New York, LA, Lincoln, Nebraska–all have community radio stations. Chicago will too if the Peace and Justice Radio Project can get the word out about what we’re missing. Frustrated by inadequate media coverage of the gulf war, community, political, and labor activists started PJRP in 1991 to provide Chicago with a progressive perspective. PJRP aims to establish a community radio station in Chicago that’s free from commercial control, where individuals and organizations with no connections to mainstream media can get their issues heard–by covering those issues themselves.
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“What we’re about is teaching people how to use the technology, how to use the media for their own goals in order to tell their own story,” says Tyehimba Jess, a PJRP staff member. “How to go out, conduct an interview, track people down, do some investigative reporting, formulate your questions, come back with your information, go to a studio, edit tape, cut tape, make a program, and get it on the air. That’s an empowering process.”
PJRP’s vision of a community radio station is based on the understanding that community activists get short shrift from mainstream media and that they can better connect with the public and each other through an outlet of their own making. Radio seems the ideal medium: it’s readily available to a wide spectrum of people and much cheaper and easier to produce than TV.
Guests at the conference include keynote speakers David Barsamian, producer of the nationally syndicated program Alternative Radio, and Araceli Garcia of Radio Bilingue, a community radio station in California; Johanna Zorn and Carl T. Wright from WBEZ; journalist and WNUA talk-show host Stan West; C. Douglas-Ubarra, who produces a lesbian feminist show on KZUM in Lincoln, Nebraska; Lisa Johnson from KFAI in Minneapolis; and other alternative media producers, community organizers, and community radio advocates from Chicago and across the midwest.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Bruce Powell.
