Introduction
"Radical Left 'Monsters'"
Interviews
In 2024 and 2025, I conducted 35 interviews with station personnel in spaces including the Monroe County Public Library, cafes and restaurants (Bloomington Farm Stop Collective, Soma, Brightside, Trojan Horse, and Hopscotch), the Eskenazi Museum of Art, and WFHB’s production rooms. Acknowledging the increased top-down hostility toward organizations perceived as politically left-leaning, I preemptively granted all the colleagues I interviewed anonymity to the best of my ability; anytime a programmer is named in this dissertation, it is in the context of publicly available information rather than information disclosed solely in an interview. Another factor in deciding to build anonymity into the project rather than to make it optional is my position as a participant deeply embedded in the WFHB social fabric. My longtime domestic partner, Jar Turner, has been part of the station since 2013. We each became involved with it independently from one another and indeed before we met. He became general manager in 2016, while I was living outside of the United States, and holds that role at the time of this writing. This was important to me to consider in promising confidentiality during my interviews. I wanted my colleagues to feel comfortable being candid with me without concerns about repercussions. Given the relatively small size of the organization and Bloomington in general, it is likely that some people will nonetheless be able to recognize themselves or others, but I have done my best to conceal identifying information.
I came to each interview with a list of questions and prompts grouped into six topics:
Overview:
Describe your current/past role(s) at WFHB.
Getting involved with WFHB:
How did you first hear about WFHB?
What do you remember about your early interactions with WFHB?
Why did you decide to get involved? What did you want to do?
Training:
What can you tell me about the training process at WFHB?
What were your interactions with other people at WFHB like during the training process?
What equipment were you introduced to as part of the process? What was your experience with that equipment?
What was the prescribed training process? What was your experience in your own training process?
Experience:
Describe your regular duties and routine in your roles at WFHB. For example:
How often are/were you on the air?
What technologies did you use? Why?
What off-air duties do/did you perform?
Do you feel like there are ways that WFHB has impacted your life experiences outside of radio contexts, i.e. in interactions with people, places, or media?
How have other people outside of WFHB reacted to your involvement with WFHB?
Perspective on WFHB in context:
How would you describe the sounds of WFHB?
What do you think WFHB does well?
What do you think WFHB should do better?
How have you seen WFHB change over time?
What is your understanding of community radio? How would you distinguish it from other radio formats?
Perspective on Bloomington area:
What is your relationship to the Bloomington area?
How would you describe the local music scene?
How would you describe the local radio scene, including WFHB and beyond?
What do you see as the connections between WFHB and the Bloomington area?
In a typical interview, I would move through these categories roughly in the order in which I listed them, always prepared to follow whatever threads emerged during our conversations. My aim in devising the questions was to cover a wide range of aspects of community radio programming, from more concrete questions to abstract and value-dependent lines of conversation. Of course, many of my interviews went in directions I did not plan for in these questions, much to the benefit of my overall learning. Community radio enthusiasts, especially those willing to sit with me for between 30 minutes and two hours, tend to be more than happy to talk about community radio, and many of them have spent considerable time thinking deeply about the subject. I recorded these interviews with a handheld recorder, transcribed them, and coded them using nVivo software, making it easy to keep track of the themes that emerged, including some I expected and many that I did not.