Also this issue:

Almost Midnight
-Howard Altman

Upward and Onward
Saying thanks for a great gig -- and looking forward to a change.
-David Warner

Letters to the Editor

March 27-April 2, 2003

loose canon

An Angry Party

by Bruce Schimmel

SAN FRANCISCO--For nearly 30 years it has been the blowout media party that everyone loves to go to. But now that the bombs and the bullshit were flying, many of the 600 people scheduled to come to this annual convention of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters just wanted to get home. After all, these were newshounds away from their stations in the middle of a war.

For the reporters and DJs who work at the nation’s public radio stations, San Francisco has always been a mecca for innovation, especially for community-based public radio.

Community radio is powered primarily by the passion of low-paid and often volunteer broadcasters. Community radio is mostly the little guys, the smaller siblings among the big boys on the left side of the FM dial.

WKDU, Drexel’s station, is community radio; WHYY has never been; WXPN, from Penn, used to be a community radio station, but is no longer.

Community radio is arguably the freshest of the grassroots media, probably the medium closest to its audience. Community radio broadcasters are their own audience, recruited from the listeners themselves.

And now their listeners, their neighbors, were home alone. Tuned to the major outlets, they heard mostly cheerleading, with hardly a naysayer in earshot.

Cheerleading. That’s what the broadcasters called it. From the podium of plenary sessions, at roundtable discussions, over beers at the hotel bar. On the record and off, these folks were pissed.

The embedded journalists, it was often said, were not just "traveling" with the troops, as reporters have in the past. Embedded journalists, in the eyes of these conventioneers, were ethically "in bed" with the war-makers. They were seduced by the images of a made-for-television war.

Angry, feeling impotent, many reporters took off their convention credentials and took to the street. They walked in packs to Union Square, the site of the demonstrations, to strengthen the chorus on the other side of the microphone.

Many of the protesters held up placards attacking the war, hoping to catch the eye of cameras scanning the crowd. Most of the signs protested the war itself, but a fair number had messages attacking the messenger, the media that reported on the demonstrations.

It got personal. Protesters chalked the words "lies," "corporate bullshit," "censored" and other taunts on network satellite trucks.

So, as the fireworks of the initial assault give way to ground combat, will the major broadcast and print outlets begin to show the full carnage?

Will they see the taunting demonstrator? Will they hear the outrage of grassroots radio reporters fresh from a very angry party in San Francisco?