Student Press law Center: Listeners revolt over secretive deal turning over most of Georgia State’s WRAS-FM broadcast day to non-student public radio shows. Georgia State University shocked students and listeners by announcing a secretly negotiated contract to give over 14 hours of daily airtime on student-run WRAS-FM radio to Georgia Public Broadcasting, which plans to air a combination of nationally syndicated public-radio fare and some locally produced news-talk shows. GSU administrators say the deal – which will let GSU students control programming only during late-night and overnight hours – is a tradeoff for getting students access to GPB’s production facilities and TV internship opportunities. SPLC View: Over-the-air college radio has had an awfully difficult decade. Rice, Vanderbilt and multiple other universities have sold off their FCC-licensed stations, leaving students with little-heard Internet radio outlets that struggle to find an audience. But what’s happening in Atlanta feels different. Like a line has been drawn. Listeners, alumni, students and musical artists rallied enthusiastically to the defense of “Album 88,” one of the strongest college radio signals in American at 100,000 watts, an oasis of alt-rock and hip-hop that has helped popularize acts from the Indigo Girls to Outkast. College Broadcasters, Inc., the national umbrella organization for campus broadcasters, released a strongly worded statement speaking up for student programming control. Student journalists at The Signal, GSU’s scrappy student newspaper, plunged into the story aggressively and unearthed a “smoking-gun” memo from 2008 explaining in devastating detail why Georgia State’s then-president rejected the identical deal from GPB. Among other reasons: Because listenership plummets during late-night hours, and almost nobody tuning in for “Car Talk” is going to stick around to hear Nas deep-cuts on the “Urban Flava” show. Legally, it’s awfully difficult to challenge the decision to change radio programming content. The FCC has shown little appetite for wading into disputes when station owners switch formats, even drastically. But in extreme cases, the Commission can act if a station fails in its mission to serve the interests of its listeners. Arguably carrying canned national programming duplicative of what’s already available on a perfectly good Atlanta-based NPR affiliate, WABE-FM, might qualify as disserving the public interest. It certainly disserves the educational interests of students who’ll spend all day in a studio talking to just about nobody. What cost Georgia State and GPB the benefit of the doubt was the purposeful secrecy with which these government agencies reached their agreement, and then the tone-deaf way in which they rolled it out. In an especially boneheaded symbolic move, GPB staffers showed up at a May 6 briefing already wearing WRAS-FM shirts with the Georgia Public Broadcasting insignia – rubbing the WRAS staff’s face in the fact that a T-shirt manufacturer got more advance notice than they did. Finally on May 30, Georgia State President Mark Becker awakened to the realization that the “Save WRAS” movement was… a movement, and not a 24-hour flu bug he could sleep off. He did the only thing he could do, calling a month’s “time out” to work with WRAS students on trying to accommodate their concerns – concerns that, of course, should have been built into a transparently negotiated relationship with GPB from the very start... #saveWRAS
Posted on: Mon, 02 Jun 2014 16:35:59 +0000
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