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québécoise
A Sound Archive
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Phonothèque
québécoise
A Sound Archive |
| The History of Community Radio |
- See also Activism
Community and grassroots groups find a voice
It has taken time for public
participation
to become the watchword for a greater democratization of our society
and the
institutions dedicated to managing public affairs. For the community
radio
movement, however, citizen involvement has been a priority from the
outset.
Community stations are organized on an egalitarian basis and a
democratic ethic
is essential to the way they function. It is also an unavoidable
condition of
their opening onto their communities and the stronger social ties that
they are
able to create. The different social groups that make up the community
need
community radio to find a voice and to get their point of view across.
In
return, the radio station must rely on volunteers for management, for
program
production and even the for financial survival of the organization. Giving a platform to people, to ordinary
citizens, demystifying the news, making the radio station a true medium
of
communication, all became major objectives in blazing the path of
creating and
developing community radio in Quebec.
Community radio stations would
become a
pivotal forum for democratizing the media by becoming a hands-on
communication
medium that gave a platform to those who had little or no voice. They
also
became a model for new kinds of democratic functioning by bringing
democratic
values and practices into the public sphere and giving these values an
important place in the way they carried out their activities.
According to the established
model, radio characteristically
attracted people by creating its own “community of listeners,” what in
the
industry is commonly called the audience. This audience is quantified
using
ratings and market share. Community models of communication tried to
reverse
this commercial relationship by postulating the existence of
already-formed
communities, to whom the media were obliged to adapt and not the
reverse. This
is due in large measure to the fact that community media see their
publics
first as groups of citizens with particular communications needs and
not as
consumers whose percentage of listening time is sold to advertisers.
The
non-profit character of community practices is reflected both in the
legal form
of their organization and also in the “anti-commercial” way they
understood their
public.
It comes as no surprise that
community communication
in Canada and Quebec had its beginnings among the radical, protest
movements in
the activist social climate of the 1960s and 1970s. The idea that the
community
should collectively appropriate the media was championed in word and
deed by
social actors who did not have access to the control and use of the
media.
The participatory approach
favoured by
community radio, along with other practices developed through activist
film and
video, resulted in a focus on the role of the community in owning
stations,
producing programs and managing the organization. Hence the emphasis on
training volunteers and the key the assembly of members, who were the
democratic backbone of the media, played in management and production.
The concrete expression of these
principles was the legal existence of an independent non-profit
organization,
collectively owned, with a board of directors elected by the assembly
of its
members. The board managed the budget, handled public relations,
ensured that
CRTC norms were respected, and so on. The paid staff was responsible
for
supporting the community in its involvement with programming, for
listener
services, for local and regional news and for the internal management
of the
organization. The procedure for becoming a member varied from station
to
station. Usually it involved the purchase of a membership card and
sometimes a
minimum number of hours of volunteering each year.
It was part of the mandate of a
community
radio station that the majority of its “employees” be volunteers. There
was
usually agreement that having a volunteer-run station was an important
way to
involve the community. However, some of the permanent staff felt that
it was
sometimes necessary to professionalize activities to enable grassroots
and
community groups to find a voice. Nonetheless, it remained important
that
community radio not “over –professionalize,” as this would have reduced
access
to the airwaves. Between the two ends of the spectrum there appears to
be an
equilibrium that, fragile as it may be, must be found if the station is
going
to endure.
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