Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Public Radio

I listen to the radio only when I'm driving, and my station is almost always KVRT, the public radio station. Of late the KVRT announcers have begun nattering about HD radio and what a wonderful thing it will be. An old and dear has engaged himself against the UT public station in Austin and against HD. He got pissed when KUT set out to drop some longstanding programs generated locally. Once he got the management suits in his sights, he has persisted in his war against progress, for which all right-thinking Americans will commend him. You can see his side of the battle lines here. Austin's amazing in the way that people can get all fired up about something such as their public radio station. I remember maybe 20, 25 years ago everybody was so mad at the editor of the American-Statesman that there were 'Fire Ray Mariotti' bumper stickers all over town. That's real involvement with your local paper. 'Fire Chris Cobler'? Probably not gonna happen.
And off-topic, but interesting, this photo, meaningful today when the DJIA managed to ootch just above 10k, putting us back to where we were late in the last millenium.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

HD Radio is a scam to destroy the smaller adjacent-channel community radio stations, on AM and FM. NPR received tens-of-millions for useless upgrades to this inferior, destructive technology. Listeners should stop donations to NPR. iBiquity should be investigated by the Federal Government.

chats said...

The interesting thing about the coastal area: A post to the Vicad online was only one of several denigrating HD radio, most of which were something like "well, I only got two ears...Don' need no stupid HD radio." Similarly, several attempts at posting to the Corpus site — increasingly innocuous in content to pass muster — were summarily yanked from the site. Somebody's ox was being gored there...

The Loon said...

chats – The Advocate online site is in theory a great forum of free speech; in practice, almost any opinion even slightly contrary to the official line will get pulled down quickly. I didn't know the same was true of the Caller-Times but am not surprised. TL