Ieuan franklin
The Philosophy, Funding and Social Gain of Community Radio
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5.5 The Philosophy, Funding and Social Gain of Community RadioThis notion of paradigmatic change within an organisation highlights the importance of a normative theory of community radio appropriate to its participatory ethos, and the multi-flow, rather than unidirectional, flow of communication that constitutes its organisational philosophy (see Day 2009). The idea of multi-flow communication – a term derived from Enzensberger (1970/1976) - here refers to cultures of communication and collaboration that can be jointly nurtured within radio stations and within/across the communities they represent, whose ownership of the stations is more than symbolic. Community radio attempts to dismantle the barriers that have traditionally separated broadcaster and listener or manager and volunteer, in order to increase the participation of communities in all levels of station activity, including programme presenting; production and planning; scheduling; management; fundraising; and community outreach work. The chairperson of community radio station North East Access Radio (NEAR) in Dublin has explained the resulting difference between the programming of community and mainstream media in the following terms: Community radio has more freedom to do things that public service broadcasters can’t and I think that print media doesn’t want to do. I think community radio has a unique ability or facility and flexibility to do things in programming terms that none of the other media have or want to do. And I think that’s the challenge to us to rise to that, to experiment with the medium (quoted in Day 2009: 95). I would like to argue that, in experimenting with the medium, the UK community radio sector could benefit in particular from the example of the Challenge for Change (see Chapter 4) project (and the Fogo Process), as well as ‘home-grown’ initiatives like the (national) MMB and (the local or metropolitan) Commonwealth FM. As Lewis has noted (Lewis 2008), Challenge for Change was a pioneering project that preceded the theoretical or regulatory existence of community media in Canada, and had a significant influence on community media developments in Europe. It influenced the Canadian regulator, the Canadian Radio, Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), to distinguish “community programming” – the involvement of the community in ownership and production – from “local programming” in which professionals are put in charge of interpreting local needs, and it helped to oblige cable companies to carry community channels (Lewis 2008: 11). Lewis and Scifo have proposed that the inter-departmental financing of Challenge for Change by the Canadian Federal government (see Chapter 3.7) represents a financial model which the British Government should emulate or adopt in supporting the community radio sector in the UK (Lewis and Scifo 2008). According to this argument, as community radio is delivering social gain in a number of areas of social policy that correspond to governmental concerns, it is imperative that other departments of central government, beside the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), should contribute funding.181 This was highlighted in a letter to the Guardian written by a variety of community media experts and printed on 26th September 2007: London Metropolitan University’s Finding and Funding Voices colloquium last week heard evidence from across Europe of the contribution community media is making to social inclusion, community engagement and regeneration. Our own experience confirms that, especially among disaffected young people – from both native and minority communities – involvement in programme-making brings important gains in self- and peer-esteem, as well as highly transferable digital and communication skills…Yet the UK’s community radio sector is running on empty, because there is not the understanding at the highest levels of what this local form of public-service broadcasting involves, nor the political will to place it within agendas dealing with housing, health, crime prevention, employment, education, regeneration and community development – the very areas in which community media have a proven record (Lewis, Devereux et al. 2007). The community radio sector in the UK could also benefit from using Challenge for Change/The Fogo Process as a model of best practice in terms of programming, and the capture of actuality for both current social gain and future social history. There is not necessarily a contradiction between the ‘present-tense’ focus and remedial impetus of participatory media activism (as in the Fogo Process) and the life-history documentation involved in oral history, as both activities are concerned with social change as much as with ‘end product’. Memory is mutable and contingent in adapting to the needs of the community, and is therefore engaged as much with the present as with the past interests of a group or community. Conversely, the Fogo Island films are now valuable documents of social history, despite the fact that they were made at a specific time, for an instrumental, rather than merely documentary purpose.182 Oral history as a movement seeks to uncover and circulate the ‘hidden’ voices of those people who have been excluded from the historical record, and who lack opportunities to make their voices heard. These are the same kinds of people that community radio stations seek to enfranchise – the underprivileged and marginalized in society, the minorities who are neglected by the existing provision of mainstream media content.183 Although most of the MMB project staff (based at BBC Local Radio stations) were acutely aware of the need to “collect interviews beyond their own audiences” and made efforts to target hard-to-reach groups (Perks 2001: 99), no radio sector can achieve this to the extent that community radio can. It is within the terms of each community radio station’s mandate and licence obligations to maximize appropriateness, inclusion and empowerment for geographical or epistemic communities, and this may include, for example, ethnic minorities, the unemployed, the disabled and the homeless. Especially given the unprecedented and unpredictable economic ‘downturn’ at the time of writing, the community radio sector is looking for sustainability, in the form of new sources of funding; new partners; new forms of programming; and new approaches to achieving social gain. It is the contention of this thesis that the likelihood of achieving social gain would be significantly improved by a greater degree of networking and collaboration with community development184 and community history activists. Conducive to such networking is the fact that community radio stations are dispersed across the country and implanted within social networks in geographical communities, or communities of interest. The organisational form of community radio, in which the barriers between broadcaster and audience are broken down, has affinities with the co-operative enterprise (‘shared authority’) of oral history and community development. Due to the community radio sector’s current ‘funding crisis’ (Buckley 2009), practitioners and advocates are motivated to discuss this immediate issue rather than programming, and it is often the case that an exploration of community broadcasting’s social and cultural benefits has to be made secondary to the primary needs to advocate for changes in funding or licensing, and justify community radio in economic terms (Foxwell 2001). However, recent audience studies of community broadcasting have provided useful evidence of the economic and cultural indicators of the sector’s success (for example, Meadows, Forde et al. 2007), and I would like to argue that the discussion of programming does not necessarily have to be made ancillary. For instance, the influence of Challenge for Change on the community radio sector could and should encompass the incorporation of the collaborative documentary work involved in the Fogo Process as well as the methods and mechanisms of funding. The Fogo Process has already inspired the BBC’s Open Door series (which began in 1973), in which community groups were given the resources to create their own television programming, and Open Door in turn inspired a Canadian equivalent called Access (McLeod 2007). Given the links between Britain and Canada as countries, as well as the British and Canadian documentary film traditions and public service broadcasting systems, there is a great deal of shared cultural history which can be built upon.185 Given also the undeniable influence of the public service model on community radio (see Lewis and Booth, quoted below in section 5.7), this thesis has shown that there is a fascinating and innovative tradition of British and Irish radio feature production that can be drawn on by the community radio sector for inspiration, as well as a burgeoning current interest in digital storytelling, which BBC Wales has fuelled with the popular digital storytelling project Capture Wales (Fyfe, Wilson et al. 2008).
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