Introduction

Affinity

No matter how broad their stated listener base, every station makes choices about which local listeners they serve. Each community station has its own interests. However, certain political tendencies inevitably emerge from the intersection of community radio principles and the regimes of value of a given social/spatiotemporal context. In the United States, community radio is often conflated politically with its fellow non-commercial stations categorized as public radio, which has long been imagined, rightly or not, as strongly left leaning. This contrasts with commercial stations in the United States which, as Katie Thornton has explored in depth in the award-winning radio miniseries On the Media (2022-present), overwhelmingly lean toward the right wing in cases in which they overtly espouse political values at all. As I explore in chapter one, this narrative has, especially in the 2020s, had direct consequences for the state of non-commercial radio that demonstrate the strength of the discursive association between the (relative) political left and such media.

It may be true that community stations in the U.S. are more likely to air left-leaning content and to have left-leaning staff, at least relative to mainstream media and governmental agendas. This is, though, the result of community radio’s orientation toward providing an alternative to top-down sources of information, rather than the impetus for it. Ultimately, community radio exists to provide a platform for viewpoints that are not profitable and thus are not supported by commercial outlets, with a focus on their effects on local society. This is not inherently politically leftist, but often is in the context of the 21^st century United States, the government of which is at the time of this writing dominated by the right-wing Republican party (GOP). In fact, the strand of community radio from which WFHB derives is one founded on aspirations of dialogue between all points on the political spectrum, rather than uplifting the political left.

This strand is most commonly associated with the Pacifica Foundation, an organization founded in 1946 by a group of conscientious objectors who hoped to democratize the U.S. airwaves. While the Foundation’s leaders themselves espoused pacifist and socialist tenets, their commitments as broadcasters were to on-air balance. Matthew Lasar has explained this in part as a strategic move made in the wake of the FCC’s Mayflower Decision, which stated that “the right of the individual listener to hear more than one point of view over the air remained superior to the right of individual broadcasters to ‘support the candidates of his friends’ or to regularly broadcast his favorite opinions” (1999, 46-47). This decision in conjunction with founder Lewis Hill’s personal (and, in the wake of World War II, largely unpopular) pacifist code suggested the need for an all-inclusive way forward. From this utopian vision came Berkeley-based community radio station KPFA, the first station in what would become the Pacifica Radio network.

In its early days, WFHB followed largely in the footsteps of Pacifica and its many offshoots, including those founded and/or advised by Lorenzo W. Milam. A one-time KPFA volunteer, Milam spent much of his life aiding in the creation and development of non-commercial radio stations across the country. Though models of fundraising varied, Pacifica stations and Milam’s stations regularly solicited donations from listeners and financial support from local businesses. Many stations also opted to apply for funding through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting after its founding. Maintaining independence from commercial interests was crucial to Milam, whose advocacy on behalf of what he once wrote about as “the art of transmission” (“a habit as hard and driving as the very shriek of the blower which cools the white-hot tubes in the broadcast transmitter”) included writing, speaking, and doing (1975, 20). Publicly and in their conversations with me, WFHB founders have credited Milam’s keynote speech at the second National Alternative Radio Konference (“NARK 2”) in 1976 as one of the most inspiring moments of the early years of the Bloomington Community Radio Project (founded as a corporation in 1975, though it did not go on the air as WFHB until 1993). Most of the speech still lives on, videotaped, in the archives of KRAB, Milam’s first station. Throughout, he articulates his own point of view on what it means for community radio to be open and accessible, in the process demonstrating the impact of his experiences in radio on his interpretation of the values put forth in the original official Pacifica Foundation vision:

We have the chance to teach volunteers… we have to make them welcome at our station, no matter who they are. We have to at least try to give them contact with the air. We have to give them the chance to talk through our transmitter. And some of them are gonna talk funny, and some of them are gonna talk bad, and some of them are gonna talk wonderful. And we’ve gotta give them all a chance, because that’s one of the reasons why we’re here… You’re the watering hole to all the freaks and intellectuals, to all the poets and all the nuts in your community. You’re the place they have to go, because no one else is gonna pay any attention to them.

