Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

Why Listen to Radio?

The natural disasters, equipment failures, culture wars, and federal defunding that threaten the existence of WFHB are aggravated by the regimes of value inherent in the systems of media capitalism and college town neoliberalism in which the station operates. Though the station chafes against the requirements of economic capital these systems impose, it is also inextricable from such a context. The history of community radio in the United States is one based in the idea that there must be an alternative to the capitalist media mainstream, and WFHB is one of many stations to embrace such a concept in spite and because of its incompatibility with the political hegemonies around it. People listen to community stations, at least in theory, because they are different from everything else available. They offer respite from media that is bought and sold and controlled by the highest bidders. They are shaped by people who have something to express to whatever they consider their community, and though these people are not immune to the influence of for-profit social forces, they can act on different motivations in the context of community radio stations like WFHB.

In this chapter, I have engaged with the question of who listens to radio and why by laying out a history of U.S. experimental media as working against the grain of media capitalism and institutional authoritarianism such as that demonstrated in acts taken by the recent Indiana University administration. By exploring these complex systems of force and resistance, I hope to have illuminated some of the stakes of having an outlet like WFHB available in Bloomington, Indiana, in the 2020s. The specific examples I have provided at the end of this chapter are meant to demonstrate the station’s propensity for attracting and channeling intense energy to intermingled despairing and hopeful ends. These accounts do not mark the last of the station’s recent struggles or victories, but they offer some insight into the adaptations and forms of capital that have allowed the station to persevere.

Framed on one of the walls of WFHB’s lobby is a letter dated April 8, 1987, before the station had received its license. It’s addressed to William J. Tricarico, then the secretary of the FCC. The letter reads:

Dear Mr. Tricarico:

I am pleased to write in support of Bloomington Community Radio.

I believe that this important addition to the existing media will benefit both town and gown. Students, faculty and area residents will have an opportunity to participate.

Moreover, a non-commercial, listener-supported station will be educational in a number of ways. It will increase the diversity of information and entertainment available to local listeners, and it will give many people in our community a chance to actually be involved in all aspects of radio broadcasting.

Bloomington Community Radio should help different segments of our community talk to each other. We will learn about each other and thereby understand and grow.

The letter is signed by Herman B Wells. It’s a hopeful letter, one that purports to believe, perhaps ambitiously, that community radio can move a populace away from the segregationist philosophies long inherent in the planning of U.S. college towns and, indeed, many other formations of the local. In the next chapter, I keep this aspiration in mind in investigating the interrelations between social-spatial connections and sonic practices of WFHB by discussing what sounds participants bring to what spaces over the course of broadcasting and what imaginaries these sonic practices and events convey about local place and community.