A wide ranging speech by Paul Jay giving a good overview of his world view, state of the media and reasons for creating the Real News Network.
More victims of plain vanilla progress, survival of the bean counters, the world under anesthesia mentality. Check out the Web site – saveKBCS.org – and decide for yourself. Be sure to read this post on what is going on and what effect, if any, savekbcs is having with the higher ups. It looks to me like a heavy hand cutting away original content in order to chase a bean counters idea of economic competitiveness. The radio station is community supported. Either the community pushed for these drastic changes in programming and personnel or the heads in charge have a personal agenda that trumps the small people from the ground, whether they be volunteer dj’s or listeners (I know I’ll miss the programs that are getting cut and/or downsized. Phase one is very bad, phase two seems like a different radio station all together). Or, maybe, what made KBCS what it is was wrong all along and what the station needs is less independent thinking from within. Let the volunteer aspect fade into the sunset and wise decision makers at the top call all the shots. Just like commercial radio. Perhaps there should be no distinction between private and community based radio programing, just different financial methods to deliver generic product with the widest mass market appeal.
What is happening to public radio and is it happening on a national scale? Covered at the GrassRoots Radio Coalition Web site.
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Arundhati Roy
“But here in India, there’s the smell of fascism in the air. Earlier, it was a kind of an anti-Muslim, religious fascism. Now we have a secular government, and it’s a kind of right-wing ruthlessness, where people openly say, you know, every country that has progressed and is developed, whether you look at Europe or America or China or Russia, they have a quote-unquote “past,†you know, they have a cruel past, and it’s time that India stepped up to the plate and realized that there are some people that are holding back this kind of progress and that we need to be ruthless and move in, as Israel did recently in Gaza, as Sri Lanka has recently done with its hundreds of thousands of Tamils in concentration camps. So why not India? You know? Why not just do away with the poor so that we can be a proper superpower, instead of a super-poor superpower?” Arundhati Roy
She finishes her interview with these lines:
But here in India, there’s the smell of fascism in the air. Earlier, it was a kind of an anti-Muslim, religious fascism. Now we have a secular government, and it’s a kind of right-wing ruthlessness, where people openly say, you know, every country that has progressed and is developed, whether you look at Europe or America or China or Russia, they have a quote-unquote “past,†you know, they have a cruel past, and it’s time that India stepped up to the plate and realized that there are some people that are holding back this kind of progress and that we need to be ruthless and move in, as Israel did recently in Gaza, as Sri Lanka has recently done with its hundreds of thousands of Tamils in concentration camps. So why not India? You know? Why not just do away with the poor so that we can be a proper superpower, instead of a super-poor superpower?
What gives me hope is the fact that this way of thinking is being resisted in a myriad ways in India, you know, from the poorest person in a loincloth in the forest saying, “We’re going to fight,†right up to me, who’s at the other end, you know. And all of us are joined together by the determination that, even if we lose, we’re going to fight, you know? And we’re not going to just let this happen without doing everything we can to stop it. And that gives me a tremendous amount of hope.