Ending off the Year With Some More Bad Radio News.

2012 has been a busy year for Community in radio in Canada, in fact the last few years have been busy, and not always in a good way.
In 2008 Winnipeg station CJWV, a privately owned Community Radio station went off the air and lost it's license after a years of infighting, money problems, legal problems and refusal to follow CRTC regulations. From what I know of the CJWV (and I have read the CRTC hearing transcripts and decision) that place was completely fucked up and got what they deserved. (Note the CJWV call letters have already been reassigned).
Then, disregarding this warning sign, Toronto's Ryerson University's Student Union jumped into bed with a group of way far left wacko political activists and seized control of radio station CKLN, taking it off the air for eight months and purging any dissenters and so incurring lawsuits and CRTC complaints. That resulted in a CRTC hearing in 2010 (which I testified at) and the loss of their license as well in 2011. From personal experience I can report that CKLN and Ryerson were REALLY fucked up and richly deserved to be put down.
Also in 2010 two other stations were hauled in front of the CRTC to answer for their myriad regulatory, financial, staffing and legal problems; CHSC, a small station in St.Catherines and The Aboriginal Voices Network. CHSC got shut down and AVN lost some of their network.
In 2011 CKRG, the tiny radio station at York University (with only a few watts) decided it was simply too much trouble and cost to keep broadcasting and gave up their license. But on the other hand CARN, the application for a Black/Caribbean station finally got their license, which was seen as a good thing until people actually heard it. Oh well.

That brings us to 2012. This past year started out with a feeding frenzy as the old 88.1fm frequency came up for tender and 22 groups applied, including a bid by Ryerson to take back the license. Besides the usual corporate suspects and The CBC, there was a small group which owned two other small town stations for a all-indie radio station called "INDIE 88". I wrote a lengthy brief for their application which I and most other people assumed was a longshot. In the end the CRTC gave the nod to INDIE 88, which is has gotten generally good feedback from the local music scene. So that's good news. Also Vancouver's CO-OP Radio managed to keep it's license after some serious problems which landed them into hot water with the CRTC as well. In the end they were bale to reassure the CRTC that they were able to fix their problems unlike, say, CKLN, CHSC and CJWV. (Note; I wrote a letter of support for their hearings as well)

So far so good. But of course you might have expected that there would have to be some serious fuckups to ruin things. That brought us back to Winnipeg to watch the jaw-dropping spectacle of Red River College's CKIC (AKA "KICK FM")getting in a completely unnecessary public spat with the CRTC and refusing to renew their license. Then days later they changed their minds and deleting their earlier comments. Then a few months changing their minds back again and going off the air in a snit. I have written fairly extensively about KICK FM an this blog.

And a just few months back I reported that another small privately owned station, CJRN in Niagara Falls, lost their license for blatantly flaunting CRTC Rules.
And then out of the blue came this posting from The Northwest Territories;



Posted on Airchecker Saturday Dec.29 2012
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY CKLB RADIO NWT WILL BE OFF THE AIR UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

As with most publicly funded Aboriginal organizations, The Native Communications Society of the NWT relies heavily on both Federal and Territorial government funding to deliver our Radio and Television programming to the people we serve. As of December 21, 2012 we have received neither a contribution agreement nor the funding we were for the 2012 fiscal year, a full nine months overdue.
Because of this, we have no choice but discontinue our Broadcasting service.
EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY, CKLB RADIO WILL BE OFF THE AIR UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
If you wish to show your support or have any inquiries regarding this situation, please contact your MLA's, or the Federal government officials listed.
The contact information for all relevant government officials is listed below.
In the meantime, from all of us here at NCS, we'd like to wish all our listening audience a safe and happy holiday season, and the best for the New Year.
The Hon. James MOORE, P.C., B.A., M.A. Minister of Canadian Heritage PARLIAMENTARY ADDRESS Telephone: 613-992-9650 Fax: 613-992-9868 E-Mail: james.moore@parl.gc.ca House of Commons Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0A6
Danielle Bouvet Director, Aboriginal Affairs Branch Canadian Heritage Aboriginal Peoples' Program Directorate 15 Eddy Street Gatineau, Québec, K1A 0M5 Email: Danielle.Bouvet@pch.gc.ca Tel: 819-997-6451 Fax: 819-953-2673
Nicholas Moore Program Officer Aboriginal Peoples' Program Canadian Heritage Government of Canada 15 Eddy Street Gatineau, QC K1A 0M5 Tel: 819-934-2585 Fax: 819-953-2673"
(this was followed by a list of NWT MLA's and contact info)



