When I was a radio host, I learned about the mute button. It was what you hit to silence your microphone if you needed to cough or clear your throat or utter a word prohibited by the FCC. Those air shifts, at an NPR affiliate and at two college stations, one as a student and the other as the host of an ethnic show, happened years before I moved to northeast Ohio.
So while I have some opinions about the WCSB/Ideastream announcement, that are informed by experience, they are not as strong as some of you might have. Full disclosure: I don’t listen to terrestrial radio, nor to streaming services. The 600-odd new releases that have hit my inbox this year alone and the listening I do to prepare the articles on this site give my ears more than enough to do. Sorry, not sorry.
Still, my project here at let’s call this is to provide a documentary record of creative and improvised music in the Black American tradition in northeast Ohio, the people who make it and the places where it can be heard. If journalism is the first rough draft of history as the saying goes, I am a historian of the now.
And right now, the story is one of anger and betrayal, which seems to be the default affect of our degraded times.
Look, there are real losses here, certainly to the hosts of WCSB programs and their loyal listeners. The reputations of CSU and Ideastream are bound take a hit, too (as I type this there is a silent protest on the CSU campus). As a PR operative who has put in time at both a public broadcasting station and a university, I can tell you that nobody wanted this.
Which makes me wonder why it went down this way. Did anyone involved give a moment of thought to the consequences of their decisions?
As for the music, you can be pretty certain that nobody on either side of this transaction gave it a moment of thought either. Notwithstanding the understandable outrage of some WCSB listeners at what looks like a bag job on behalf of jazz fans, the truth is that jazz and ethnic music–or post-punk music or ambient music or any of the wonderful stuff that once found a home on WCSB–are not in opposition. Music is not a zero-sum game.
Those institutions must have had reasons for making the decisions they made. It would be nice to know what they were, but for now the mute button is firmly held down.
Big orgs are gonna big org. It’s what they do. As for us music lovers, we need to do what we do: go out and hear music the way it was meant to be heard, live, in-person, loud, proud and unmuted.
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