged technological setup, and that set us apart from other stations. It was an echo of Milam’s keynote speech from 1976, a reminder of our purpose as we looked toward uncertainty. Remembering the importance of staying weird in a capitalist mediascape could not save us from the realities of our financial precarity, but it might bolster us for the oncoming tempest.