Money and Morals: WBEZ Draws the Line
Account executive Steve Adler massaged the flyer’s language, and here’s what he sent back to Hutchcraft: “Support for this WBEZ program is provided by the American Friends Service Committee, holding a community convention and forum exploring issues of morality and war. This Sunday at 7 PM. Information at grassrootsvoices.org.”
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Does Chicago’s public radio station value empty rhetoric above conviction? Adler didn’t want to comment, but my sampling of opinion around the station suggests that people who work there believe WBEZ’s policy is dictated by federal law. That’s not exactly true. The 1934 Communications Act (last revised in 1996) does flatly forbid public radio stations from airing advertising–a message intended to “promote any service, facility, or product”–of a profit-seeking concern. But when the advertiser is a not-for-profit such as the Friends, the stations have a lot of latitude. “The [Communications Act] does not prohibit noncommercial educational stations from airing announcements that promote its own activities, or those of other not-for-profit entities,” a senior FCC attorney told a 1999 National Public Radio conference.
Underwriting, says Malatia, covers 18 percent of WBEZ’s $12 million budget and as much as half the budget of some other public stations. “It’s a source of revenue a lot of stations need to use. We need to use it. It’s got to be watched very carefully.”
So many other public radio stations reacted the same way that NPR turned to its lawyers for advice and then to the FCC. After hearing from the commission’s staff, NPR declared there was no problem. “I have received about a dozen e-mails focusing on the ‘learn more’ language, and I have read each of them carefully,” executive vice president Ken Stern asserted in an October 4 statement to public radio station managers and development officers. The FCC staff, he explained, had “reinforced” NPR’s conviction that what the FCC meant to prohibit was “calls for specific transactional behavior (‘buy,’ ‘come down and see’). This was never meant to be a prohibition against the use of verbs. While it is understandable that many in public radio have read it differently, this has led to awkward grammatical formulations and the somewhat illogical belief that an implied verb is somehow better than the expressed verb.”
“The Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a White Christian organization, standing up for rights and values of White Christian America since 1865. For more information, please contact the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, at P.O. Box 525, Imperial, Missouri 63052. Let your voice be heard!”
Among the countless differences between the Ku Klux Klan and the American Friends Service Committee, the most significant here is that the Klan wanted to tap into an unfamiliar and unlikely audience while the Friends asked public radio to help it reach kindred spirits. “It’s not like we have a Pacifica Radio or something,” says the Reverend Dan Dale, director of Agape House at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a planner of the Friends’ peace forum. “In terms of the Chicago area, this is the only station for progressive folks in town, and if they start saying we can’t use the word ‘peace’–and we’re not talking about editorial policy, we’re talking about a paid ad–it’s very worrisome.” He doesn’t want WBEZ to become just another “corporate mouthpiece.”
