I want to say thank you, so much because, it feels like radio & these people who worked to create these enjoyable spaces, filled with such life: it feels like that is so rapidly becoming such a lost art. And it just feels like theres so little we leave to the future to remember this by. That as things get bleaker and worse, there's so few artifacts to point to like this that tell the good tale.

Elsewhere in this thread I poured out such joy and happiness about so many station that are so beloved to me, are just darling special places. I want so badly to imagine https://mountainchill.com KRKQ to be broadcasting from Telluride Colorado for a hundred, a thousand years. It's something so special.

Yet the story, the sadness you tell here, identifying forces eroding us, our great Society, with nothing of substance and meaning in its place: it's just getting so much worse, in so many ways and places.

The mechanized take-over of the airwaves, the public's airwaves, that the FCC has congressional mandate to use and protect & make good for the public, is ongoingly getting so much worse, on and on. The takeover by right wing aligned outlets like Sinclair has been so bad, so ongoing, has so few hopeful counter-examples if things going right at any scale. Lots of small positive lights, but this chewing up of the world by hostile above-human quasi-immortal corporate super orgs is on full display in radio, in broadcast.

Trump I's FCC overturning congressional media ownership requirements has been part of this. There are only three major players in radio left, since these rules, and two of them are trying to merge right now, for a $6.2B merger. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15716219 (2017), and excellent article today, https://karlbode.com/local-u-s-tv-news-will-soon-be-entirely...

Meanwhile that same Carr run FCC is doing everything it can to chill and ruin free speech, to terrorize anyone with speech they find disagreeable. Orban style totalitarianism, right here at home. Ghastly ghastly anti-democratic, anti freedom, anti-liberty, just the smallest possible weasel stuff, shame beyond shame to these weak spirited cowards.

> "To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile but is morally treasonable to the American public."

Theodore Roosevelt, 1918

Meanwhile this same administration has all but destroyed the National Endowment for the Arts. Countless radio stations have had to make drastic efforts to stay afloat, as both a miniscule yet vital source of funding for such great public service has been cut, by these same foes of everything you've written of.

I want more than a memory. In the comments below I've shared some truly great amazing stations I love, that folks can tune into from anywhere and enjoy. I an a proud supporting member at multiple stations. Yet, with forces like this, big, scary, corrupt, evil, un American, in my view demonic forces like this, with Powell Memorandum operations to corporate and own the airwaves for private and increasingly political interest, I fear writing like this will serve all too strongly as a necessary vital remembrance of a past, one that few people would otherwise have any ability to connect to. With a tear and with thanks, let me say I really appreciate this write up, and I hope it will not be so very necessary for so very long into our future. With apologies for being a bit pointed, obviously, but for hopefully reasonable or understandable, good spirited cause... May there be better times ahead, may the people enjoy the airwaves & making special places of them together again.