Corporate Interests out to KILL Analog FM

Totally agree the FCC is complete f*&!@%g joke. It's like the fox guarding the henhouse, and the Bush administration, predictably enough, is encouraging more of the same, proposing to further relax ownership limitations of broadcasters, to the detriment of scarce public resources. NPR is getting worse, too. My hometown of Washington, DC, the seat of the government that's allowing this 'malling' of our airwaves, no longer has any independent college stations on the air - they can no longer compete for the licenses. I think our only hope is an eventual complete conversion to a digital system that allows for hundreds of stations all across the country to be received in any area, otherwise the diversity of content is just about gone forever. In fact, once that happens, maybe truly local programming can retake the FM band.

Well guys, I can't say I agree with your more apocolyptic or conspiratorial constuctions of the situation, though our assessments concerning the general direction of eventual outcomes we may be headed toward, might not be too dissimilar. But I think the impetus for and genesis of the predicament can be easily enough accounted for by the natural tendencies of capitalism and marketing in a media age, and the ongoing breakdown of local variation as our crowded, connected, and mobile modern society increasingly loses - for better and for worse - a lot of the old barriers supporting regionalistic and individualistic qualities that are often beneficial to artistic originality and free expression. The profit motive has been with us from time immemorial; its just the unintended consequences of escalating technology that make possible both the exponential expansion and the ironic subjugation of our artistic output as just so much product, leading to the untenable position of our not receiving the essential sustenance we all crave from the arts - such as (but hardly limited to) music - in the first place. Mind control is unfortunately not just what you or I let it be, it's what we all let it be, and the only antidotes are freedom and knowledge combined with will and effort.