Episode 102: Radio Silenced – Transcript

February 7, 2017

HOST INTRODUCTION:

You’re listening to a podcast that you probably downloaded straight onto your phone. And what we do with our podcast — the interviews, conversations, reporting, production — owes a lot to a thing called radio.

As a podcast you can listen when you want where you want. And we can produce what we want when we want and post it online. There aren’t really any rules or limits.

But not anyone can set up a radio transmitter and start broadcasting. Radio is limited by the laws of physics. There are only so many radio frequencies… and how those frequencies are regulated…well that’s the law and that’s what this story is all about.

It’s the story of two radio stations in Boston. Community radio stations owned by African Americans. Both are gone. Life of the Law reporter Ian Coss begins Radio Silenced by spending some time with a man who listened to both, Greg Lawson…

 

STORY:

LAWSON: Alright, so we can just meet in my office back here…

COSS: So you listen to the radio all the time?

LAWSON: All the time. I don’t like silence, I gotta hear something on, so radio’s my life

COSS: So what are you listening to now?

LAWSON: I think it’s 94.5, oh no 96.9

COSS: Want to turn it up, see what’s on?

The Radio sits just next to Greg’s desk, always within arms reach. His office is on the first floor of a brick public housing complex that Greg maintains for the city. He’s been here for 22 years. Pipes rattle on the low ceiling and oversized rolls of toilet paper are stacked on the wall. Greg is dressed all in blue: blue jeans, blue sweatshirt.

LAWSON: You know 94.5 is OK, 96.9 is OK, but they don’t talk about the community. That’s what I really miss. Too bad on radio we don’t have a choice, it was taken away from us. We have to settle, settle for what’s on right now.

Greg didn’t always have to settle. As a kid he had a radio station he could count on, a station that talked about the community, and played the music he wanted to hear. The station was at 1090 on the AM dial, and it was called ‘W-I-L-D.’

LAWSON: We had a little small radio; it was the old school radio with the dial. You turn it (makes swishing noise) until you find the station. And yes, we would stay in, listen to the radio—we didn’t have a television—and WILD was my station. It was my escape.

Our household—our mother was very overprotective of us, because she was a strong black woman raising four boys on her own. When she left to go shopping, we weren’t allowed to leave, we had to stay in and watch our friends out the window because she was afraid something would happen to us, she thought one of us would get shot by a stray bullet.

COSS: So you would sit and listen to the radio, and look out the window and watch your friends playing?

LAWSON: That’s it. And then when it was a song I knew they would like I would put the radio near the window with the music, and now they’re out there dancing outside.

Like I said, the radio has always been part of my life, always. Listening to WILD, faithfully, everyday all day. Only thing about it was —at 6pm it was shut off.

…then all you heard was just air—‘shhhhh.’

This is how Greg first encountered the laws surrounding radio. You see, what Greg didn’t realize as a kid was that radio is regulated, and ‘WILD’ was only licensed to operate 12 hours a day. Like many small AM stations, it was forced to shut down at night to clear the airwaves for larger, more powerful stations.

This system of licences, frequencies, and channels is at the heart of Greg’s story, so we are going to take a big step back — about 100 years back — and take a look at how it all started

It’s 1912, just before midnight, the Titanic has struck an iceberg and the ship is taking on water. But fortunately there is a state of the art radio transmitter on board that is powerful enough to broadcast a distress signal to any ship within a thousand miles.

The radio operator starts tapping out the letters ‘S-O-S’ in morse code, again and again. The problem is — there were no protocols at that time for radio communication. There were no rules requiring ships to even have a radio operator, or rules saying which frequencies they could use. And as a result, the nearest ship never gets the distress call.

JOHN ANDERSON: and because of the loss of life, that the disaster caused  and the importance radio communication could have played in saving more people, the government decided that it was best that we actually attempt to license those who should be able to use the airwaves.

This is John Anderson.

JOHN ANDERSON: …an assistant professor and the director of broadcast journalism at Brooklyn College.

He’s also an expert on radio regulation, and he is going to help walk us through the history piece of this story. So back at the time of the Titanic disaster, this idea of wireless communication — of actually creating waves of electromagnetic energy that travel at the speed of light and can carry sound — it’s been around for a couple decades, but it was only just starting to find applications in daily life. Fast-forward to 1920 and you get your first radio stations for the general public.

