Radio Reform

I've yet to meet anybody who enjoys commercial radio yet I've also met very few people who do anything about it. Davey D dropped this article on his site a few days ago and its an important and good read.

By Davey D

Over the past few years there have been a number of campaigns designed to make radio stations more responsive to their communities – battles fought in San Francisco, Detroit, Chicago and New York and other cities. Some have failed and others have succeeded.

If we are to make radio accountable to community, we must identify viable strategies. To understand which strategies work, we need to understand the recent history of reform efforts and the current context.

Faced with government plans to allow additional consolidation in radio ownership, tens of thousands of people successfully mobilized in 2003 through 2005 against such ownership rule changes. Meanwhile, over the same period, activists began to create more alternatives to corporate media – launching their own news-oriented Internet websites, creating blogs and making documentaries. As for radio, activists began to launch pirate operations and pushed the Federal Communications Commission to license low-power radio stations.

This independent media movement, which continues to grow, is a proactive way to give communities options to mainstream radio and other commercial media. Unlike the media reformers who waged a campaign in the early-to-mid 1980s to get the recording industry to put labels on music with “explicit” lyrics and – unlike the movement 10 to 15 years ago spearheaded by seasoned civil rights activists such as the late C. Delores Tucker and Reverend Calvin Butts – the leading media reform advocates today are the 20-to-30-something-year-olds who identify themselves as members of the Hip Hop generation.

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Dont forget to check out the Youth Media Council.