WBEZ: High Fidelity or High Tail? Counterpoint
By Steven Pate in News on Nov 2, 2011 6:00PM
I listen to live radio less than I used to. My cell phone's alarm replaced my bedside clock radio, podcast subscriptions long ago supplanted appointment listening and, since I don't own a car, I don't even find myself in front of a radio all that often. When I do, WBEZ is always the first place the dial lands (unless I'm picking up the Chicagoist staff in a borrowed hoopty, in which case it's obviously V103 time). Maybe I'm just getting to the age where the higher frequencies are harder to hear. Maybe I'll file it under habit. Or hope. Or "Honor, Blue State Badge of."
While my relationship with WBEZ may not have gone on for as long as Kevin's (or yours), it has been an important one to me since I arrived in Chicago ten years ago. So much so that I remain a High Fidelity member despite listening with less regularity and even though I found the Vocalo misadventure more than a little disheartening. Maybe Torey Malatia is the Jim Hendry of Chicago Public Media (where Vocalo is his Soriano, solve for Zambrano), as the Michael Miner-led chorus seems to tell us. While I'll grant that the station's programming could and should be better, I find the moment when they try to do something about that an odd time to punish them for it and feel obliged to say point out that Malatia has not been talking about cutting local programming, but reconfiguring and potentially expanding it.
Taking apart Eight Forty-Eight and Worldview may be a bad idea, but if it is done with a mind to improve the station's local offerings we should at least level our attacks properly. Skepticism of the Malatia administration's ability to pull it off well is healthy and, should this turn out to be a diluting of the programming, we should cry foul, and loudly.
I spent the first 23 years of my life being served by legitimately second-rate public radio outfits, and I'm sometimes surprised at how WBEZ is taken for granted by the locals. I would love to play Clarence from It's a Wonderful Life and replace WBEZ with dead air or, worse, a public radio station more moribund and lacking in, at least, Chicago Public Media's imperfect ambition (say what you want about Vocalo, but it did not lack for ambition). But since I can't, and since I don't want to imply that WBEZ should be spared the vigorous criticism it needs to be the station a market the size of Chicago deserves, the only argument I want to make is going to sound an awful lot like a pledge drive. If you believe there should be local public radio, you should give money to local public radio.
Period.
You can't treat a noncommercial enterprise as if it were a commercial one. Not that public radio is immune to market forces, but there are no competitors who do what they do, much less operate on a social contract with listener support. Being a supporter gives your criticisms more weight, since you have something to withhold, after all.
I do not believe you can positively influence the direction of the station by denying them your support. If the public schools are terrible, do they magically get better if I stop putting money into them? If I enjoy a street musician's performance several times over the course of a day while saying to myself that once I hit the ATM I would drop a dollar bill in his trumpet case, but then withhold my crumpled single because I find him playing my least favorite Brandenberg Concerto, do you think he's going to internalize that as a critique of his chosen repertoire? Or that I don't care about music?
If you were raised on NPR, payback for years of freeloading is itself a major reason to contribute when you can. If you care about making it better, having a greater likelihood of effecting that is another. Most of all, thinking of public radio as a public good whose existence is positive for the community, even if it can always be improved, seals the deal for me. If you want to cast it a vote for WBEZ's prioritization of strengthening its local offerings, now is as good as any time to do it.