JOHN ANDERSON: And back in those days, all you needed to do in order to get a radio license was certify that you were a US citizen, and the government was compelled to give you one.

And once you had your license, you were free to set up your own transmitter, which could actually produce those electromagnetic waves. So more and more of these transmitters are coming online — in business, universities, even in private homes…

JOHN ANDERSON: And that, in the 1920s, created a situation which has been popularly described as “chaos!”

Out of that came legislation, passed in 1926-27 and in there licensing itself was more formalized–meaning that the regulatory body could specify when a station could broadcast, on what frequency, and with how much power.

Now the government could actually decide who gets to broadcast and who doesn’t. And to determine who got such a special privilege, they came up with this phrase…

JOHN ANDERSON: You were supposed to demonstrate that you were serving something called the “public interest convenience and necessity.”

And that phrase became a kind of guiding motto for the federal communications commission, or FCC, which was created by Congress in 1934, and still regulates radio today.

JOHN ANDERSON: The problem is, the FCC never, and has never, formally defined what the public interest convenience and necessity actually is.

And as you can imagine, the phrase can be interpreted in different ways, especially by people with particular economic interests — like these guys.

NBC chimes

By the 1930s, radio is a big business with nationwide networks like NBC, CBS and by and large, the FCC’s attitude towards the public interest is, well…

JOHN ANDERSON: Radio stations should endeavor to serve the largest audiences possible.

If you were a member of say, a minority community, if you were a member of a labor union, by the way the regulation was interpreted in those early years, that was not a sufficient rationale to get a license.

And the reason the FCC was so exclusive, is that there are only so many licenses they can give out. That’s because if you think about it, each license is for a specific frequency — meaning, if you have that license then only your transmitter can create radio waves at this frequency. Radio communication only works within a certain range of frequencies.

JOHN ANDERSON: That’s what separates over the air broadcasting from all other forms of media: there’s a limited amount of space to put stations on the dial. And you tie that into the notion of maximizing a station’s potential audience, and you effectively marginalize any sort of specialty or minority programming. It’s built into the DNA of the regulatory system.

So to recap — there can only be a limited number of stations, and each one is supposed to serve the largest audience possible. The question is how do you reconcile that legal perspective with Greg’s personal perspective.

LAWSON: Every community should have a radio station.

Over time, the FCC and Congress have tried different policies for managing that tension — so for example there have been special low-power licences for small stations, and ownership caps that prevented one company from buying up too many stations. These are the kinds of policies that have guided the fate of black radio in Boston, which brings us back to the story of W-I-L-D.

HALPER: Before we even get to WILD, do you want me to introduce myself or anything? OK, my name is Donna Halper, I’m an author of a book about the history of Boston radio.

And when Donna Halper was growing up in Boston in the 1950s, WILD was already on the air. But at that time — and this is before Greg was even born — WILD, like all stations in Boston, was white owned.

HALPER: The first black-owned station was WERD in Atlanta, GA, which went on the air in 1949. But for the most part black radio starts really slowly, and in a lot of cities it doesn’t hardly start at all, and Boston is one of those cities.

Then in the 1970s, the FCC — they decide to actively promote media diversity by offering a tax incentive for minority ownership. And two years after the policy is introduced.

HALPER: Ken Nash was a black businessman, and he really wanted to own a radio station. And WILD was there, and it was available, so he bought it in 1980.

Rick Anderson was a DJ at WILD and he remembers that time well.

RICK ANDERSON: When I got in it was the 80s—you know gold chains, long hair, that kind of thing. It was real urban. Ken was a fastidious, meticulous brother from the upper crust of New York. Very refined, very reserved. But he was a hell of a businessman. And he was all about the community. That I can tell you.

HALPER: And it wasn’t just playing the music, it was also community events, it was also doing public affairs.

There were turkey drives, toy drives, job fairs…

RICK ANDERSON: In the summertime it was the kite festival….millions of kites in the air.

LAWSON: It was HUGE, I mean they had all these different artists who would come perform for free.

RICK ANDERSON: That’s where, we got a chance to come out of the radio station and go into the community.

And for local kids like Greg, there was also the chance to come into the radio station itself.

LAWSON: I never forget I won a record; it was a 45. It was like the 10th caller, “you’re the winner,” and I was like “I won?” They were like, you can come down and pick the record up today between such and such a time. And I remember saying, I gotta go now, because my mom just left.

