Chapter 4: Radio as Collage Art

WFHB Rewind

In 2025, WFHB started experimenting with a new way to use its own archival materials by way of a weekly hour-long segment entitled WFHB Rewind, for which the station’s news director, Kade Young, selected and edited together music, news, and other programming from the past week to highlight recent work: “highlights from the week—and sometimes hidden gems you might have missed,” per the regular introduction. Often, these include live in-studio music sessions, interviews with public figures, youth-produced programming, and important local news coverage.

I became involved with WFHB Rewind for the first time at the start of the Spring 2025 fund drive. This was a worrisome time for the station; just a week before the drive started, news broke that the sitting U.S. president had drafted a memorandum calling for massive, immediate cuts in federal funding to non-commercial media outlets. WFHB staff set the drive’s goal higher than usual: we had to raise $50,000 in just over a week. We would all need to be as compelling as possible.

In the hopes of doing something different from my usual fund drive pitching and knowing that Kade and Josh had already discussed integrating older archival materials into the program now that we were beginning to digitize them, I asked Kade if he would be interested in a WFHB Rewind segment from the cassettes I was digitizing. One stood out as especially relevant: a recorded live episode of in-house public affairs program Interchange from a station fund drive in 1998. The title felt apt for the moment: “Who Owns the Media?” In it, host Shana Ritter spoke with then-journalism professor Linda Billings and then-journalism student Sarah Rupel about corporate media and the dangers of press that can be bought and sold. With Kade’s approval, I edited down an MP3 file of the full hour-long program to 11 minutes so that he could air it during the fund drive edition of WFHB Rewind.[1] The full transcript of the edited segment and others I mention in this section can be found in Appendix A. I note a few key quotes here:

• “The biggest change in the media industry over the past 20 years is in ownership. We have far fewer owners of the media, and those owners are becoming bigger and bigger and bigger.” (Linda Billings)

• “The people we’re indebted to are the public, and we owe them, you know, the honest truth, without bias, and if it’s gonna lose advertising money, what’s more important?” (Sarah Rupel)

• “Is all of media an advertising mode at this point?”“Well, in a dystopic vision of the future, I think that’s what we’re looking at. I honestly don’t think that we all, the public, are going to let that happen.” (Shana Ritter and Billings)

  
  

With the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on the proverbial chopping block and the sitting president launching frequent verbal attacks against non-commercial media, these points seemed newly prescient. Editing the episode to make clear that these points were both 27 years old and still resonant today was an interesting exercise—the hosts’ references to the Kosovo War, Beavis and Butthead boycotts, and now-obscure political satire film Bulworth were markers of pastness with varying degrees of obscurity today—and it was crucial to find a balance in the recontextualization. In addition to the mildly fuzzy quality of the older recording, Kade and Josh added clear framing. Kade prefaced the segment with information about the episode’s original context. Following this were sounds of static from which emerged Josh’s voice, digitally tweaked with added reverberation so that he sounded as though he were speaking from a vault: “From the WFHB archive.” After the edited Interchange segment, the tag of static and voice played once more. The piece concluded with Kade’s own remarks on the continuities between the issues discussed in the episode and those WFHB faces today. “The airwaves belong to the public,” Kade concluded in a final ask for donations, “so be a part of what we’re doing and support this kind of non-commercial, grassroots vision that we’ve built here on WFHB.” Josh’s and Kade’s editorial decisions added even more sonic and semantic dimension to the recontextualization. Each one of us, it seemed, thought the listeners might feel convinced by the archival resonance of the episode.

Later that year, news continued to break about decisions made by state lawmakers and IU administrators, including cutting or reconfiguring many programs and departments. Indiana Governor Mike Braun released a statement emphasizing the goal of “ensuring that Indiana’s higher education institutions are preparing students for career opportunities in the most in-demand fields of today and the future,” while Indiana Commissioner for Higher Education Chris Lowery defended the changes as institutions ensuring “the programs they’re offering are responsive to student demand and fit the needs of Indiana’s evolving economy” (Gooding 2025). On my personal social media, I posted a link to a 2021 episode of Interchange hosted by Doug Storm and featuring guest (and WFHB volunteer, longtime Bloomington City Council member, and geographer) Steve Volan titled “Authority and U: On the Anti-Democratic Campus,” in which Volan discussed his research on the nature of the tensions and inequities between college administrations, college students, and college towns. Kade reached out asking if I would edit the file for another WFHB Rewind segment. This one aired on August 13, replete with more moments that took on new significance against the current Bloomington backdrop:[2]

• “Everything flows from, in this case, the state of Indiana, and we just haven’t thought anywhere near enough about it. The phenomenon of IU is a state entity that functions as a local municipality.” (Steve Volan)

• “The life of the student is what’s at question here, also. What does it mean to be a student? How do you perceive yourself as a student? How do other people perceive you as a student? You know, what kinds of agency do you have within your locality?” (Doug Storm)

• “I got questioned at first: Isn’t it ironic that you’re biting the hand that feeds you? You’re criticizing the place where you’re doing your academic work. And I had to say, no, I’m perfectly fine with the university as a second place… I questioned the parts that have made them effectively independent city states.” (Volan)

• “A campus is what you get when you let people who are at least invoking utopian ideas, if not ideals, if you let them, this is what they’re going to build. Utopia apparently requires a significant amount of authority, you know?” (Volan)

