Many of you know how important I consider shortwave radio to be in the third world and for those living under repressive regimes. Radio France International recently interviewed me regarding these views and my position as the founder and director of the charity, Ears To Our World.
Click here to download the interview, or listen on RFI’s website.
Many thanks to RFI’s Brent Gregston for giving Ears To Our World air time!
This well-written, comprehensive take on RCI’s closures does an excellent job of addressing radio’s continued relevance in our current socio-political climate. It even includes a brief quote from yours truly. Thanks, Rich, for bringing this to my attention.
(Source: rabble.ca by Garth Mullis)
Across the Indian sub-continent and Asia, shortwave radio sets scan up and down familiar frequencies, seeking a signal from Canada that had come to be known as “an old friend.” Internet-blocked Chinese activists search the dial for Canadian news of a Hong Kong demonstration. But an ocean of low static is all that emanates from the Sackville, New Brunswick transmitter. Canada’s once robust international radio voice has fallen silent, victim of the latest round of budget cuts.
Recently, choked with emotion, Mark Montgomery closed out the final transmission of Radio Canada International (RCI) after 67 years of shortwave radio programming to the world. Then, dead air. Radio station shuttered and budget slashed by 80 per cent, RCI is now reduced to an anemic web presence and a skeleton staff.
Like vinyl records, newspapers and incandescent light, the death of shortwave radio has long been heralded. But the global millions who listened regularity to RCI may disagree. So do I.
As a nearly blind child, my world was pretty small. But once I found shortwave radio, the world bloomed out of my orange foam headset. My dad slung a long wire up over a high branch in a neighbour’s tree. That antenna connected me to something bigger; fracturing the lonely alienation of the 1980s.
[…]Unlike the Internet, which is easily disrupted by dictators, hackers, wars or natural disasters, shortwave cannot really be jammed and does not require the massive infrastructure of fiber optic networks, servers and miles of phone or cable lines. Unlike reading this story on-line, listening to radio does not leave an electronic record. A profile of one’s interests cannot be generated by authorities. Though, Canadians surely would never have cause to worry about this.
I am not a cyber-luddite. Podcasting has given birth to a radio renaissance and an explosion of voices. Just listen to Memory Palace, 99% invisible or Transom to see how the format is being innovated. Yet, I would never want to see Vancouver’s Co-op Radio or CBC Radio One reduced to an on-line only presence. I want to live in a broad community, not a pod of one.
Radio waves easily cross the digital divide. About a third of the world has no access to phones or electricity, never mind Internet. But battery-powered and hand-cranked shortwave radios are ubiquitous over the developing world, and they won’t be hearing from Canada any more.
Shortwave is also a good backup when other forms of communication go down. It can be used to communicate internally in case of natural disasters (this was done during Hurricane Katrina) and can even transmit Internet content.
[…]Of 18 western countries, Canada is 16th in terms of expenditure per capita on public broadcasting, narrowly beating out New Zealand and the U.S., but RCI punched above its weight.
“Please, Canada, find a way to avoid severing your own tongue. The world is listening to you,” pleads U.S. citizen and founding director of U.S. NGO Ears to Our World, Thomas Witherspoon.
In the ’80s, 20 million Chinese listeners learned English from a series of RCI broadcasts running for months in advance of regular programming to the Middle Kingdom. But China is now more a market for Canadian petro-exports than radio.
Last weekend, Hong Kong erupted in pro-democracy protests. But on the Chinese mainland, the state was able to censor most reportage by blocking Internet content, through deep packet analysis, or simply by a flood of propaganda from government bloggers and tweeters. Previously, millions tuned into RCI’s “Voice of Canada” and would have heard such news. But RCI’s web-site is blocked in China.
International shortwave radio is old school for sure. At fractions of a cent per listener, it’s also cheap and accessible. It allows activists overseas to hear what their own governments are up to. Radio is part of the global conversation. The RCI Action Committee is an employee effort with union support campaigning to save the service.
Radio silence is a ham-fisted decision.
End of transmission.
Garth Mullins is a writer, long time social justice activist and three-chord propagandist living in East Vancouver. You can follow him @garthmullins on Twitter.
Yesterday, as I toured Radio Canada International’s Sackville, New Brunswick transmission site, the Canadian press discovered that the Cabinet approved an order that paves the way for RCI to be dismantled. The Metro News reported:
Heritage Minister James Moore recommended an order in council, approved on June 7, that deleted a requirement for RCI to maintain a shortwave service.
That change removed an obstacle to the steep cuts the CBC had announced for RCI in April — $10 million of $12.3 million budget will disappear along with at least three-quarters of its work force.
RCI had planned to file an injunction this past week to prevent CBC from shutting down its shortwave broadcasting facilities, but the new order thwarted their lawyers.
“I don’t know how this happened. I’m just shocked that it did happen. I’m shocked that the minister would make this decision two months after CBC announced the budget cut, two months after the CBC announced they were cutting shortwave,” said Wojtek Gwiazda, spokesman for the RCI Action Committee, a union-supported lobby trying to save the international service.
The Ottawa Citizen quoted RCI Action spokesman, Wojtek Gwiazda, extensively:
“As of June 25, most of the original content will disappear,” he said, “because we won’t have the people to do it.”
Thirty of 45 permanent employees are being laid off, along with a dozen or more contract workers and other regular freelancers.
Gwiazda, spokesman for a group inside RCI attempting to salvage the short wave service and its original programming, said a proposed injunction on behalf of RCI employees was thwarted last week when the Conservative cabinet quietly and quickly changed two key rules under which RCI operates.