Scattered throughout his speech in relation to these ideological statements are stories that illustrate the range of community members included in his philosophies, most notably one of a prospective volunteer who, during their first meeting, casually brandished a gun and threatened to stab Milam with scissors. The moral of the story, Milam explains at the end of his speech, was not that community radio must inherently be dangerous, but that even when a station intends to serve the community, there is still much that is unexpected. “Remember, there are other people out there,” he concluded, “and they’re listening to you and they need you.” For the early Bloomington Community Radio proponents, this was key.

Early on in WFHB’s broadcasting years, starting in 1993, it became clear that it would be difficult for the station to maintain neutrality while also cultivating a dedicated listener base. Studying WFHB as a community outlet in the 1990s, media scholar Kevin Howley’s own chapter on the station chronicles internal and external debates over the station’s airing (and subsequent shelving) of syndicated programs with progressive political viewpoints. At the time, Howley writes, WFHB’s mission statement made “no mention of serving marginalized, disenfranchised, or under-represented groups,” instead promising “to provide a neutral forum for the discussion and exchange of ideas and issues” (2005, 116). This acted, in Howley’s estimation, “as a bulwark against overtly oppositional discourse, effectively limiting the range of ideas and opinions presented over local airwaves and thereby reinforcing many of the same social, political, and cultural inequities a participatory medium like community radio professes to rectify” (117). Unsurprisingly given the backlash from local press and internal station actors that Howley discusses, the word “neutral” no longer figures in to the WFHB mission statement. It nonetheless seems at first to fall in line with Lew Hill’s perhaps overly utopian vision of radio by and for literally everyone: “WFHB exists to provide an open forum for the exchange and discussion of ideas and issues, and to celebrate and increase the local cultural diversity.” But if the shift from purported neutrality on the station’s part was small, almost imperceptible, the polarization of WFHB’s social setting has since given the statement stronger impact. In 2025, “diversity” and “increase diversity” were earmarked as terms (along with hundreds of others) to be avoided and/or removed in the context of government communications from websites to school curricula in keeping with the spirit of President Trump’s anti-Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion executive orders (Yourish et al. 2025). They were also reportedly among the “trigger words” that some news sources reported as leading to an automatic review of federal grant applications (Lee 2025). Once controversial for its ideological vagueness, this mission statement understood in the sociopolitical context of the 2020s United States signals a political stance in opposition to that of the Trump administration.

The sense of affinity that draws together a community radio community, then, is perhaps best understood as an affinity for nonconformism, with all the lack of stability that implies. Milam’s “freaks and intellectuals” are ultimately people pushing against some kind of local status quo, which is itself always manifold and in flux. According to the website Radio-Locator, 112 of the 397 radio stations located in Indiana are specifically focused on Christianity, while only 27 are listed as “Variety” (like WFHB) or “Public Radio.” These categories do not necessarily correspond directly to political alignments, but it is worth noting that most of the Christian-forward radio stations in the United States have strong political right-wing investments (Thornton 2022). In the GOP-dominated state of Indiana, it holds that a majority of these stations are likely to serve listeners with similar interests. WFHB works against this mainstream, most overtly in airing syndicated programs like Making Contact, Counterspin, and most notably Pacifica production Democracy Now! All of these are typically regarded as politically progressive series and routinely receive specific positive listener feedback by way of fund drive donations and other communication. WFHB also tends to reject other social hegemonies, specifically those produced by institutional centers of power like Indiana University. The potential of community radio to facilitate dialogue beyond reductive and alienating categories of people is worth deeper exploration in adding nuance to conversations about what community radio can do for its social surroundings and about what forces shape perceptions of who can claim what senses of place. Such murky sociopolitical affinities are crucial to explore without defining as they loosely bind together people interested in divergence from the mainstream in their mass media participation and consumption.