BANNED: The Controversy Surrounding Public Radio in the US

The 40-Year Anniversary Logo of KSKO-FM, McGrath, Alaska, a rural Public Radio station that will see drastic budget cuts thanks to the defunding of the US's Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As many Radio hobbyists, Radio Industry employees, and others who follow the Radio business are aware, Public Radio in the US has come under fire -- by the present Administration, as well as conservatives in the US Congress. 

In fact, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a governmental entity set up by Congress in 1967 to fund Public Radio and TV stations in the US, has been defunded.

The reasoning for the Defunding of CPB, of course, appears to be purely political. Detractors insist that CPB, and Public Radio in general, is 'biased' in news reporting, and shouldn't be funded by the US government.

As someone who listened to NPR 24/7 when my ill mother was staying with me for over a year, I can't say I heard a ton of bias on NPR, and I tend to be a slightly right-leaning centrist, politically. In fact, most of the programs weren't political or News oriented at all.

There are also a few in Radio who say that the "government shouldn't be funding stations that compete with commercial radio stations." That argument is almost laughable. The audiences for NPR and Public Radio are different from the commercial radio audience that wants to hear the latest country, AC, or pop/hip-hop hits. Also, in many areas, the Public Radio station may be the only non-music station in the market -- so the 'government-sponsored competition' argument doesn't really hold water. 

And if you have a conservative talk station, trust me -- NPR isn't taking your audience away. It's a completely different audience from yours. 

NPR has its issues, sure. There have been articles about them, including one written by a veteran journalist who worked at NPR for well over a decade. 

But Public Radio is a LOT more than NPR. Public Radio is every state's own network (if they have one), and it is every Public Radio station in every small burg in the rural US which may be well served with Country and Religious radio stations, but underserved by News Radio stations. In many of these areas, the Public Radio station is the only Radio news that the people have access to. 

This CPB Defunding action has put hundreds, if not thousands, of small public radio stations in rural areas of the US, including remote areas of Alaska -- and rural areas of states like Montana, Oregon, Minnesota, and other sparsely populated areas -- in jeopardy. Many small public radio stations in rural areas, along with smaller college stations, depend on the CPB funding for a significant amount of their operations.

Because of the CPB cuts, many smaller stations will go off the air. The people who run and operate KSKO-FM, McGrath, Alaska -- their logo is up top in this article -- think they may end up going off the air eventually because of the CPB budget cuts.

Here is a Guardian article on another small, rural Alaska public radio station, KSDP, located in Sand Point, Alaska -- a small town in the Aleutian Islands, not too far from the Alaska Peninsula, maybe 800 miles or more west of Anchorage.:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/20/alaska-radio-ksdp-trump-cut

MANY IN RADIO DO NOT CARE ABOUT RADIO

Now, you would think that Radio people would be concerned about this, wouldn't you? After all, the funding cuts are not just an attack on Public Radio -- they are an attack on Radio itself. Take, for example, the small rural Oregon city, Burns. Burns is a town of around 3000 people, located in the High Desert region in Eastern Oregon -- it's all sagebrush and cattle country.

The only radio station in Burns that has any news coverage is the Oregon Public Radio station there. The other 10 stations audible in Burns are Country (one of them a rimshot FM from John Day, 50 miles away), AC, and half of the Burns-area FM's are religious FM translators. OBP, which runs KOBN-FM, Burns' Public Radio outlet and its only news station, is going to see some budget cuts because of the CPB defunding.

CPB cuts will also affect JPR -- Jefferson Public Radio -- which has a network of stations in mostly rural, low population Southern Oregon and Northern California, with many of those stations serving isolated areas with no news or public information radio station outside of the Public Radio outlet.

Burns, Oregon, a small cow-town in the High Desert in Eastern Oregon. It's a small city that survives on the traffic from US 20, a few large ranches, a few nearby farms, and it used to have a lumber mill. There is also a nearby Paiute Indian Reservation. Burns is small, but it's the only town and commercial center within 100 square miles of sagebrush, greasewood, and cattle ranching country.

When I was a kid, we passed through there, driving US Highway 20. Several hundred miles to each side of Burns was miles and miles of nothing but broad vistas of dry dirt and sagebrush, with red lightning occurring sometimes during the late afternoons. Burns has only one radio station that has extensive news coverage -- KOBN-FM, 90.1 on the FM dial. That station is part of the Oregon Public Radio network. CPB cuts could adversely affect small town OPB outlets like KOBN. 

It's almost as if the powers that be think that people in small cities like Burns don't count.

So you would think that when you go onto a Radio forum, or any of a number of "Radio" based social media subreddits and Facebook groups, that the vast majority of posters on those sites and threads would be angry at the cuts to Public Radio funding, right?

After all, they KNOW that such cuts may cause Radio stations in some regions to disappear, which is bad for Radio. You would think that Radio people would dislike that idea, right?

