The Radio Overton Window

 August 10, 2022 Late night/early morning

So, I want to mention this, and in a sort of open-ended way, see where it goes.  I think cultural analysis of this is often neglected in the discourse.  How much attention have people paid to the fact that your typical broadcast for-profit radio station broadcasts with a standard format that's essentially pre-packaged?  Put conservative talk radio on hold for a minute.  Even the music channels are broadcasting a standard format - a slate of songs from a defined era, and so on.  There's an agreed-on scope of what's available.  Does fashion dictate what is on?  Or does it come down to a corporate decision, whittled by some arbiters of taste who have gotten that authority from...somewhere.  Stolen it or something.  Probably a little of both if you're talking about the stations playing the newest songs.  But when you're moving backwards somewhat, into the replay stations, fashion doesn't play so much into it.  There's more of a corporate flavor.  

Cookie cutter.  People do say that.  It's not an unfair criticism.  But it's not a criticism of the songs as much as it is a criticism of the prescribed format: how people's taste is commonly supposed to be assumed, but is actually dictated to them by what's on. 

So the internet kids have some beef with this broadcasting mentality, say my doubters (perhaps).  But it's not so much a full-fledged attack.  Putting out content continually can be extraordinarily difficult.  Autopiloting a broadcast can allow you to work on the mechanics of the thing.  But there is some hypocrisy in this model that a fan of music can discern.  For instance, to not allow someone to pay a station to play a song, but affirmatively allow corporate interests to define your entire programming and all your pre-packaged options, is hypocrisy.  If one should be sensationalized, so should the other.  But the reality is, that the public owns the airwaves, and, secondly, that big corporate interests are still embarrassed to have their enormous influence on the media known.  They only want to get away with the murder of diversity of information if their hand in it is never disclosed.  They only want to participate in narrowing the Overton Window and manipulating it if no one knows about it, ever.  What's a little payola compared to the wholesale manipulation of our information flows?

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Now, just for fun, how about this to ponder.  I want to be clear that I don't buy conspiracy theories, as a standard, but I do entertain them because I like to imagine what might be going on.  AM Radio is heavily Republican; that is not a secret.  I just picked out this detail from the for-profit radio station history in the Lansing area: there used to be a hip-hop radio station on AM radio here directed at the black community.  When that channel was bought out by its present owners, they transferred the programming to FM, and replaced the programming on AM with some bland mix.  Did the fact that this station was the first to program specifically to the African-American community in Lansing, and at one time could be heard in a big chunk of the Lower Peninsula, have anything to do with the buyout and the shunting off to FM radio?

Here's my limited understanding of "radio".  FM is the pros: it's higher quality sound but it's got a lower ceiling on scope (of broadcast area).  AM is actually easier to get into: all the amateur radio enthusiasts are on AM.  But it's generally a conservative-leaning bunch.  Apply common sense to it: what is the power of broadcast radio technology that the conservative side, many of whom have a big animus against African-Americans, want to keep away from the black community?

I'm just entertaining that conspiracy theory for what it's worth, and it seems like there's something to it.  I don't claim to be all that familiar with broadcast media, but I do like music.  I also get a kick out of that Grand Rapids-based conservatives were once regaled with the sounds of hip-hop radio.  It might have made them less uptight. 

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The serious part for me is the part of this that constitutes the easily-accessible explanation of the word "propaganda".  Forget the extremities of "MK Ultra" and so on, or put them aside for now.  "Propaganda" is just simply exactly this: limiting people's options for the consumption of information, and also for culture, by washing out alternative voices in a sea of noise, whether that be junk mail, or radio stations confined to a certain "format" of "acceptable" programming.  More precisely it's, for example, radio stations whose programming confines the listener to a certain type of mood and outlook.  And more accurately it's a regime that manipulates the programming that's available so that "they" (whoever controls it) can attempt to keep as many people as possible within what they decide is the range of acceptable opinion (also known as the Overton Window).  It's not just spam or bad journalism.  In short, propaganda is content, or media in general, that makes the audience vulnerable to some further, predatory, manipulation.