To the Editor:
It is very distressing to hear that censorship is raising its ugly head at WRPI.
While this time around, it is under the guise of forcing out community members to conform to an arbitrary 5 percent membership rule and increase student participation, I remember when, as a student programmer at the station in 1967, I was censored over a program covering an anti-Vietnam War demonstration that station honchos deemed “too controversial.” I subsequently resigned from my classical music show “From the Podium” and am proud of it.
The airwaves belong to the public at large and not to any private entity licensed to use them. A 10,000-watt signal covering thousands of square miles cannot be compared to an insular student club whose influence is limited to the campus community.
WRPI has been a worthy tenant of our broadcast FM spectrum, and its vibrant mix of student and progressive programming is a breath of fresh air on a corporate sound-a-like dial of pablum and right-wing echo chambers.
Make no mistake, the current bloodletting at WRPI has little to do with student empowerment, and everything to do with the forces that have reduced most of the mass media in this country to a mindless wasteland designed to disempower critical intellect.
Edmond Haffmans