Not necessarily. With a considerable number of radio people, t's actually the opposite. It turns out that A LOT of Radio people do NOT support Public Radio, if the relative orgy of joy, from many sectors, over the shutting down of CPB is any indication. 

Some may allow speech to be stifled if you speak out in favor of Public Radio. Show too much support for CPB and Public Radio online, and you could get temporarily banned on radio forums.

More on that later.

SHUTTING DOWN CPB + A NEW, TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT BILL = SAVINGS.

YEAH. RIGHT.

The fact is that we have a government in the US right now that doesn't want to spend a couple hundred million dollars on Public Radio, but at the same time has passed a large spending bill that could jack up the national deficit by a Trillion.

The consequences of this defunding of CPB is that small Public Radio stations like Alaska's KSKO, a small FM out of McGrath, in rural western Alaska, may end up going off the air because without the CPB funding the station will run out of money. Undoubtedly the small Public Radio FM in Burns, Oregon (KOBN) will have funding troubles as well. Burns' small community of townspeople, small business owners, Native Americans, and ranchers will be hard pressed to come up with the funds to keep KOBN on the air.

And many in Radio think that's fine. They don't care about Radio listeners in rural areas and Indian Reservations, or Native Americans in rural Alaska.

This is an example of one reason that Radio is in decline. Radio people are shooting their own industry -- and their own hobby -- in the foot. Too many Radio people do not believe in Radio anymore.

BAN ME? DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH

Now onto another media in decline: Radio forums. I was recently 'Banned', for a week, from a Radio forum -- one that I used to go to regularly -- basically because I was showing a lot of support for Public Radio, and it looks like someone I may have been arguing with didn't like it, and they may have reported me to the moderators for something I did NOT do -- 'personal attacks'. There also may have been a complaint that the discussion was too 'political'. 

I never attack people personally when discussing stuff on the internet. I may attack the position, but I never attack the person. First off -- attacking the person is pointless. Secondly, I'm just not wired that way. Meanwhile, another guy on the thread -- who did actually attack me -- did not get banned. That didn't make sense.

As for the discussion being 'political' -- News Flash: when the Government Defunds Public Radio merely because of government and party politics, that's Political. You can't discuss it without it getting Political.

It's an example of the sort of 'moderation' that just drives people away from a website.

And being that traffic to that site (and others) has declined over the 12 years I was an active member there, driving people away is just not a great idea. I've seen declines in other radio and hobby forum activity as well. It seems that forums in general are in decline.

Some of this decline in radio forum (and other hobby forum) traffic is undoubtedly due to social media taking the attention of Radio people. But when a moderator 'Bans' you for 'Personal Attacks' that you didn't make, that ultimately becomes a problem.

Not for me -- but for the radio forum. Because other users can see how things turned out. If you are a site owner, and your moderation is not even-handed, you're just telling long-term participants to go elsewhere. And that is not a good thing if forums in general are declining in activity.

Forum site operators: When you treat your regular posters poorly, they're going to go elsewhere. I don't mean to sound like a dick about it, but it's just fact.

Reddit and FB have tons of alternative options. The internet is a vast place with infinite competition.

Bye Bye.

SOME GOOD RADIO FORUMS I GO TO

I want to make clear that the vast majority of the Radio forums and sites I have mentioned on this blog since 2015 are very good ones.

These forums and sites are ones like RadioReference, HFUnderground, and the Antique Radio Forum are very good sites, with a lot of good people, and they seem to be very fairly run. I recommend those sites to any Radio fan or DXer. There are subreddits like the ShortwavePlus subreddit that are also very good. 

A few older sites, like the BCBLogger  / Shortwave Logbook site, and the old AM-DX site, got shut down because the owners either lost interest or didn't want to spend the money on the sites anymore. Any time a forum or radio site disappears, the DX Radio hobby is less for it..... One less place to go to share DX loggings with other DXers.

However, forums need to pay attention to how they run their sites, if what I just experienced is any indication. There are plenty of alternatives if someone jacks you around -- you just go elsewhere. Which is what I have done.

WEEK LONG BAN? NOPE.

Like I said, the 'ban' I received was for a week. Or so that website thinks. But they are in error.

I've banned that site from my computer forever.

The Fourth Of July this year was better than the Fourth Of July last year -- when I took this picture. A neighbor shot off some safe-and-sane fireworks for his young son, and we had fund talking and I enjoyed seeing the small street display. Some other neighbors further down the street were also shooting off fountains and safe and sane fireworks on the pavement as well. Every single firework is banned in my city, no matter how safe it truly is. It's what happens when the 'Karens' of the world seem to be running it. But sometimes, just sometimes, common sense prevails for a few hours, so small kids can have good memories, of times spent with Dad, that they'll keep with them forever.

IN OTHER LIFE....