Here's the short bio on CKLB from their website;
"Under the mandate of the Native Communications Society of the Northwest Territories (NCS NWT), we deliver aboriginal language services to 32 different communities and 3 diamond mines as well as into Alberta. The First Peoples of the North have historically relied on oral traditions to pass on stories, culture and information. NCS continues to reinforce the oral traditions of the past by using the technologies of today to bring CKLB-FM 101.9 to all the communities of the NWT and beyond. CKLB radio has formed a strong personal relationship with the people of the NWT since it’s inception in 1982. Northerners start and complete their day with CKLB because we offer the most unique radio programming available in the Territories…We’ve become like part of the family! Here at CKLB we present a great mix of music: from contemporary and traditional Aboriginal music to country. We also have daily insightful interviews from the communities and live special event broadcasts. This is done in one of the six languages that we broadcast, which are: English, North Slavey (Sahtu), South Slavey (Deh Cho), Denesuline (Chipewyan), Gwich’in & Tlicho Yati."

From what little I have been able to find there seems to have little or no advance warning (at least on line) so there is no way of knowing what exactly is going on here. But clearly this is not a problem with the CRTC, yet. It has been in the news that the various Aboriginal Communities are in a contentious battle with the Harper govt. over budget cuts and it would appear that CKLB's money problems stem from this dispute.
However, keeping in mind that I don't know exactly what the financial situation of CKLB is, I can't help but wonder if they could not have kept something on their air through volunteers.

There are basically two types of costs for any Community Station; those which absolutely have to be paid, which include rent and power to the transmitter, rent and power for the station itself (unless they get office and studio rent free) and various taxes (which may not apply to a station on native land) and fees to Banks, Socan and The NCRA. Then there are the expenses which can be deferred which is everything else, including staff wages. It should be possible to delay at some of these costs and work with volunteers while some quick fundraising is done, especially if they had several months to get ready for this.

If CKLB is going off air as a sign of solidarity (there is also a hunger strike and protests going on over funding cuts) then they are taking a huge risk. As we learned from CKLN and CJWV, going off the air is the swiftest way to provoke the wrath of the CRTC and end up on the wrong side of side of some CRTC hearings which could cost them their license for good. The CRTC has little patience for stations that can't stay on the air whatever the reason. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Besides; staying onair would enable the community to get it's message out themselves rather than relying on outside sources like, even relatively friendly ones like the CBC. Let alone hostile press like SUN News, which has already denounced the native protestors as "terrorists".
In the meanwhile if you want to fire off a letter of protest/concern to the Harpercons you should probably get right on that, the longer this drags on the harder it will be for them to keep their license.
Their website is at;
http://www.ncsnwt.com/
With a Facebook page at;
http://www.facebook.com/cklbradio.radiocklb?ref=ts&fref=ts



UPDATE: As of January 3 this posting went up on their Facebook pages;
"The world is right again - Cklbradio Radiocklb is back on air! Denendeh Sunrise tomorrow at 7 am :D."
I can find no other explanation nor is there any on their official website either. For that matter the previous off-air notice has been deleted from their web page, although not from their Facebook or Twitter pages. Apparently cooler heads prevailed somewhere.
Although they are apparently still having a few problems as the following Facebook exchange shows;

*Gina Migwiposted toCklbradio;
"cklb is not working in behchoko still been 2weeks"

*Cklbradio; "The community's transmitter at the Edzo Fire Hall is not working. As soon as we get one, we'll set it up. This is the second time we have done this in the last three months."

