Month: December 2015

Big shake-up at a small radio station

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

You’d think a university wouldn’t need to tell everyone they were making their campus radio station more “student-focused.” But the University of Massachusetts, my alma mater, is doing just that with WMUA. This spring, the airwaves on 91.1 FM will have no more than 24 hours per week of non-student programming. This comes as a review committee checks out the controversy which led to the ouster of non-student DJ Max Shea and faculty adviser Glenn Siegel last spring.

For all this to make sense, you have to understand a little bit of backstory of the station.

Even as the radio voice of UMass, WMUA has enjoyed an awful lot of community involvement over the years- as in, tuning in meant you might hear a fellow student or you might hear a townie. Blocks of programming included jazz, world music, and even polka, so we aren’t talking about a typical college radio station that was playing Snow Patrol circa 1998.

Though the station was largely funded through student fees, community members always felt part ownership. It hasn’t been unwarranted.  Community DJs ate up time during the non-student-friendly hours when classes were being attended (early on weekdays) or hangovers were being nursed (weekends).  The signal from WMUA stayed strong through winters and summers because non-students felt like they were a part of the action.

My own show, Politics as Usual, was a student-produced Sunday morning outlier from 1998-2000. I was scheduled back-to-back with the late Ken Mosakowski, a nice older guy who would be cheering on Bernie Sanders each week if he hadn’t passed away some years ago. He was always remarkably nice to me despite our political differences, and I was really happy that I got to bump into him – by complete chance – on the day I graduated. Listening to the beginning of his show as I cleaned up after my own was fun and I learned a good bit from him about local politics. It was a benefit to have these folks around the station to serve as mentors.

Ont the other hand, the mission of the university – and, by extension, its radio station – is education, which means giving students the microphone. Reaction to UMass’s decision to focus on student-produced programming  drips with entitlement and self-importance:

At a press conference in the Bangs Community Center, community members said they are frustrated that mediation was not offered after they raised concerns about student leadership … 

Louise Dunphy, spokeswoman for the task force and host of “Celtic Crossings,” said she is particularly frustrated with what she sees as a “total absence of moral leadership” at UMass, pointing to a meeting she, Sax and community representative Maria Danielson attended Tuesday morning with Associate Chancellor Susan Pearson and Enku Gelaye, vice chancellor for student affairs and campus life.

“The very worst of our community played out in the chancellor’s office yesterday, when Associate Chancellor Pearson and Vice Chancellor Gelaye told us they would release a statement to the press soon while they had already planned a presentation with the students who have participated in conduct directly in conflict with university policy,” Dunphy said.

If I was a  student, or a parent writing checks to UMass, I’d wonder why the hell the Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs is spending time meeting with a bunch of Amherst-dwelling hippies whose biggest beef is that their weekly volunteer world music radio show might get cancelled so that some Communications major can spin the Decemberists and Band of Horses for three hours. Pearson and Gelaye were right to dismiss these issues because they are non-issues. It’s disappointing to see adults getting so involved in the workings of a student radio station.

But like so many other things that UMass does, this has the potential to backfire. After all, the fact that no one listened to WMUA when I was a student had more to do with the advent of MP3s than people turning away from jazz or polka. College radio was the place to hear edgy, rare music once, but by the time the century turned people found that stuff online. Even back in 1997, older students told rookies like me that radio station jobs weren’t going to be easy to find as national syndication services edged out the old-school DJ-spinning-records model.

As both a reflection of UMass campus life and a training ground for real careers, WMUA may not be particularly relevant anymore. They can set aside programming blocks for students, but will the students actually want it anymore? UMass could find itself stuck with a choice: reinstate the dual student-community focus of WMUA, or be forced to shut the station down.

Hopefully, the students will come back – because even if radio is a dying medium, it’s still pretty cool to have a show.

Offensive jokes may help non-offensive behavior

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

The most recent episode of my Crummy Little Podcast featured a good friend and former colleage, Geoff Woliner. He runs his own company now called Winning Wit, which helps people be funny when giving speeches, making toasts, or running campaigns. At one point, we dish a little bit about the difference between the subtle humor of The Simpsons (at least in its early seasons) combined with the over-the-top gags in Family Guy.

Family Guy is well known for jokes which skirt the edge of decency (and occasionally fall over). But as it turns out, that may not be such a bad thing. According to a recent study, playing games like Cards Against Humanity that call for participants to be funny and a little offensive help our brains draw the line on what constitutes racist behavior.

Consider the evolution of mainstream racial humor. In the 19th and early 20th century that meant minstrel shows. Since All in the Family, most mainstream racial humor makes fun of racists; when Donald Trump mock-tweets “I love the blacks!” on SNL, the joke is on his supposed ignorance.

 

 

 

Ok, fine, get excited for Star Wars

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

“You know,” I told friends up until a few weeks ago, “this new Star Wars movie is probably going to suck.”

Here was my reasoning: viewed outside the lens of nostalgia, many of the Star Wars movies aren’t particularly great. The entire franchise rests on the excellence of The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars itself captures the imagination, but one wonders if it would have held up as a stand-alone movie. Return of the Jedi ties everything up nicely – but has its weak moments, too. Obviously, the prequels left a horrible taste in everyone’s mouth.

Since the franchise is really built on one excellent movie and a handful of flicks that hold up better in your memory than on screen, I figured a new, Disneyfied Star Wars movie would prove to be a shallow, thinly-plotted, poorly-acted money grab – just like the prequels.

