CKUW radio station. Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. 2011.

In recent years a number of college radio stations have been closed, some of which have moved to an exclusively online format. In January 2011, the University of San Francisco’s KUSF was sold to a classical public radio network and can now be heard online. The closing was justified by highlighting the viability of online broadcasting for smaller, or “alternative” radio stations. A New York Times article from the same year profiled American college stations that had moved online. In the article, students at Yale University’s WYBCX referred to their station as a “global entity” with shows “designed for audiences beyond Yale,” defining the station in opposition to the local and community-based mandates of many campus and college stations.

While online broadcasting can effectively carry local sounds to distant places, my research into the Canadian campus radio sector highlights the importance of licensed FM broadcasting in terms of representing the cultural and musical interests within a station’s broadcast range. By broadcasting exclusively online and abandoning space-based FM or AM broadcasting, stations run the risk of losing the community-based focus that has been integral to the programming and operations of the campus and community radio sector. In Canada, FM regulation has aided campus stations in realizing their goal of community representation through increasing their reach and relevance, which, in turn, has increased inclusivity and diversity in many instances. The following example shows how one station in Winnipeg, Manitoba, increased its prominence in the community when moving from closed-circuit radio to FM broadcasting, shedding light on what might be lost if stations were to move entirely online.

Before acquiring a FM license, CKUW at the University of Winnipeg operated as a closed-circuit station, broadcasting to speakers set up in different buildings on campus. Long-time station volunteer and staff member, Ted Turner, recalled getting involved with the station in 1990. Turner decided to check out the station after hearing so much about it. “And it was a big deal to go in there,” Turner reflected, “because you were very intimated because there were a bunch of cool people in there, right?” In those days, according to Turner, CKUW was “more of a hiding place… where these amazing records would come from Chicago and other places.” The station “had this magical mailbox where these really amazing underground records would show up and you could play them to a group of people, of which maybe a handful were ever listening.”

In order for the station to eventually receive its FM license, a number of factors had to coalesce, including mobilization towards better organization. Turner recalled that the station had to lose its connotation as a “boy’s club,” especially in the eyes of the university’s student association and administration. In 1992, Nicole Firlotte became the first woman to be hired as station manager. Turner explained that Firlotte acquiring the manager position was a critical point during the years leading up to CKUW’s FM license. He was careful to state that Firlotte was “a lot more than just the first woman to manage the station,” but that her role as manager certainly contributed to dismantling the image of the station as a boy’s club. Firlotte “brought a whole different energy, and a sense of organization and professionalism” to the station at the time.

Many of the comments made in reference to each station’s pursuit of an FM license illustrates that the full potential of these stations was not being realized when contained by campus borders. In a 1994 issue of Stylus, CKUW’s sibling publication, Alec Stuart asked, “How does it feel to know that Winnipeg is the largest city in Canada without a campus radio station?” Stuart explained that the station had begun work towards eventual broadcasting, but help would be needed. He said that financial donations were greatly appreciated, and for those that did not have the “cash to toss around,” even for a “worthy cause,” Stuart implored readers to come and see one of the many shows that the station organized that year. “If you own a business,” he said, “or work in some such place, write us a letter of support. We need a whole pile of letters to hand in to the [Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission] when we finish the application.”

In the December 1998 issue of Stylus station manager Rob Schmidt explained that a “CRTC license is only one of the components needed for a successful radio station…. Equipment, volunteers, and training all have to be in place before we can even hope to begin broadcasting to the community.” The license application was approved in October of that year, and in the application CKUW “promised to create programming that is diverse musically and yet has a strong focus on urban issues and concerns.”

CKUW’s successful license application involved the collective drive of students and community members who, at a particular point in the history of their campus broadcaster, felt that it was time for the station to expand beyond the confines of the campus, and reach a greater number of listeners within its locality. A small, secluded closed-circuit station can act as a private space for individuals to hide away and play records, especially if not many other people are listening or paying attention. However, as stations worked toward the goal of going FM and broadcasting to a wider listenership, the private/public ratio is renegotiated. These were public efforts, as students and radio practitioners justified their stations to other students and university administrators, asking for support that ranged from financial contributions to simply asking other students to give the station a chance and tune in. There came a time when the scale and scope of the station could not be contained by a low-range broadcaster, when students felt the need to put their connections to the wider cultural and musical communities of their city or town into practice.