Fade to black, SUN TV's Last Day in The Bunker

For those who didn't notice, and judging from their truly pathetic ratings most people didn't, SUN TV (AKA FOX North) went off air on midnight October 31 2011, after being ordered to cease all terrestrial (meaning over-the-air) broadcasting by the CRTC. SUN TV will still however be offered by some cable networks in some parts of Canada including Shaw and Bell.

The CRTC announced their order back in August 2011 ruling that SUN NEWS TV would be losing their terrestrial (over-the-air) signal at the end of October . It seems that SUN TV had been living on borrowed time since going on the air in a suspiciously rushed and slapdash manner during the last federal election, during which SUN TV acted as cheerleaders for the Tories. Since backing the winning horse in the election SUN TV had spent an remarkable amount of attacking their enemies in the media with vitriolic campaigns against the CBC and arts funding along with some what less frenzied attacks on the CRTC. Both SUN TV as well as FOX itself have been feuding with the CRTC for years while demanding the preferential treatment that would allow both of them to set up the kind of national wide right wing network FOX has in the USA and ultimately the rest of the (white) English speaking world including Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. FOX's ambitions have dealt a serious if not lethal blow by the phone hacking scandals of course, but this hasn't dampened the frothing ambitions of SUN TV who continued to try and bully the CRTC into granting them a full nation wide broadcast. If SUN TV were assuming that they now had protection from the now all powerful Harper govt, they gambled wrong.

The odd thing about the SUN TV's sign off was it's stealthy nature. For a right wing trash talking tabloid who never pass up a chance to rage against the vast liberal establishment which is always censoring our poor oppressed billionaires and conservatives this silence spoke volumes. Even after the CRTC's public announcement the near silence from SUN TV was deafening. The assumption is that SUN wants another crack at this once the current CRTC chair, who has the honest-to-God name of Conrad Von Finkelstein (Seriously? He sounds like a Bond villain) is gone. Finkelstein's term is ending and while he has made it known that he would like to stay for another term, Harper has made it even more clear that he will be appointing another one of his more pliable cronies. So SUN is going to bide their time and not make things worse by picking a public fight with the CRTC.

An additional factor was the pathetic ratings of SUN TV which at times have been measured as being as low as 25,000 nation wide, which is less than some local TV stations. Some surveys showed them pulling less than half that (7000 at one point) which is even less than CKLN used to get. Pathetic. As SUN TV was circling the drain the CBC couldn't pass up a chance to rub salt in the wound by taking out ads bragging that CBC's ratings were 650 percent better than SUN TV's. And that was even before they went dark. This led to more impotent outrage from from various SUN TV talking heads who sputtered about the scandal that "Tax Payer Money" was being used to "attack" a poor defenseless mom and pop operation like SUN TV. Taking another shot in the increasingly nasty death match, the CBC piled on by running more ads pointing out the millions of "Tax Payer Money" that QMI (SUN TV's parent company) had gotten over the years from corporate welfare (which I also wrote about here,). QMI Boss Pierre Paladeu threatened a libel suit (like his pal Rob Ford when faced with bad press) and then failed to follow through (also like Ford). Notably he did not actually deny the accuracy of the CBC report however. He did however get to testify at parliamentary hearings which gave him yet another chance to sputter his outrage on behalf of the sacred taxpayers that the big bad CBC would be allowed to run adds smacking him down.

So the run up to the Oct.31 sign off was oddly muted. Other than a crawl across the bottom of the screen which listed the cable providers which would still carry SUN (which at that point was merely Shaw, at least in Southern Ontario) but actually did not mention that they would be off the air at all. That was pretty much it.

I watched the last hours from SUN TV's bunker curious to see how they would go into the dark, dark night, on Halloween no less. Still expecting some kind of grand defiant send off, or at least some kind of acknowledgement to their few viewers. What we got was slapstick.

With FOX North looking to come with a version of the ever popular "War on Christmas" that FOX South has been hawking for years, we had the ludicrous spectacle of Ezra Levant and Charles Adler ranting about the liberal "War on Halloween". The evidence for which being a few schools that banned Halloween dances. Running on a roll they then rambled on to rant some more about the outrageous liberal War on Disneyland. If the War on Halloween consisted of a few school board Killjoys, the War on Disneyland existed solely in the paranoid fantasies of Levant and Adler who simply speculated about how imaginary liberal activists MIGHT protest about racism in Snow White or whatever. The fact that nothing like this ever actually happened is apparently beside the point. As was the fact that the one group who actually HAVE protested Halloween has been Christians, outraged at a pagan holiday. Actually some Christians have even protested Disneyland for allowing gay tourist charters. But there I go using "facts" again, no fair.

