[Peace-discuss] [OccupyCU] News from Neptune on UPTV, 11 July 2014

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

Come on, Stan. This is playground stuff (as even your language gives away).

I've been involved with WEFT for a quarter-century. In those years it's compiled an awful record of censorship, bannings, and 'coercive harmony' (in Laura Nader's phrase). The fact that WEFT is not unique in this regard - cf. the proceedings, hardly short of fascistic, at Pacifica stations in New York and California - might lead us to reflect on the peculiar politics of 'alternative' radio as a footnote to the triumph of neoliberalism in this generation. The post-WWII political promise of alternative radio (notably Pacifica) was one of the things that had to be subjected to the 'limits of allowable debate' in the corruption of American liberalism since the 1970s.  (The best accounts remain Hedges, "Death of the Liberal Class," and Harvey, "Brief History of Neoliberalism." One will not hear such literature mentioned on WEFT today - with the exception of the Labor Hour.)      

I began (and named) News from Neptune in the summer of 1990 with Paul Mueth as a "spontaneous and unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media," in the spirit of Noam Chomsky (to whom the title referred). We spent an hour every Saturday for years doing that, occasionally with a third discussant - Scott Peters, Jamie Hutchinson, Sandra Ahten, David Green - but eventually Paul's impassioned objections to some opinions I held (notably on abortion, and some Democrats...) led him simply to talk over what I said on those and similar matters. I eventually said that we needed to divide the hour somehow so each of us could speak without interruption.

When he refused to do that, I 'withdrew my labor' until we or the programming committee could come to a solution. (I never refused to meet with the programming committee.) When the programming committee refused to provide an equitable arrangement (I suggested several, including our conducting the program on alternate weeks), I began conducting News from Neptune on Urbana Public Television, where several former WEFT colleagues joined me.

I told Paul from the beginning of the television version that he was welcome to participate, but I have never been invited back to the radio version (and was once physically removed). My case is unfortunately not unique - one in a series of bannings and exclusions over the years that kept WEFT from being the "accessible, responsible, and responsive radio alternative" that it advertises itself to be. (There was even a puerile attempt to prevent my talking about those bannings and exclusions on the air, "because it would hurt fund-raising" - as it should: the solution was not to promote lying but to cease the censorship; of course people contributing to the station should know what the situation was doing so that they could comment.)

I hope the new management at WEFT means that its days of behaving like a particularly small-minded college fraternity are over.

--CGE

On Jul 24, 2014, at 3:44 PM, Stan via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> Carl you are so full of it.
> 
> You walked out on your show because you wanted to control how long others could talk.
> 
> Six months or so after you walked out you wanted your show back so the programming committee agreed to hear your position. You did not show up.
> 
> The only censoring you were subject to was a requirement that you stop telling people not to contribute to WEFT on out air.
> 
> Stan
> Programming Committee Chair at the time of this whoaaa.
> 
> 
> "C. G. Estabrook via OccupyCU" <occupycu at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCHbY1xoZYU
> 
> NEWS FROM NEPTUNE FOR 11 JULY 2014
> 
> {INTRO} Good evening, & welcome to News from Neptune on UPTV for the 28th week of 2014. For more than twenty years, this program has been "a spontaneous & unrehearsed discussion of the news of the week and its coverage by the media" - first on a so-called "community radio station" - and, when censored and locked out of there - welcomed, I'm happy to say, by the good people at Urbana Public Television.
> ~ I’m Carl Estabrook; my discussants tonight are David Green & Ron Szoke. 
> ~ Our program's name, News from Neptune, was chosen to honor Noam Chomsky, who has been talking sense about American politics for twice the quarter-century we've been on the air. Chomsky has said that in the American media, “either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it’s from Neptune”...

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