This led me to more relevant content in the Interchange archives. The next was another digital-born 2021 episode on universities, this one featuring author, scholar, and cultural critic Davarian L. Baldwin, titled “The Mask of the Public Good: What the University Costs Community”:[3]

• “Even these schools that claim to be self-sustaining, they are directly and intimately connected to the cities and towns in which they sit in terms of labor, in terms of wealth extraction, in terms of public services. The public roads don’t just stop at the campus borders. The electrical grid doesn’t just stop at the campus borders. Most of the low-wage labor that takes place on campuses is not performed by students, but by primarily working-class Black and brown people in the surrounding cities.” (Davarian L. Baldwin)

• “So if the pharmaceutical company sits at a university, or if they conduct their research and development with a university, it’s presumed that that's educational work, but what's happening is that the work that's being done there would normally have to be done at a private research facility, and would have to be paid regular wages. But when it’s done on a university campus, it’s done by graduate students who are paid below standard wages, a stipend, the overhead is less because the land is tax exempt. Then when the university sells that research and development in the form of intellectual property on the private market, millions of dollars can come back to the university in the form of royalties. So this becomes a money-making entity, both for the university and for the private partner, while the graduate student workers and the city get the short end.” (Baldwin)

A third and final installment in what had become this unofficial series came from a 1999 episode of Interchange called “How Economics Affect Universities,” hosted by Darryl Neher and featuring professor Stephen Watt and then-doctoral student Sarah Stevens, originally recorded to cassette and then digitized to MP3:[4]

• “Could you explain to us what the corporate university is all about?”“…I think it has several different possible meanings. One of them certainly is… the increasing interest from educational institutions in getting a good, better percentage of its funding formula from corporate investment. Now, you know, part of that is of necessity, as the funding formula for state legislatures goes down as universities, public universities, in particular, like Indiana, are put in a terrible position, in the sense that is where their operating budget has to come increasingly, not merely from tuition and a declining state support, but also from corporate and other kinds of investments in the university. Then a concern, I think a legitimate concern, comes up, that to what extent are universities taking that money and doing corporate bidding, as opposed to in doing independent investigation.” (Darryl Neher and Stephen Watt)

• “I don’t think most people come with an eye to finding any kind of a corporation job, or even with any clue that their department might have corporate ties. There are, I know there’s, especially in the sciences, there are programs where a company like Exxon or Shell will give people a fellowship to come and study. So they might, people who accept that kind of a fellowship might think more that they’re going to be tied to a corporation.” (Sarah Stevens)

  
  

The shared themes of the latter three Interchange episodes edited for WFHB Rewind were ones Kade and I chose directly in response to current events. As I edited the segments, I intended to project an overarching message of continuity, to point to a throughline of IU’s corporate interests and the general trend in U.S. American public academia toward economic capital gains traced from the late 90s through to the present moment.

In each of these three episodes, Kade placed the archive segments directly before the rest of the news highlights. Twice, they came before reports on the planned redistricting of Indiana, part of a nationwide initiative that many felt was meant to favor the Republican party in the electoral college. The Neher-hosted segment, which aired on August 27, immediately preceded an interview with Bryce Greene, organizer with the local Palestine Solidarity Committee and IU Divestment Coalition, on IU’s suspension of the former group. This, too, was significant, the juxtaposition taking seriously this archival material and its relationship to current events.

Nothing about the reuse of these segments was neutral, nor did it pretend to be. Kade and I were selective, choosing pieces with clear viewpoints regarding state and institutional hegemonies; though I tried not to edit out sections with which I did not wholly agree, the pieces in general appealed to us because they fit our (or at least my) perspective on the situations at hand. In this, WFHB Rewind fits into a still-emerging tradition of metacommunicative radio critique: radio made using radio to educational and even radical ends. Many producers have used this strategy to comment on the social role of radio itself. In 1996, for example, Jacquie Gales Webb, with the support of the federally funded Smithsonian Institution, produced the series Black Radio: Telling It Like It Was using archival clips of Black programmers alongside scripted narration by Lou Rawls and interviews with many of those same programmers decades later. It was rereleased in 2021 for its 25^th anniversary with new framing narration by Webb and distributed over PRX, a distribution network serving non-commercial stations. In 2022, On the Media, a radio program and podcast produced by public station WNYC, presented The Divided Dial, a series of episodes produced by Katie Thornton on the role of radio in shaping and driving conservativism to its current polarity in the U.S., earning the series a Peabody Award for excellence in media. This show, too, used collage techniques, bringing together interviews and narration with archival clips. Both Black Radio and The Divided Dial tell stories that rely on the aural identities of the sonic agents who act within them. Including these original voices, accents, and intonations, tinged with crackling or tape hiss indicative of the passage of time, makes for a multidimensional and affectively rich production.

The complexities of each segment’s aura—in its original live broadcast context, then in its recorded object form, then framed as archival segments of an already-retrospective show—were key to expressing these viewpoints in full, not just as relics, but as deeply relevant moments of community discussion. By playing them over the terrestrial airwaves (and making them available on the WFHB website for on-demand listening), we were performing a sense of Bloomington identity with distinct temporal roots, facilitating urban encounters across time, producing knowledge of space inclusive of past and present to inform the future.

[1] Audio embedded in companion webpage.

[2] Audio embedded in companion webpage.

[3] Audio embedded in companion webpage.

[4] Audio embedded in companion webpage.