At any rate with all this idiotic babble going on I plumb forgot that they were about to go off the air at midnight and turn into a pumpkin with no viewers. Apparently they forgot as well since they never bothered to mention this even once as the minutes ticked down to midnight. At about five to midnight as Levant was in still in mid rant the screen suddenly froze on Levant with his arms outstretched and his mouth silently agape. This shot stayed motionless like this for perhaps half a minute, then the screen went dark on SUN TV forever. And that was that.

I have now had the odd distinction of listening in to no less than three stations go off the air. I also listened in as 1050 CHUM went off air back in 2001 to become an all sports station. They had a classy sign off with an Elvis song "Heartbreak Hotel" (the first number one record at CHUM) and a long sound collage of various moments from CHUM's past. The new format didn't last very long and they soon came back as an oldies station, which also didn't last. Then they were bought out to simulcast CP20's TV newscasts, which was odd since there was obviously no video to go along with the commentary. This year that came to an end and they went back to being an all sports station, which is dying in the ratings again. I didn't catch those changeovers but apparently they were done with little or no notice, let alone fanfare.

1050 CHUM promo circa 1986;



And then there's CKLN. They were yanked off the air this April for being completely inept. Given their penchant for strident left wing ranting and bizzarro conspiracy theories their sign-off was oddly muted. As D-Day came there was no notice of their impending demise until mere minutes before when the station manager Jacky Harrison broke into "The OCAP Show" to announce they would be going off air in about five minutes. She then handed the show back to the perpetually outraged OCAP Radio show host to furiously rant about this censorship for a few minutes before Harrison came back to repeat the warning. Then back again to the OCAP host who was by then comparing CKLN to the Arab Spring protesters before being cut off in mid rant, putting an end to their Abbott and Costello routine for good with the sweet, sweet sounds of static.

It's worth pointing out that after being yanked off the air various members of CKLN's disgraced management gave their conspiracy theories about the CRTC's secret plan to destroy community radio, using this as an excuse for their incompetence and portraying themselves as hapless victims. To go along with this they confidently predicted that others would soon follow, particularly CO-OP Radio in B.C. and CIUT in Toronto.

CO-OP Radio did indeed face CRTC hearings last year partly due to some serious issues over their financial and equipment problems as well as some missed paperwork fillings, as well as a plan by CO-OP to trade their signal with a commercial radio station in exchange for enough money to fix their existing issues. I happily wrote a letter of support to the CRTC for them. The hearings were quite different from the CKLN Gong Show hearings of December 2010. In spite of the CRTC's supposed ruthless corporate racist agenda against community radio they granted CO-OP their extension and allowed their signal swap. And CIUT has been granted their extension along with every other community station as well. Except for CKRG who gave theirs up voluntarily.

CKRG was a Low Power campus station at York University's Glendon Campus. How low? About 5 watts, which would cover the area of the campus itself and that's it. They had been around since 1998 first as a Low Power AM signal then moving to Low Power FM in 2004. They had tried to go for a 200 watt license in 1994 but were turned down. Lately they had decided not to bother to renew their license when the current one came up for renewal in Aug. 2011. There was an extension to Nov. 2011 but by then CKRG had actually been off the air since school had let out the previous spring. Like many student stations (and CKRG was always a student station) CKRG had given up on trying for a terrestrial signal and had decided on a purely internet future. This is unfortunate since they had made this call before they know that CKLN was going down and would be creating an opening that they could have made a bid for. Oh well.

So the cheese stands alone.

A few other sign offs;


CINW-AM 940 in Montreal;





CIGM-AM 790 in Sudbury;






CJUL-AM 1220 in Cornwall;





WMJX-FM 96.3 in Miami (shut down by the FCC in 1981);