It is a popular conservative position to stand against publicly based institutions and a typical liberal position to halfheartedly support them. The ‘public’, a concept so central to the emergence of democratic spaces during the progressive era, services during the depression, and civil securities during the Great Society, has clearly waned as a rhetorical and conceptual imperative. The logic of privatization has become so strong that every space is seen as a potential extension of accumulation and distribution tactics. It contends not that equity equates to socialism or other absurdities, but that the democratic endeavor is naturally achieved through increased consumer choice and additional pathways of communication. Proponents list an impressive series of recent accomplishments on behalf of private industry: interactive media has increased the capacity for content to reach intended audiences in a way that promotes sustainable consumerist relationships, narrowcasting has provided entire demographics with both lifestyle content and personalized commercials to satiate their habitus, and one may participate freely, safely, and with like-minded users in online spaces. So why would federally funded stations that run low demographic and low-impact programming need to continue if increased consumer capacity and aesthetic complexity have made a ‘public’ media space mandate obsolete? Forty-five years after the 1967 passage of the Public Broadcasting Act, PBS and NPR’s wide hodgepodge of civic, pedagogical, childrens, science, documentary, and how-to programming seem like an anachronism. The ‘promise’ of increased specialization of consumer demand as democratic participation has become a dominant policy position regarding public broadcasting, as well as rationale to privatize and weaken public schools, public housing, settlement houses, public parks, and public universities. Amongst media studies itself, with the deluge of information around private industry, convergence practices, and transnational flows, what significance could a study of our unpopular and endangered non-profit sector offer?

The Free Press has recently presciently pointed to decreased state support and rhetorical attacks upon PBS stations, and the survival of public broadcasting in its current form relies upon these crucial state and federal dollars. But I’d also like to pose a broader historical context. Public broadcasting is not a revolutionary ‘alternative’ to commercial media. It is a specific set of institutional practices, an autonomous self-sustaining extension of the government, and a channel delegated for curricular programming and adult education. In this way it resembles many industrial and aesthetic characteristics so thoroughly studied today. But it is also an enduring concept that served as a basis for an entire generation of media studies. Though the well-documented business-friendly Communications Act of 1934 privatized American media, the concept survived and an entire corpus of communications research emerged to promote media literacy, educational technology, and understand content reception. For over 30 years the consensus regarding the primacy of public media for public spaces inspired researchers to constitute a sustainable academic advocacy culture. This included figures such as Wilbur Schramm (Stanford), who utilized qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine propaganda, UNESCO initiatives, and the effect of communications technology on national development; Dallas Smythe (Illinois), who wrote cutting and trenchant critiques of commercial media practices while heading an influential congressional advocacy campaign that led to the FCC Blue Book and the Sixth Report and Order; and Keith Tyler (Ohio State), who was at the center of many public technology initiatives from closed-caption instructional television to the Midwest Program on Airborne Television Instruction (see Allison Perlman’s recent work on the MPATI), while overseeing research on educational radio and television aesthetics later utilized by American Public Broadcasting. During the advocacy period between 1934 and the passage of the 1967 Public Broadcasting Act, communications research followed an intended purpose.

Hence, at a moment in which public institutions are weathering attacks in virtually every sphere, it’s worth noting that in media and communication studies alone attention to the concept of ‘the public’ has historically engendered wide (and productive) regulatory debate about democratic participation, a media advocacy movement that persisted for over thirty years, and an entire genre of non-commercial programming rubrics. While ‘mapping’ of industry practices and new media innovations will no doubt continue, and it’s a given that commercial media is entertaining, provocative, and occasionally addresses social expediencies, there is no sustainable incentive within logic of accumulation to support a mediated forum for working out social problems with equanimity. Incentive has to be created. Put succinctly, when a research orientation begins with bottom-up evaluation and assessment of how media may promote ‘public’ good in all of its variations, consequent methods can be constituted to examine media not only as proxy of ‘official’ utterances, but toward the realization of debatable social imperatives within a visible field. Such analysis demands strong evidentiary practices, but it also requires that we begin with a rigorous conceptual discussion about implicit assumptions endemic to the object studied and the purpose of analysis itself.