Under previous rules, RCI was legally obliged to provide a shortwave service and to consult regularly with the Department of Foreign Affairs.
The government, in its June 7 rule change, has dropped both those requirements.
A spokesman for the Department of Canadian Heritage confirmed the change had been made, but refused to say why.
The Department of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions about the issue.
[…]NDP Foreign Affairs critic Paul Dewar accused the CBC and the Conservative government of “taking Canada’s voice off the world stage.
“It is sneaky,” he said in an interview with the Citizen. “They are pretending they aren’t killing it, but they are. Our Commonwealth cousins and others in the G8 have made a commitment that the world should hear their voices. Why not Canada’s?
“How will we keep people in other countries informed about Canada and how will Canada’s voice be heard by the international community.”
Dewar says he’s hearing negative reaction to the RCI cuts from MPs in all parties, and the NDP has written to both Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Heritage Minister James Moore urging a reversal of the decision.
“We are appealing to them to find the money and put this essential service back where it belongs,’ added Dewar. “Canada needs its voice heard and we have to figure out a way to do it. It’s not a lot of money. Let’s find it. Let’s not leave RCI orphaned.”
The Metro News also quoted me:
Thomas Witherspoon, founder of an American non-profit organization called Ears to Our World, said it is shortsighted to cut RCI’s shortwave service because it represents a cost-effective way of showing Canada to the world.
Witherspoon, whose organization distributes shortwave radios to communities in the developing world, recently wrote an impassioned opinion piece defending RCI.
“Here on the overly-lit, information-saturated North American continent, it’s easy to forget that an estimated 1.6 billion human beings — a full one quarter of us — still lack access to reliable power and to the Internet,” he wrote.
“In remote, impoverished, often war-torn regions, radio has become a familiar voice in the darkness. Without radio broadcasters such as RCI — and the light of information they can relay — the night can become very dark, indeed.”
RCI Action formed a response to the Cabinet’s decision:
Hon. James Moore,
A little more than 24 hours ago we at the RCI Action Committee found out that on June 7, 2012, you changed the Order in Council that directs CBC/Radio-Canada in its obligations under the Broadcasting Act in dealing with Radio Canada International.
You have eliminated CBC’s obligation to provide programming on shortwave, depriving almost all Chinese listeners of uncensored news from Canada, since the website of RCI is blocked by the Chinese authorities. And you have made it impossible for most listeners in the world to stay abreast of what’s going on in Canada via radio, because most people do not have easy access to the Internet.
You have also abolished CBC’s obligation to consult with Foreign Affairs about the geographic target areas and languages we broadcast in. Letting it continue in the slashing of services to the Ukraine, Russia and Brazil.
And you have done this after two months of CBC being in contempt of the 2003 Order in Council. Just as we were preparing an injunction to stop the shutting down of shortwave transmissions.
You have cleared the way for the CBC’s destruction of a 67 year old institution. An institution that CBC/Radio-Canada has never understood. It does not understand international broadcasting, the importance of it, and the impact of the 80% cut you are letting them get away with.
It is ironic.
Chinese authorities block RCI’s website. They have not jammed the shortwave frequencies of Radio Canada International. So you’ve done it for them, by shutting down RCI’s Chinese radio programming.
Why have you done this?
Yours truly,
Wojtek Gwiazda
Spokesperson, RCI Action Committee
[email protected]
rciaction.org/blog
Follow our tag, RCI Cuts to follow these developments.
As many of you know, I find the downsizing of major shortwave broadcasters around the world deeply concerning, especially since so much of the world still relies on the medium as a source of news and information, and for some the only source of potentially life-saving information.
The recent cuts to RCI, however, were particularly painful. In one stroke of a pen, many people lost their jobs, and RCI’s already-skimpy budget was reduced to virtually nil. What’s more, their only international transmitting station–in Sackville, New Brunswick–is slated to be shut down, meaning there is no intention to continue the service, ever.
The Toronto Star has kindly published my thoughts on the matter. You can read the full article here.
Thank you to Radio World for publishing this:
A teacher with an ETOW radio in Bor County, Southern Sudan. Courtesy Project Education Sudan
For as long as I can remember I’ve been passionate about radio.
From my earliest childhood memories in the 1980s during those final fading days of the Cold War — of my dad tuning in WWV in Fort Collins, Colo., on his dad’s vintage RCA 6K3; of falling asleep listening to my then-old-fashioned AM transistor radio; and of drinking in all those mysterious DX stations I heard over shortwave and medium-wave … I was the sort of kid (a throwback to a former generation, one might say) who couldn’t get enough of radio.
In those days when cable TV and video games and the first PCs upstaged and supplanted radio in nearly every American household, even in the blue collar town in which I grew up, it was nonetheless radio that captured my imagination, and taught me early on that everyone has a story. Radio taught me, too, that each voice is different in his or her consideration of what’s meaningful or newsworthy. I learned to understand or at least appreciate the diverse perspectives I heard in my vicarious radio journeys, and from these sprang my own opinions, hopes, beliefs. Radio became my teacher—a teacher who gave me, in my formative years, a global perspective.
I would have to say that radio has shaped my life. I suppose that’s why radio recently has become a mission for me…
…Today, I am the founder and director of Ears to Our World, a grassroots charitable organization with a simple objective: distributing self-powered world-band radios to schools and communities in the third world, so that kids, not to mention those who teach them, can learn about their world, too.
I want others –– children and young people, especially –– who lack reliable access to information, to have the world of radio within their reach.
Click here to read the full article.
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