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Copyright by Rebecca Suzanne McInroy 2018 The Report Committee for Rebecca Suzanne McInroy Certifies that this is the approved version of the following Report: On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information Ecosystem APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Mary Beltran, Supervisor Ben Carrington On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information Ecosystem by Rebecca Suzanne McInroy Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May, 2018 Dedication For Chloe Violet McInroy “Never, never, never give up.” -Winston Churchill Acknowledgements I could not have finished this degree without the continued encouragement, guidance, and enthusiasm of so many people along the way. Michael Kackman, Dana Cloud, Mary Kearney, and Paul Stekler, early on you never gave up on my ideas or me. Mona Syed you are a beautiful human and kept me on track. Karin Wilkins, your friendship, support, and undying belief in the significance of public education are invaluable. Raj Patel and Tom Philpott thank you for your respect, laughter and constant focus on social justice (also thanks for introducing me to our great philosopher Slavoj Zizek). Thank you to Art Markman and Bob Duke for taking a chance on a young producer, and for including me as an academic in our work. Erin Randall, thank you for your friendship, your willingness to collaborate without a roadmap, and for your incredible heart. Owen Egerton, thank you for trusting me with your limitless talent. Carrie Fountain, thank you for your hilarity and for sharing poetry as a revolutionary act. And Neil Blumofe you are an unwavering light in all. Thank you to everyone at KUT and KUTX Radio. Especially Hawk Mendenhall, for trusting my work and my ideas, and for being the best boss a person could ever ask for. For all the enthusiasm, conversations and partnerships thank you: Joy Diaz, Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon, Alain Stephens, Michael Lee, Jay Trachtenberg, Jake Pearlman, Amy Chambless, Peter Babb, Elizabeth McQueen, Jimmy Maas, Matt Munoz, Stewart Vanderwilt, Laura Rice, David Alvarez, Margo Shaw, Laura Willis, Rebecca Ouellette, Ben Philpott, Todd Callahan, John Burnett, Michael Crawford, DaLyah Jones, Jack Anderson, Gabriel Perez, and Stephen Rice. v Thank you Ben Carrington for saying yes to our project, for your rigorous academic work, and your love of Stuart Hall. Maggie Tate and Anima Adjepong thank you for your earnestness to push me to do the show we all wanted to do, and for your deep well of knowledge, friendship and enthusiasm. Thank you Mary Beltran for your attention to detail, your astute insights, and for seeing me through to the finish line. Finally, thank you Olga Maier for being my first true comrade. Thank you to my mom, Pauline Moermond, who has filled out countless applications for me, always supports my education no matter what, and has listened to endless rants about media theory, Marxism, and Public Radio and has never once judged me. Finally to her father, my late grandfather Sidney Watkins, whose spirit and belief in the lifelong education for everyone regardless of race, class or gender runs throughout all the work I do. vi Abstract On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information Ecosystem Rebecca Suzanne McInroy, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2018 Supervisor: Mary Beltran In this thesis report I examine the role of public radio in an information ecosystem. I ask what it means to be “public” in the era of podcasting, when audiences could be across the street from you or halfway around the world. I also look at what “public” radio stations are responsible to when their audience is both more fragmented—because they are not connected geographically—and more streamlined—because they unify around specific themes, ideas or shows more than ever before. Finally I explore how public radio stations, by re-imagining their role in this ecosystem, can focus more attention and resources on developing content that aligns with, “the mission of NPR [which is] to work in partnership with Member Stations to create a more informed public — one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas and cultures.” I demonstrate how stations and universities can partner to develop programming by offering examples of programming I’ve been developing over the last 10 years at KUT Radio in Austin, Texas. vii Table of Contents On Podcasting and Intervention..........................................................................................................1 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................................31 viii On Podcasting and Intervention: Re-imagining the Value of Public Radio in the Information Ecosystem “There is no human activity from which every form of intellectual participation can be excluded: homo faber cannot be separated from homo sapiens.” –Antonio Gramsci1 As I was