Swarthmore Radio Station Pirates Iraq War Truth; BBC Tells The World
We’re still waiting for Philly Mag or the Inky to acknowledge what The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, FOX, ABC News Tonight, NPR, The New Yorker, and (as of last night) the BBC has already figured out: That Swarthmore College has become a global beacon of lefty youth activism. And not just the usual dreadlocked stoner navel-gazing and Bush Sucks sloganeering but real-deal, tell-the-truth-when-nobody-else-will activism. They were way out ahead of the pack on exposing the Diebold voting machine scam — the chickens of which are now coming home to roost. And now their little Hey Kids, Let’s Put On A Radio Show And Tell The Truth About The War! extra-credit project is getting international play. Last night the BBC’s World Service did a lengthy piece that beamed across seven continents.
This excerpt from a City Paper piece last summer explains how this came to pass:
The project has its roots during the Vietnam War, when Swarthmore graduate David Gelber spent several years with Pacifica Radio. More than three decades later, as an executive producer for CBS’s 60 Minutes, Gelber watched as another war unraveled without due treatment from the mainstream press.
Remembering the groundbreaking work done at Pacifica, Gelber approached the Swarthmore administration with a proposal: Let’s have a group of intelligent and curious college students produce a radio show presenting unconventional coverage of the war. Within weeks several students were holed up in a campus building for two 15-hour days recording WNR’s pilot episode.
What we wanna see is a meaty piece that explains who these kids are and why they feel compelled to run counter to conventional wisdom and common sense, which clearly dictates that they should shut up, sit down, don’t rock the boat, just get your degree, pass Go and collect your Hummer, your 2.5 kids, your beautiful wife and your McMansion in suburbia. And despite all the societal pressure to do otherwise, they have chosen to do the right thing.
Swarthmore’s War News Radio: Is This Thing On, Over
CP: We Hear You Loud And Clear
BBC: Roger Wilco
