BEFORE MOST of the really good radio services started streaming online and before I got a fast enough connection to listen to them I was a die-hard DXer, a radio bug as they used to say, listening for several hours on several shortwave radios I had over the years. A really good Sangean and several Grundigs with wire antennas let me pull in some really hard to get signals. I got the habit from our father who was blind and didn't have much use for TV - though he liked listening to Barney Miller and a few other shows. We still recall many hours of him in his radio room above the garage, us playing with splints lit in the wood stove - it's a wonder we didn't burn the place down.
I would occasionally listen to Voice of America and after I got over the weirdness of listening to their "Special English" shows - at first I felt like I was being subjected to brain washing - I came to respect what they did there. That was until the Reagan-Bush years when Republican slanting of the content became evident. Since then it has fluctuated back and forth between years of relative integrity under, for the most part Democratic administrations and Republican-fascist ones where the reliability and quality of it plummeted. Apparently under Trump it's probably going to be about as credible as Russia Today, probably carrying Putin ordered propaganda. Anyway, along the way I stopped listening except for a brief period when I had the idea that learning to write in Special English might help me to become a more effective communicator. Unfortunately, most of what I write about isn't easy to do in a vocabulary of about 1,200 words and short, simple sentences. I did learn that the impressiveness of what they did it it was related to the relative simplicity of what they were covering.
That that cesspool of lying and lying and lying and lying, Kari Lake* is being given charge of the poor thing isn't going to do a thing for its reliability. I'd never bother writing about it except that that other cesspool of lying and lying and lying and lying ad infinitem, fascist criminal and I hope soon to be resident of Rikers, Steve Bannon is talking "they'd better not destroy documents" at the VOA. It occured to me when reading about that that it's a perfect Republican-fascist, Trumpzi accusation because if there were no such documents to start with, the fucking liars of Republican-fascism would just pretend there had been and, so, their non existence is proof of them having been destroyed. And the goddamned American "free press" red light district will just repeat the lies because they're in on it. Back in the day the VOA was, actually, far more reliable than the "free press," official government media that it was BECAUSE IT WAS IN THE HANDS OF PEOPLE WHO BELIEVED IN THE TRUTH AND TELLING THE TRUTH, SOMETHING THAT THE COMMERCIAL MEDIA HAS NEVER BEEN ABOUT. That's true with few exceptions, such as the Boston Globe used to be when some rather eccentric old-family idealists owned it, something that is long, long over and the thing is almost as bad as the infamous little picture paper. But that would get me on to the selling of the once great Boston Herald to that shit rag.
Of the government supported media services, most of those are pretty bad or, once great ones are shadows of their former selves, such as the CBC. I've never been that impressed with the BBC which has always been way too much under the control of the Brit establishment and partisan governments. The German Deutsche Welle is, actually, far better as are some of the smaller national services such as Radio Swisse and Radio Nederland are pretty good, though I can't say I keep up with them like I did when I got low-fi reception on short wave.
Listening to Stephanie Miller and her colleagues talking about the debacle of Air America which was done in, not by its lefty programming but the rank incompetence and, apparently, grifty management under what was an incompetent business model from the start, I think its time to face the fact that any broadcast lefty medium isn't going to happen. I think a better thing would be for some of the more reliable online programs and services to band together to form an accumulator site like Buzz Flash used to be for online text resources, only for podcasts, youtubes and the such. One that was independent of another hosting platform which would not be sabotaged or sold off as MSNBC apprently may well be soon. One which kept out the really shitty play-lefty shit would probably be best because those a-holes would only cause problems and headaches. They shouldn't be afraid to reject crap and unvetted, unprofessional stuff that traffics in rumors and likely false information. There should be standards higher than a lot of the open comment blogs had. Lies drive out the truth, assholes drive out seriousness. Don't put some Ivy League product in charge of it, I wouldn't trust them to not turn into a self-centered, narcissistic jerk. I'd avoid "humor" too. Anyone who wants to do that should look at what the prophetic Karl Krauss had to say about such stuff always coming to dominate the reporting of truth. The world doesn't need another source of that, it's entertained to death, as it is.
* What the hell, I'm going to go there. I don't think Trump cares much about the non-billionaire women he appoints except that he might be hoping to get a blow job from them. Why else would someone like him appoint Kari Lake to anything?
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