WUFT Drops Classical Music

Now that my local Public Radio station, 89.1/WUFT, has decided to cave in to a few loud voices and stop broadcasting classical music in favor of talk and news, The Gainesville Sun, which was responsible for creating this phony controversy in the first place through its editorial pages, is now printing letter after letter decrying the change (which takes effect August 3).

In Monday’s editorial section, they printed a long letter by Mickie Edwardson (a retired UF professor) opposing the programming change. She notes that the biggest contributions to WUFT during fund drives always come during the times that they play classical music. And that the proposed added news/talk shows are very, very expensive. Edwardson, like me in a previous blog article, also points out that WUFT was already providing a great diversity of programming, not just classical music. And finally, she gives as an example the case of the Jacksonville Public Radio station, which (according to her) had done what WUFT is planning to do and then found out that it needed to restore some classical music in its programming.

Regarding the Jacksonville station (its call letters are WJCT), it is definitely airing talk/news programming most of the day and evening. But late at night, it does play classical music. WUFT, on the other hand, has always played jazz in the late night hours. I often listen to WJCT on my car radio when driving home from work, but its signal is generally not strong enough for other radios of mine.

It is true that Gainesville is a cultural center in north central Florida, and that many of its residents are patrons of the arts, especially classical music. But Gainesville is also an academic center as well as a more politically liberal “island” in a vast sea of conservative political sentiments. And all of the available commercial talk radio stations are either sports talk or extreme right-wing conservative talk. It would be nice to tune in to a station that at least displayed a sense of objectivity in its political outlook.

Once again, here is my lament: everybody picks on the one Public Radio station to criticize and ignores the many commercial stations that are dropping the ball with their programming, apparently because the public has now bought the line that the marketplace alone should determine what their programming is. But there are still laws on the books that mandate programming that serves the public interests on these stations as well, even with the Fairness Doctrine having been revoked.

In the middle of her article, Mickie Edwardson asks, “If Classic 89 doesn’t provide this music, where will people get it?” I have to presume that she meant “from off the radio dial”, because I can still gain access to classical music through other means. My local public library has an enormous number and variety of classical music CDs that I can check out for listening. My desktop computer has access to the Internet, which has many free classical music web stations to listen to. And my television service has some music channels on it as well, two of which are solely devoted to playing classical music.

I think that the question Mickie Edwardson was asking was posed in the sense of introducing and exposing the general public to classical music in the most accessible manner possible. And this would have been through the radio. But I have already pretty much written off radio anyway, getting more and more of what it used to provide from the Internet.