[BC] WPRB

[Robert Orban]

At 02:06 PM 1/23/2006, you wrote:
>From: Bernie Courtney <jerseyspikes at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: [BC] WPRB
>To: "Broadcasters' Mailing List" <broadcast at radiolists.net>
>Message-ID:
>         <8175714e0601231205k6edb0720ra3c58e55d0c8b81b at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>
>And after about a half hour of listening I now must say I'm even more
>appalled at Bob Orban's take that KTU should just sign off to give them
>better coverage.  To the contrary PRB should just sign off for the sake of
>being a waste of natural resources in all the energy they are using to
>broadcast their crappy programming.  Maybe it was just this one daypart, but
>the 200w @ 2m HAAT station that's shared between Rutgers and Piscataway HS
>has better programming on it, and that's sad because for years i thought
>that station was a waste of spectrum.

It sounds like you picked a particularly bad time to listen (or were 
looking for a particularly bad example). An automation crash and a student 
jock frantically trying to fill in for it hardly represents the typical 
programming on any radio station.

I was being facetious when I referred to WKTU's being turned off --  after 
all, Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" maintained that the English 
should start eating Irish babies for supper, but he didn't mean it either. 
Lots of people prefer McRadio and there is a bounteous quantity of it now 
on the air -- all you can eat, in fact. I would never seriously propose 
that McRadio be taken off the air -- the mass audience that likes it 
deserves to have plenty of safe, thoroughly researched, non-threatening, 
repetitive formats whose hipness is carefully marketed, like the mall 
tee-shirt that says "Rebel." But McRadio shouldn't be the only thing 
receivable. After all, almost 10 million people have already voted with 
their wallets against McRadio by going to XM and Sirius. It's unnecessary 
for _every_ radio station to have a mass-appeal format. One man's "crappy 
programming" is another man's gateway to hearing worthy, non-mainstream music.

Bob Orban