Remember Greg’s overprotective mom, and how the kids weren’t supposed to leave the house? Well…

LAWSON: When I won the record, she left to go somewhere. My house, from Warren street where WILD was located, was probably 8 blocks. I remember my brother saying: “You’re not going to make it back.” I said I’m gonna make it back. I remember running, running all the way there to pick up my prize.

I’m running and I’m sweating, I get there, I go in, and of course they want to talk a little bit. I just boogied all the way back home—I ran I ran I got there, I made it home and she never knew I left and went all the way to WILD to pick up a record I won on the radio.

I think it was Larry Graham: “One in a Million,” I think that’s the song because I remember playing it a million times, a million times—to the point where my mother was like: “Are you ever gonna give that record a break? Where’d you get that record from anyway?”

I’m out on Warren Street now, in front of the old WILD studio, and I’m just trying to picture the scene Greg described: out of breath, running up these steps to his local radio station. And just inside these dorrs, he knew he would find his heroes: Skippy White, Coach Willie Maye, Elroy Smith, and the rest — all right here in a plain brick building, eight blocks from his house. Now if you’re my age — under 30, let’s say — this is probably not how you remember radio as a teenager. And that’s because radio in America was transformed in the 1990s — and not by technology, but by the law.

This is Trent Lott, the Senator from Mississippi, speaking on the floor of the Congress.

LOTT: ”It’s been 20 years that Congress has been trying, struggling to get comprehensive communications reform without success, but we are on the verge of seeing that happen, so it is a historic act that will bring, I think, a tremendous boost to our economy and outstanding communications policy that will take us into the 21st century…”

JOHN ANDERSON: The Telecom Act was designed to promote competition.

This is John Anderson again.

JOHN ANDERSON: So prior to the Telecommunications act of 1996, a company could own a maximum of 4 radio stations in a given market, and they could own I think 40 stations nationwide. When the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was passed, the ownership cap locally was raised to 8 stations, and it removed the national ownership cap.

A lot of regulations were removed around this time. Remember that tax incentive from the 1970s, the one that encouraged minority ownership? That’s gone too. And the result of this deregulation is that more and more stations end up in the hands of a few — mostly white owners. When the Telecom Act was passed in 1996, Donna Halper was working as a consultant for independent stations — including WILD — and she watched as they disappeared one by one.

HALPER: If you know that old video game Pac Man (Pac Man Music), where it’s like the little thingy gobbles up the other ones–gobble, gobble–and pretty soon it’s just this one big, and it’s gobbled everything–that’s exactly what happened. And WILD gets gobbled up.

Greg Lawson.

LAWSON: One day it wasn’t there no more. I missed the memo I guess that they were shutting down. And I called my brother, and I’m like what’s up with ILD?

What happened is that WILD’s owner, at that time Ken Nash’s widow Bernadine, sold the station to a national media chain called Radio One. Now to be clear, no law forced owners like Nash to sell, but the law created an environment in which it was almost impossible for independent and locally owned stations to survive.

JOHN ANDERSON: It’s like you’re the last house on the block standing, surrounded by luxury condos and the luxury condo developer comes to you and says I’ll pay you 20 times what you’re house is worth in order for us to redevelop that lot. How many people are not going to take that? That’s one of the things that really decimated minority ownership.

And the data backs that up. In 1996 alone, 26 black-owned stations sold out to white-owned conglomerates — about 10% of all black-owned stations in the country. And of those 26, almost 20 were bought by a single company. That never would have been possible before 1996. Now in the case of WILD, the media conglomerate that bought it up, was itself black owned, but the end result was the same, because when stations become consolidated like this, the next step is to cut costs — they cut the local staff, cut the local programming, cut studio space — and that’s exactly what happened to WILD. Rick Anderson, the WILD DJ we met earlier, he watched it happen.

RICK ANDERSON: And I had to stand at the door and watch a lot of my colleagues with their personal belongings in boxes, walk out, some of them in tears. I’m watching my past, my history, a piece of me walk out.

HALPER: People picketed, people marched, people missed it. That live and local voice that everyone had grown to love, was gone.

You may recall from the top of the show, that we said this is a story of two radio stations. Well WILD was the first, and when its new owners began to phase out the local programming, beginning around the year 2000, it left a hole. One of the people who felt that hole was a local Boston man named Charles Clemons.

CLEMONS: And I said, going off the air, how is that possible? How can you allow an institution like radio—black radio—disappear like that.

