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The value of indigenous and community radio

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This summarizes a 2025-04-10 interview with University of Leicester Professor Katie Moylan[1] about community radio. The 29:00 podcast extracted from this interview will be released 2025-04-19 to the fortnightly "Media & Democracy" show[2] syndicated for the Pacifica Radio[3] Network of over 200 community radio stations.[4]
It is posted here to invite others to contribute other perspectives, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view while citing credible sources[5] and treating others with respect.[6]
2025-04-10 interview with University of Leicester professor Katie Moylan about the value of indigenous and community radio.
29:00 mm:ss of excerpts from a 2025-04-10 interview with University of Leicester professor Katie Moylan about the value of indigenous and community radio.

University of Leicester professor Katie Moylan[1] describes her research into the value of community radio including indigenous radio in the US. She is interviewed by Spencer Graves[7] with KKFI, Kansas City Community Radio.

Indigenous radio

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There are roughly 60 tribally owned and managed radio stations in the US. That's a small portion of the Indigenous communities in the US.[8]

There are 574 federally recognized tribal nations as of 2024.[9] In addition there are many Indigenous bands, communities, nations, pueblos, tribes, and native villages recognized by individual states.[10] At least some of the Indigenous radio stations provide important public health information, including in Indigenous languages.[11]

Moylan (2022b) discussed the value of "Community radio production as critical pedagogy" particularly for Black students and students from minority ethnic communities, "who arrive in an academy that was not shaped for or by" them. The undergraduate module at the University of Leicester that Moylan co-teaches has students produce content for a local multilingual community radio station, EAVA FM.[12] Exercises like this can help students whose experiences may be otherwise under-represented present themselves positively to a wider audience. This experience may also make it easier for them to make valuable contributions to building community radio, including Indigenous radio, later in life.

Moylan and Nanaeto (2022) described how Indigenous music radio expands capacities for tribal community-building on-air in ways that reinforce a cultural Indigenous internationalism. They focus on two Indigenous radio stations:

Community radio more generally

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Moylan (2014) explored the representation of migrant communities in Irish Radio. Moylan (2019) described The TalkBack Show on Nottingham community station Kemet FM, which produces articulations of British Caribbean identity. Moylan claimed that ethnic radio like this supports community radio’s remit of inclusivity via transcultural production of ‘accented radio’.

Moylan

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Professor Moylan has two books on The Cultural Work of Community Radio, which appeared in 2019, and Broadcasting Diversity: Migrant Representation in Irish Radio from 2014. She has also published numerous research reports in refereed academic journals and as chapters in research monographs.

She earned a two-year prestigious European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Research Fellowship[13] to conduct in-depth research into Indigenous community-led radio in urban and rural contexts in the US. The prize was named after Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the first human to win two Nobel prizes in different fields. She was born and raised in Poland as Maria Skłodowska and moved to Paris in her early 20s to study and work, because no comparable opportunities were available in Poland for females at that time.

Moylan spent the first year of this fellowship working out of the University of Texas at Arlington exploring diverse ways in which Indigenous programming enables community self-determination and representation through locally produced tribally-specific content and collective practices. This work includes mapping Indigenous radio stations in the US.

Moylan was raised in Wisconsin. She earned masters degrees from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and the National University of Ireland - Galway and a PhD from Technological University Dublin. Between degrees, she worked as a features journalist, radio producer and presenter and arts and film reviewer in Irish print and broadcast media.[1]

The need for media reform to improve democracy

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This article is part of category:Media reform to improve democracy. We briefly summarize here the motivation for this series.

One major contributor to the dominant position of the US in the international political economy today may have been the US Postal Service Act of 1792. Under that act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny when first class postage was between 6 and 25 cents. Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited the relatively young United States of America in 1831, wrote, “There is scarcely a hamlet that does not have its own newspaper.”[14] McChesney and Nichols estimated that these newspaper subsidies were roughly 0.21 percent of national income (Gross Domestic Project, GDP) in 1841.[15]

At that time, the US probably led the world by far in the number of independent newspaper publishers per capita or per million population. That encouraged literacy and limited political corruption, both of which contributed to making the US a leader in the rate of growth in average annual income (Gross Domestic Product, GDP, per capita, adjusted for inflation). Corruption was also limited by the inability of a small number of publishers to dominate political discourse.

That began to change in the 1850s and 1860s with the introduction of high speed rotary presses, which increased the capital required to start a newspaper.[16]

In 1887 William Randolph Hearst took over management of his father’s San Francisco Examiner. His success there gave him an appetite for building a newspaper chain. His 1895 purchase of the New York Morning Journal gave him a second newspaper. By the mid-1920s, he owned 28 newspapers. Consolidation of ownership of the media became easier with the introduction of broadcasting and even easier with the Internet.[17] This consolidation seems to be increasing political polarization and violence worldwide, threatening democracy itself.

The threat from loss of newspapers

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A previous Media & Democracy interview with Arizona State University accounting professor Roger White on "Local newspapers limit malfeasance" describes problems that increase as the quality and quantity of news declines and ownership and control of the media become more highly concentrated: Major media too often deflect the public's attention from political corruption enabled by poor media. This too often contributes to other problems like scapegoating immigrants and attacking Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) while also facilitating increases in pollution, the cost of borrowing, political polarization and violence, and decreases in workplace safety. More on this is included in other interviews in this Media & Democracy series available on Wikiversity under Category:Media reform to improve democracy.

An important quantitative analysis of the problems associated with deficiencies in news is Neff and Pickard (2024). They analyzed data on media funding and democracy in 33 countries. The US has been rated as a "flawed democracy" according to the Economist Democracy Index and spends substantially less per capita on media compared to the world's leading democracies in Scandinavia and Commonweath countries. They note that commercial media focus primarily on people with money, while publicly-funded media try harder to serve everyone. Public funding is more strongly correlated with democracy than private funding. This recommends increasing public funding for media as a means of strengthening democracy. See also "Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government".

Discussion

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[Interested readers are invite to comment here, subject to the Wikimedia rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources[5] and treating others with respect.[6]]

Notes

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  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Katie Moylan, Wikidata Q133832220
  2. ↑ Media & Democracy, Director: Spencer Graves, Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q127839818{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  3. ↑ Pacifica Radio, Wikidata Q2045587
  4. ↑ list of Pacifica Radio stations and affiliates, Wikidata Q6593294
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 The rules of writing from a neutral point of view citing credible sources may not be enforced on other parts of Wikiversity. However, they can facilitate dialog between people with dramatically different beliefs
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Wikiversity asks contributors to assume good faith, similar to Wikipedia. The rule in Wikinews is different: Contributors there are asked to "Don't assume things; be skeptical about everything." That's wise. However, we should still treat others with respect while being skeptical.
  7. ↑ Spencer Graves, Wikidata Q56452480
  8. ↑ Moylan (2022a).
  9. ↑ Tribal sovereignty in the United States, accessed 2025-04-08.
  10. ↑ Moylan (2022a).
  11. ↑ e.g., Moylan (2022a, 2023).
  12. ↑ EAVA FM, Wikidata Q133843389
  13. ↑ "Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowships". Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions. Wikidata Q133832425. https://marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/actions/postdoctoral-fellowships. 
  14. ↑ Tocqueville (1835, p. 93).
  15. ↑ McChesney and Nichols (2010, pp. 310-311, note 88).
  16. ↑ John and Silberstein-Loeb (2015, p. 80).
  17. ↑ John and Silberstein-Loeb (2015). See also Wikiversity, “Information is a public good: Designing experiments to improve government” and “Category:Media reform to improve democracy“.

Bibliography

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