preparing for a trip to Jamaica recently a friend and colleague of mine from KUT, the National Public Radio affiliate station in Austin, Texas, asked me to do him a favor. He had lived in Jamaica during the 1980s and he wanted me to check out what was happing on the radio stations in Kingston when I got there. He said, “Tell me what people are talking about, and what music they’re into.” He wanted to know what the ‘talk of the town’ was, the currents of the community, and the soundtrack of daily life in Kingston. His desire to tap into the vibe of Jamaica through the local radio stations reminded me of something Susan Douglas wrote about radio in her book Listening In: Radio and The American Imagination. Few inventions evoke such nostalgia, such deeply personal and vivid memories, such a sense of loss and regret…In other words, while it has become commonplace to assert that radio built national unity in the 1930s and beyond, we must remember that what radio really did (and still does 1 Gramsci, Antonio, Quintin Hoare, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Selections from the prison notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 2005. (9) 1 today) was allow listeners to experience at the same time multiple identities—national, regional, local—some of them completely allied with the country’s prevailing cultural and political ideologies, others of them suspicious of or at odds with official culture.2 It is this idea of the production and re-production of multiple identities, imagined communities, and educational opportunities, realized through radio broadcasts and through podcasts, that so intrigues me. Yet, Douglas warns us against critiquing audio content, including radio, podcasts, streaming, audio books and the like today, through such traditional lenses. That is, we must look at the way in which each generation produces and uses media, specifically audio in this case, to share ideology, solidify hegemony and reproduce social and political ideas and identities. For example, the Brexit referendum in the U.K. and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S. were populist movements that seemed to come out of nowhere when pollsters, researchers, journalists, pundits, and academics were trying to assess national sentiments through social media and mainstream news sources. However, for those listening closely to audio, the ideas and ideologies undergirding conservative right-wing movements signaled a sea change loud and clear. In his article, “Waking People Up! Conspiracy Radio and the Contemporary Public Sphere,” Michael Kackman describes what he calls patriot radio; he traces the roots of right-wing ideology radio through the anti-Semitic rants of Father Charles Caughlin, the rabble-rousing 1930s radio priest (for whom the phrase “lunatic fringe” was coined), to the far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and our current 2 Susan J. Douglas, Listening in: Radio and the American imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. (3-24) 2 political moment. “Today,” he writes, “broadcast radio is an essential part of this movement’s discourse of public engagement, but the actual broadcast signal is less important than ever. “3 The distribution models of many conservative radio talk shows, he argues, utilized conventional commercial AM & FM radio stations, low power FM (particularly utilized by stations affiliated with evangelical churches), unlicensed “pirate” stations, shortwave, internet streaming, iPhone and Android apps, and call-in listening, which allows listeners to simply call a phone number to listen to programming live. The goal of this production and distribution model was widespread availability, especially for those who are otherwise off the grid. The effectiveness of Trump and the right wing to solidify an anti-immigration, protectionist, and populist platform among its base through radio, as Kackman demonstrates, should give cultural and media scholars, producers, and journalists pause. How much significance do we, in the media and as academics, give to audio content when we think about cultural identity for example? We should be listening as closely as we are watching and reading because it is easy to take for granted audio production and consumption, one reason being it is hard to keep up with the swift ways in which audio production and consumption transition. In the 20 years I have been in audio production, working for public radio stations, I have seen the platform and distribution models change rapidly from analog terrestrial radio, to digital radio and internet radio, to podcasting. This has had a massive impact on the ways in which audio is constructed, distributed and perceived. For example, when I 3 Kackman, Michael. "Waking People Up! Conspiracy Radio and the Contemporary Public Sphere." Flow Journal: A Forum on Television and Media Culture (web log), October 16, 2011. Accessed November 12, 2016. http://www.flowjournal.org/2011/10/waking-people-up/.