So, I kept hearing a lot of Caribbean stations playing on the FM dial and I wanted to know: how is it possible that they have a radio station and we don’t have one?

So I investigated. I called the station, and then I asked the owner about this community radio station, and he said you don’t need a license for it, as long as it’s under 100 watts. I said really? Can you show me how to build one?

2006 November 19, 5am in the morning after prayer, hit the button and we went on the air.

LAWSON: I think a friend, said oh man there’s a new radio station out that’s like ILD. I said, like ILD? Yeah, it’s TOUCH 106.1. You should listen to it.

This is Greg Lawson again.

LAWSON:I listened more and more, then I started seeing how they talked about stuff in our community, you could call in and voice your opinion.

He would invite the politicians there and he would let them have it, not like on 94.5, or KISS 108. These other stations are afraid to lose their ratings. Brother Charles, had no fear of anyone.

And it wasn’t just the local politicians who went on TOUCH.

CLEMONS: Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Ed Markey, Secretary of State Kerry and the mayor, councilors, you name it.

HALPER: Oh my god yes! Everybody who was anybody at one point or other. The politicians in Massachusetts have overwhelmingly been white, and it was in their best interest to be perceived as reaching out to the black community. And one great way to do that was to go on TOUCH, and they figured that it would all work out at some point. I mean, Mr. Clemons said they were legal, so therefore they must be legal. And I don’t think the average person was sitting up at night thinking: hmmm, I wonder if he’s legal or not.

The station was not legal. It did not have a license. And despite what Charles Clemons may have been told, even low power stations need a license to broadcast. He found that out pretty quick.

CLEMONS: Within 30 days, I was visited by the Federal Communications Commission, who said that our radio station was interfering with airplanes and other radio stations. And I was like, there is no other radio station in Boston on 106.1FM. And of course I didn’t want to interfere with airplanes but I didn’t know how that would happen considering we was only 100W, which was a 3.5 mile radius. So I shut the station down.

Clemons had a choice. He could try and play by the rules, which could mean taking ‘TOUCH’ off the air for good, or he could break the rules.

CLEMONS: Just because something’s law, doesn’t make it right. I like to call us the Rosa Parks of radio, the Harriet Tubman of radio, the Nat Turner of radio, the Malcolm X of radio. Everyone deserves a voice.

And as Clemons soon found out, he wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Some call it pirate radio, others call it microradio — but the point is, as long as there have been radio licences, tere have been people broadcasting without them.

JOHN ANDERSON: When the Telecom Act of 1996 happened, it was like adding gasoline to a small fire. Because MANY people began to realize that their local airwaves were being decimated. Where did my favorite morning DJ go? Where did my local news host go? What happened to my local radio dial that used to exemplify the community that I live in? And many people were disenfranchised and those people turned to microradio as a way to protest the evolution in how broadcast regulation was taking place.

The FCC noticed, and to their credit they listened and in 2000 the agency introduced a new program called low-power FM, or LPFM.

The idea was simple. There was no way the FCC could go out and shut down all these unlicensed stations. It would be like a nation-wide game of whack-a-mole — shut one down and it would just pop up somewhere else. It was much easier to try and make the stations legal. But since all the existing radio licenses were being bought up by the giant media conglomerates; the FCC would need to create a new kind of license for low power stations like TOUCH. And with that in mind…

JOHN ANDERSON: When the FCC first proposed LPFM in 1999, they included a provision that was called an amnesty clause. And what the amnesty clause said was: if an unlicensed broadcaster shuts off their radio station after a certain number of days of this rule being published, we will allow you to still apply for a LPFM license.

And everyone was pretty satisfied with that with the exception of the National Association of Broadcasters and National Public Radio. Neither of those two organizations liked LPFM at all. So in 2000 and 2001, NAB and NPR went to Congress.The battle lines were clear. The FCC and community radio activists wanted low power FM to happen. The radio industry — did not. There was lobbying and litigating, measures and countermeasures, protests and marches.

Finally, a compromise is reached in 2010, and the FCC begins issuing new LPFM licenses.

CLEMONS: However, I was not eligible for a license.

This is Charles Clemons again, the founder of TOUCH FM.

CLEMONS: And that was because, when the Federal Communication visited TOUCH in 2007 they decided to give Charles Clemons a $17,000 fine for operating an unlicensed radio station. But I didn’t know that once you’re given a fine, that you can never ever apply for a license for the rest of your life.

