Mae Brussell hosted radio shows focused on the JFK Assassination, fascism and other conspiracies on community radio stations KLRB an KAZU in the 1970s and 1980s. Brussell’s brand of broadcasting represents a strain of community radio show thatcontinues to be found, often to the chagrin of program directors and boards of directors. Matthew Lasar joins […]
In the service of my course on conspiracies and conspiracy theories at UC Santa Cruz, I’ve been listening to Mae Brussell’s many radio programs on YouTube. “At some point you have to get information or documentation about what’s happening,” Brussell told her radio audience in July of 1972, “you can’t just sit in the drawing room […]
Community radio lost an important man last month. Nick Leggett was an engineer, writer, amateur radio operator and inventor with many patents to his name. He also was one of the original proponents of low-power FM, who petitioned the FCC to create the service in the late 1990s as part of the Amherst Alliance, alongside […]
We just got word that the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force will be holding another conference in Washington, D.C. this fall. With the theme “Radio History: From Archive to Classroom,” the official event will take place on November 3 and 4 at the Library of Congress. A special pre-conference session on Cold War […]
For 40 years Mark Talbot hosted his UK-based radio show “Second Side Up.” On cassette. Only on cassette. At its peak the show had 40 listeners, but duplicating that many tapes became too big of a financial drain on the DJ, so he scaled back. I learned about “Second Side Up” from the Australian podcast […]
I teach a course at UC Santa Cruz on conspiracies and conspiracy theories, and I’ve been rummaging around for a digital performance of MacBird! for quite some time. As far as I can tell, the only online rendition of the show can be found on the Internet Archive. It is an air check via KPFK-FM […]
In case you need a refresher on the public/community radio scene in Wichita, Kansas, circa 1987, The Mumbles had a big following in and around the area. Fans did a number of shows about the punk band on KMUW-FM’s legendary Sister Midnight program. You can listen to them here: I particularly enjoyed the Elvis imitations, done with […]
It is beyond me why The United States Army produced a documentary on running an independent radio station in 1951, but here you have it. “Also serving the public,” the film notes, “are radio stations without networks. Typical is this small independent station in New York.” The “typical” indie station the Army focused on was […]
I recently rediscovered a National Public Radio (NPR) article that addressed a 2014 study by the National Science Foundation (NSF) on ‘Public Attitudes and Understanding’ of ‘Science and Technology’ in which only 74% of those surveyed thought that the Earth orbits the Sun. To rephrase and reframe that statement, that’s approximately 26% of the population of the United […]
Continuing my excavation of digitally archived college/community radio programs, I have found this nugget on the Internet Archives: a recording of WQAX-FM DJ “Gary Indiana” hosting a music show, circa February 1981. WQAX (aka, “Quacks” 100.3 FM) broadcast to Bloomington, Indiana as a cable station for two decades, from 1973 through 1993. The signal offered a […]