Then the trailers started coming out. And three big reasons to get excited became clear:

  1. J.J. Abrams. There’s been plenty of excitement about the focus on practical effects over the CGI that made the prequel trilogy look like cartoons. The real value of Abrams, though, comes through in his work directing Super 8. If you’re a fan of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, you’ll appreciate the way Super 8 uses light and sound to create a mood. Abrams understood what made those older movies special and adapted those elements in a modern film. He mixed a fan’s appreciation with a filmmaker’s expertise. That’s something George Lucas couldn’t do with the prequels; the storyteller can never see his or her own tale through the same lens as the audience.
  2. It looks like a good, new story. The first trailers banked on  familiar imagery – a downed Star Destroyer, lightsabers, Han and Chewie returning home. But look at this one, and seems clear there’s an well-thought-out story that intertwines the fates of several new characters. While the prequels were attempting to tell more of a story wehad already heard, this is uncharted territory.
  3. Prequels are, by nature, a disappointment. The problem with prequels is that, if a story is sufficiently interesting and addictive, fans will write their own prequels in their heads. Everyone who watched Star Wars had an idea of what Obi-wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker’s friendship must have been like, how the Old Republic fell, how the Empire rose. The mystery allowed each person to have their own image in their mind. Even if they had been good, the prequels couldn’t match the mythology each Star Wars fan had built in their own minds. (By the way, remember this in a few years when the Hunger Games folks cash in on a prequel showing how Panem was started.)

Early returns are good, so maybe there’s a new hope after all.

Distrust and Trump

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

It’s funny to watch talking heads on television news ponder why Donald Trump enjoys apparent popular support, even while making controversial comments that draw criticism from across the political spectrum.

Victor Davis Hanson has as good an analysis as anyone:

The first reaction of Attorney General Loretta Lynch after the recent San Bernardino terrorist attack was to warn the country about Islamophobia. Her implicit message to the families of the dead was not that the government missed a terrorist cadre or let Islamic State sympathizers carry out a massacre. Instead, she worried more about Americans being angry at the inability of the tight-knit Muslim community to ferret out the extremists in its midst…

The government reports that a record 94.4 million Americans are not in the labor force. That is almost a third of the country. How can the same government declare that the official unemployment rate is only 5 percent?

Aside from a government so obviously unmoored from reality, most people watch a 24-hour cable news media where facts are equally alien. Consider that in the 16 hours after the San Bernardino shooting, early Twitter-fueled reports the attack on misguided anti-Planned Parenthood activists, white supremecists, and a workplace dispute, before the facts actually came out. The need for speed has surpassed the need for accuracy.

There’s also a willful tone-deafness to opposing views which creates distrust. Megan McArdle got it right in a column about the public discussion about Syrian refugees that sprang up right after the Paris attacks. McArdle, who supports taking in more refugees, had plenty of criticism for the holier-than-thou voices from her own side of the argument:

Perfectly reasonable people are worried that a small number of terrorists could pretend to be refugees in order to get into the U.S. for an attack. One response to these reasonable people has been: “How dare you say people fleeing terrorism are terrorists!” This is deeply silly. Obama administration officials have admitted that they can’t be sure of screening terrorists out from asylum seekers.

As a result, media and politicians wringing their hands over Trump lack any moral authority to do so. It’s no wonder negative news stories and condemnations from his oppoenents don’t affect this guy’s polling numbers.

(Sidebar: There’s also the whole question about whether the poll numbers translate into a viable campaign. Some media outles have started asking those questions now. Why now? Why wasn’t that considered relevant four months ago?)

 

Hillary ALMOST nails the anti-Trump message

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Donald Trump had barely finished his call for a ban on Muslim travel to the U.S. when Clinton and Co. fired back. Naturally, because it’s Hillary Clinton, it came through a fundraising email pimping her new “Love trumps hate” bumper sticker over Huma Abedin’s signature. And in equally typical Hillary Clinton fashion, her message was almost off.

It started off promisingly enough:

Last night, when I heard Donald Trump’s hateful comments about banning Muslims like me from entering the United States, I was shocked, offended and angry. But after I saw the flood of responses from this team — and across the country — saying that Trump’s comments were absolutely unacceptable, I was overwhelmed with a different emotion:

Love.

That’s actually a pretty cool, positive response. Not only does it make the point that Trump was wrong, it changes the “hero” in the story. When Candidate A condemns Candidate B, A is trying to look like the hero sticking up for the little guy. Such self-aggrandizing rhetoric can ring hollow.

By referencing the public response, Abedin and Team Clinton share the spotlight with the person reading the email – and who doesn’t like getting a little shine, right?

It also marginalizes Trump, disconnecting his inflammatory rhetoric from the rank-and-file voters. For a candidate who referred to political opponents as her enemies, this is an important distinction. But the next paragraph blows up that concept:

Let’s show Donald Trump and his supporters that we won’t be torn apart by his hateful rhetoric.

It’s bad politics to blame Trump “supporters” for the ills of America, no matter which party you’re in. Its logical end is a misstep like Mitt Romney’s “47%” comments – essentially giving voice to the campaign’s plan to divide the electorate and work on getting their own supporters out to the polls. That may reflect a strategic reality, but it doesn’t mean a campaign has to say it publicly.