In that final compromise that Congress reached, the amnesty clause was stripped from the low power FM program. Meaning…

JOHN ANDERSON: Meaning, Any unlicensed broadcaster is forever forbidden from the LPFM service. It was kind of like the passage of the Civil Rights Act for everyone but Rosa Parks, so the folks that broke the law to change the law were precluded from having any benefits. And that led to the raid…

April 17th, 2014

CLEMONS: They knocked on the door they rung the doorbell. They presented me with a warrant, it was official. I let them in, around 11am. It took them till about 3 o’clock in the afternoon to remove everything from out of TOUCH 106.1FM offices: turntables, microphones, they raped the fabric of the black community.

A cellphone video from the day of the raid shows Clemons out in front of the station.

CLEMONS: They’re underserved, and there’s no way I can stand by and let my community be underserved. There’s no way. If I have to go to jail for my community, if I have to die for my community, I will do that. It’s about doing the right thing. It’s about doing the right thing. This is a voice that’s being silenced again. For over 50 years we had WILD—an AM radio station with static from sunrise to sunset—like that’s how we think? That’s not how this community thinks. This community is 24 hours. We helped build Boston, and if we’re truly one Boston, then we need TOUCH 106.1FM.

As Clemons keeps talking, federal agents in black jackets are walking in and out of the door behind him, dismantling the station he had built for almost a decade. And by this time, Greg Lawson, who lives just a few blocks away, has noticed.

LAWSON: I turned on the radio and it was gone, so I thought something was wrong with the radio, so I flicked to other channels—other channels were there and I went back. Then I’m like: what’s going on?

Two radio stations in one lifetime, something’s wrong. I’m only 48 years old, how did two radio stations that targeted my community, talked about things that I like to hear, things that were relevant to my life, how did they get shut down like that, I don’t understand it.

COSS: When radio was first regulated, the phrase they come up with for deciding who get’s to use the radio—they said radio would be used for the public interest, public convenience and public necessity. Do you think the federal government has lived up to that motto?

LAWSON: No, not at all, unless they plan on having radio like TOUCH back on the air, then they would partially live up to it, but no. Radio is just out here to play music, give some news, the weather, pretty much that’s it. Our community is suffering right now, and it’s suffering from a lack of information that our people don’t know.

JOHN ANDERSON: And you have to remember that after the raid, the mayor Tom Menino came out and was like ‘what the hell are you doing?’ and the governor came out and said we can’t believe you’ve just done this—how does taking down one of the most meaningful voices on the air for Boston’s black community, how is that serving the public interest?

HALPER: Public interest, convenience, and necessity, what does that even mean any more?

Once again, radio historian Donna Halper.

HALPER: Our system is based on commercial advertising. And in commercial broadcasting, you had to do what was mass appeal. I’m not saying I agree or disagree, but that’s the system that got set up. So it’s become a very squishy term: the public interest, convenience and necessity. Everybody bows before the altar of it, but in a commercial system, it’s about making a buck and getting those ratings.

Radio is built on these contradictions. On the one hand, the airwaves are a public resource, but they are managed like a business. They belong to us, to the people, and yet we don’t have a legal right to use them. And I don’t mean to say that this tension is unique to radio — you could say the same thing about a national forest right? But radio is actually different, and maybe it’s different because it’s invisible. What we’re regulating here is a frequency of electromagnetic radiation. Some frequencies are assigned for Wi-Fi routers, some for satellites, some for radio stations, but every frequency is used for something — go ahead and look on the back of your phone, or whatever you’re listening on — somewhere on there you will see a small FCC logo, and what that means is: this device plays by the rules. It only uses the frequencies that it has been authorized to use by the Federal Government. And for the most part, because these frequencies are invisible, we don’t think about the rules that govern  them. That is, we don’t think about them until one day you turn on the radio and your favorite station is gone.

COSS: Alright, let’s go find this place.

Seeing as this whole story started with ‘WILD,’ the little daytime station at 1090 on the AM dial, I wanted to know what happened to it after it was sold. It turns out that Radio One — that’s the conglomerate that bought WILD back in 199 — they still own the license for its frequency, and they’ve been broadcasting on that frequency ever since they bought it. Radio One manages the broadcast from an office out in a nearby suburb. On my way there, I tuned into the WILD frequency: AM 1090. This is what I heard.

radio tuning, then sounds of Chinese language, continues under ACT

COSS: Alright, we’ve crossed out of Boston, I can see the skyline in the distance. And mostly it looks like we’re in the middle of a marsh, but I see an office park. I think that’s where we’re going.

