This past Sunday, February 13, was World Radio Day. I’m a few days late in recognizing it, but still have something good to share. Like last year, the BBC tapped radio journalist David Goren to produce a documentary highlighting community radio around the globe. “World Wide Waves ’22” profiles four stations:
- Koori Radio is the only First Nations radio station broadcasting Sydney, Australia
- Arta FM is an independent, multilingual community radio station broadcasting in the Jazeera region in North-East Syria
- Radio Victoria is a social justice station dedicating to fighting poverty in El Salvador
- Machnoor, India’s Sangham Radio is owned, managed and operated by women from the margins of the society, who have been mostly excluded in public forums
Boston public radio station WBUR reports,
“A group of lawyers and activists from Massachusetts are celebrating a ruling by an international human rights court in favor of indigenous broadcasters in Guatemala.
Nicole Friederichs, who runs Suffolk Law School’s Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples Clinic in Boston, said it’s the first time an international court has upheld native people’s right to operate media outlets.”
The unlicensed station was operating without a license when it was shut down by the government. The station appealed to the country’s Supreme Court, arguing that licensure was prohibitively expensive, but was ruled against. But the station prevailed in front of the Inter-American Court in December, finding the Guatemalan government had violated the broadcasters’ rights to freedom of expression. The ruling has implications for dozens of similar stations across the country.
Mazda owners in Seattle who listen to public radio KUOW are finding their car stereos taken over by the station, and that they can’t switch away. In fact, other features, like Bluetooth, won’t work either. No one, including Mazda, is quite certain what has caused the problem, though there are suspicions that it has something to do with KUOW’s HD Radio signal. The only fix, right now, appears to be replacing the entire in-car entertainment system.