I've been trying to enjoy the better weather here in Seattleland, and I'm missing my cats. All of them died, at the beginning of June. Racofrats got sick and died within 2 days, and my outdoor kitty, Tigger, disappeared and I never found him. He always stayed right on the porch. Something happened, and I don't know what. Tigger was 18 years old.

I still have been SWLing, DXing, etc. Mostly checking out the HF ham radio bands, and sometimes the SWBC bands. I haven't been MW DXing at all the past several months. The ionospheric conditions have been more or less mediocre since December or January (see my previous blog article "Solar Cycle 25 Is A Dud" for an explanation of why that probably is), but there have been some bright spots here and there where European and Latin American ham stations are audible on either 20 Meters SSB or 20 Meters CW. 

The bands up above 20 Meters have been invariably DEAD. 40 Meters still has a variety of activity, depending on the evening.

THE MYSTERIOUS 'A' BEACON

One of the more interesting new signals on 40 Meters is a new, apparently unlicensed experimental CW beacon on 7259 kHz, which I call the 'A' Beacon. It's a continuous 'A' sent in marginally executed Morse Code, and it starts coming in when darkness hits, and sometimes gets very strong during the night -- sometimes slamming my Yaesu FRG-7 at S4 (out of 5) signal strengths.

It fades out as last as mid to late morning. I've talked to a couple guys on the ShortwavePlus subreddit, and so far we aren't sure where this mysterious 'A' Beacon could be located.

A couple DXers out of California (on HFUnderground) have been reporting the 'A' Beacon since early June, and their signal reports seem to be really good -- so the 'A' Beacon was probably set up, somewhere in the Western US, at the beginning of June, and it probably has a decent dipole antenna at least.

So, if you are anywhere in the Western US and Canada -- or even elsewhere -- set the controls of your SW spaceship for 7259, put on the headphones, and listen. During the early morning hours sometimes a Broadcast station out of China on 7260 interferes with the 'A' Beacon -- that's when you get creative -- use a narrower bandwidth (my new Tecsun PL-330 will go down to 500 Hz bandwidth), or tune to USB and tune upwards towards the CW beacon's 'lower sideband'. 

UPDATE: August, 2025: At least one poster at the HFU forum says the 'A' beacon may be a ham radio operator who put up the beacon to drive away some other hams from the 7259 frequency -- apparently there is a dispute of some sort. The 'A' beacon does seem to come and go a bit sporadically.

Unlicensed Morse Code Beacons are a fun aspect to the Shortwave hobby. There is one CW Beacon I tune into regularly, to see if it's there -- the Desert Whooper on 4096 kHz. I tune into it using LSB and the 'Whoops' sound really cool that way. The Desert Whooper usually is in the static, but when the ionosphere is cooperating it can hit my radios with S2 or S2+ signals.

Here is a listing of these unlicensed, low power CW Beacons on the HFUnderground site.:

https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/topic,9478.0.html

And here is a link to ShortwavePlus, a really good SW subreddit (on Reddit, of course). I hang out there a lot.:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ShortwavePlus/

ANOTHER ODDITY: MORSE CODE NUMBERS ON 13202 kHz

Not only are there strange, unlicensed Morse Code 'beacons' on the SW bands, there also are other oddities, mysterious signals sent for minutes at a time, in Morse Code, and usually these are long series of numbers, or alphanumeric characters.

Some of these CW/Morse Code numbers stations have been IDed as Russian and other military stations. Others? No one really knows for sure.

Now the Morse Code used in these signals isn't super fast. I can read Morse Code between 5 and 7 words per minute, which is very slow. But it's fast enough to ID a station or to at least ID the nature of the station. 

And Wednesday evening, July 23rd (July 24th, 0347 UTC), I was tuning my trusty Tecsun PL-330 up the bands and I stumbled upon a weak, but readable, Morse Code station on 13202 kHz, sending a long series of numbers, with a couple letters (mainly T and E) thrown in here and there. I copied a few strings of numbers: .5582498866....T U 7195...777... There were some periods of fading where I couldn't read the numbers. Finally, around.353 UTC / 8:53 p.m. Local time, the station ended with a "T E T".

Then there was nothing but static. It was just a random, chance reception of a Shortwave mystery.

It's just another case of 'you never know what you'll hear' on Shortwave.

And with that, my friends, stay cool, and 

Peace.

C.C., draft finished Friday night, July 26th, 2025.

Posted Monday night, August 25th, 2025.

I sat on this post for over three weeks, because of the section about my debacle with the radio forum I no longer go to anymore. I wanted to take time and cool off, and then edit it down. I also had to find and remove some links on a few of my blog articles.

The debacle was an education, for me, in what can go wrong with an internet website. There are numerous alternatives out there, all competing for screen and device time. Just like in the Radio industry in general. All that competition for your audience.

No website or forum has a monopoly. The internet is the definition of infinite competition.

Either way, not my problem.

Peace out to all,

C.C., 8-25-2025