I head across the the parking lot, through a revolving door, up a flight of stairs, around a corner, and into a windowless room filled with the humming computers.

RICK ANDERSON: Right now it’s a one space area that has one, two, three, four, five computers. And what’s happening is we’re broadcasting through satellite, China Radio International. And so that’s what they’re doing.

COSS: And this is WILD?

RICK ANDERSON: Oh yeah, this is now in 2016, is what WILD is now.

It’s been this way for over a decade, since the last of the local programming was phased out around 2006. There is no studio; there are no microphones or turntables. All the station does now is rebroadcast content from elsewhere, in this case, from mainland China. In fact, all that’s really left of the old WILD, is the man sitting in front of me — perhaps you recognize his voice. This is Rick Anderson, the WILD disc jockey we heard from earlier. He’s been around this radio since the 1970s, since he was a kid really.

RICK ANDERSON: …now they call ’em interns, but back then I was the kid–get the kid!

In the radio business, Rick is an anomaly: someone who worked his whole life at one station. So he remembers when the station was first bought by Ken Nash — the meticulous black business man from New York…

RICK ANDERSON: but he was a hell of a businessman…

And he remembers when WILD was sold to Radio One in 1999.

RICK ANDERSON: They were buying up everything…

Somehow Rick has stuck around through all those changes. Even after all the local staff and programming was cut, he has stayed on, making sure that the transmitter keeps working and the feed from the satellite keeps coming in. And by a strange coincidence, this is his last day. The station has just been sold again. And fittingly for a story about the loss of local radio, the new owners of WILD will be broadcasting exclusively state-owned radio from China.

RICK ANDERSON: That happened as of 7 o’clock this morning. It is owned by James Su, he is out of mainland China. They went through FCC approval, and that’s where we are. That is ILD—as we called it—as of 2016, so ILD goes away for good.

COSS: And that’s as of today?

RICK ANDERSON: …three hours ago, what is it just after 10 o’clock now, so yeah, 3 or 4 hours ago?

COSS: How does that feel that you’re kind of the last man standing?

RICK ANDERSON: Well you know I was prepped for it the first time.

He means when the station was sold to Radio One in 1999 and moved out of its Boston studio — the one on Warren St where Greg ran as a kid. On the day of the move, Rick was the last person there with the key.

RICK ANDERSON: It was me, and I’m standing there and it was just me and ILD. And the place looked like a war zone—like they threw a bomb in there. Papers were all over the place, things were ripped out. We left. I locked up. Then the team came and swept up. Now here it is, the end of an era, and here I am today, the very last day, and I’m the guy, with the key, and I’m doing an interview with Ian (laughs). How do I feel personally? I wish that I could have been the one to buy the station.

After our interview, Rick locked up, and we went back down the stairs, through the revolving door and across the parking lot.

Driving back into the city, I scanned the radio dial again — like Greg Lawson used to do when ‘ILD’ went off the air at night — just skipping from one station to the next, waiting for something to catch my ear. There are still some pirate stations out there, and even a new black-owned AM station, but for Greg nothing has taken the place of WILD and TOUCH. Or as Rick put it:

RICK ANDERSON: The quest to fill the hole is still on the table, it’s still on the table. And I’m a firm believer that nothing just happens, everything happens for a reason. But there will be a return of black radio in Boston. It will be, and I’ll be here to see it (pause). God willing I’ll be a part of it.

HOST OUTRO:

Radio Silenced was reported and produced by Ian Coss. Our Senior Producer is Tony Gannon. Our Post Production Editors are Kirsten Jusewicz-Haidle and Rachael Cain. We want to thank Jason Loviglio, Chair and Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland for sharing his scholarship. Professor Loviglio is the author of Radio’s Intimate Public: Network Broadcasting and Mass-Mediated Democracy. Our engineer was Howard Gelman at KQED Radio in San Francisco. Music in this episode was composed by Producer Ian Coss.

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Next on Life of the Law…our team will go In-Studio at KQED Radio in SF to talk about Radio Silenced, the law in the news, and to share a preview of our upcoming investigative report on opioid addiction and the law.

Join us February 21st for Life of the Law’s In Studio.

I’m Nancy Mullane. Thanks for listening.