100+ ways to "fix" CFUV, the University of Victoria (partly) campus and (narrowly defined) community radio, with details ("Radio Art no. 3" part 2) (1-50)
How to fix CFUV:
1. Stop with the equity as an absolute, uncontestable and inflexible prioritization – the station has done way more than necessary for societal change. It’s now rendering the station unlistenable as a whole, dividing listenership into isolated cells.
2. Honor programs you have hidden away with little to no promotion – “A Taste of Punjab” was able to make it to 100 programs, all prerecorded since COVID and it didn’t even deserve a mention on Twitter. “Rhythm-a-Ning” hit the thirty year mark a couple of years ago and Arnold was understandably broken hearted about nobody noticing. “Trend Lightly” is heading towards 100, and is one of the few programs to be gifted unannounced repeats through the week. Does anybody know that we still are able to fulfill our obligations by sticking “Democracy Now” at 6 a.m., when the shrillness and anger of the program are surely ready to turn away anyone who accidentally tuned in at that time of the day? And there are around twenty programs whose disappearance were similar to mine: thank you for volunteering, bye-bye and don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Most who disappeared without even knowing they were airing their last program, though ████████████ made it clear he was being forced to end the ████████████████████████ show.
3. Hire on the basis of ability, not just equity – and it appears that all hires since 2017 have been on the basis of DEI regardless of ability and only when funding grants are available through the NCRA-CRD (who have apparently no cares about quality and listenability) or through the student work-for-credit program. Reducing the pool of term (and promoting from within those hires only) to students decreases your base; reducing it further to necessary equity qualifications narrows the pool even further – which seem to ignore other equity of disenfranchisement by academia, poverty and even disability as witnessed by the shoddy production values of “Voluntary Noise” (despite their wonderful presenters of music) and the mysterious disappearance of “Thrift Store Music”.
4. Abandon the term “B(I)POC”, which, if I have to use it I spell it, I now write it out as “B(I)POC”, as it is an American term that has never really done more than attach for promotional purposes the “Indigenous” part of the acronym. We live in a city that the latest Statistics Canada survey that says we have roughly 13,000-20,000 people who self-identify as Indigenous and roughly only 8,000 who identify as Black. POCs, which seem to really be “people of other colors” rather than “people of color” I think combined are more than both, so even if you wanted to acronym, it would have to be POCIB, but why are we in the business of “othering” within non-white races? If you think I’m exaggerating, all you need to do is go to the SOCC home page and see that there currently isn’t a single Indigenous person on their staff/volunteer listings. If you think I’m exaggerating, listen to the new promo for the SOCC and you can clearly hear that the heavily accented person is unable to even properly pronounce the word “Indigenous”. If you think I’m exaggerating, go through all of our previous “B(I)POC Coordinator”, █████████████’s archived programs and you’ll see that he has never once* mentioned in any of his programs any reference to Indigenous, not even to African Indigenous. Not even the word “Haiti”, country of origin of one of the major Black peoples of Canada, who during his tenure went through an earthquake, a presidential assassination and a civil war that has now degenerated into a country wide gang war. He did produce two last programs on “the biggest music festival in the country of Eswatini” last year, after having won an NCRA award for his Powerpoint™ audio about the keywords used in the student uprisings in that country. These are products of “equity first” and continue to make us foreigners to our own community via the radio waves. And █████’s only declared job product was a very dubious “survey to all racialized volunteers who may have been discriminated against”, something very dangerous to undertake as a) he apparently has no human rights nor even human resources training, let alone any Canadian knowledge of the same and b) he was probably unaware that the Equity office of UVIC has no jurisdiction over CFUV since CFUV detached itself completely from all university ties (except for the tax receipts at fund raising time and the work-for-credit program). *I’m guessing, they were horribly amateurish to listen to.
5. Stop with the ageism. In a long document that I sent to the University Chancellor’s office and to the Dean of the Law Department (both positions which are currently held by Indigenous people), I wrote that one clear manifestation of it is in programming. On that 7000 word email I sent on November 17, I wrote and as of December 10, no change since then, except for the worse as it seems that ████ is okay with repeats being only of programs that fulfill equity and/or are stuff they produce, including the now twice a week “████████” hosted by two paid staffers:
How do we treat the seniors we have? Georgie's “Tidal Zone”, Bill's “Tributaries”, Jo Vipond's “Ode to Ani”, the deleted “Sunshine Breakfast”, Arnold's “Rhythm-a-Ning”, Shaukat and Demetrios' “Straight No Chaser”, Ian's “Searchin'“, Brian's “Just Say Nono”, Rod's “Eclectic Music”, Alex's “Loud and Fast and Out of Control”, Donnie Black and Yogi Garcia's deleted (the Reverend sounded more like he was pushed than jumped on his last show) “Rock and Roll Breakfast Club”, Alex and Brian's “Garage Grooves”, the real Dane's deleted “Pepperpot”, Dwain's deleted “Forbidden Planet”, the mysteriously deleted “Solitaannen”, the Italian Show, the “Postales Musicales” program, and even Sara's “Blue Light” (I don't think she's a senior) HAVE NEVER HAD A RE-AIRING OF ANY OF THEIR EPISODES OTHER THAN IN THEIR OWN SLOTS. (The abandoned overnight program now a blob of random programming called "Reruns from the Aether" doesn't count.)
6. Stop with the conflicts of interest in spoken word programming. Prioritizing only equity program – especially the really stupidly titled “Lies We Tell White People” – was one thing, but it was downright shocking and embarrassing for me to discover that the often repeated ███ program featuring two hours with █████████████████ was really two paid Local Radio Fund Initiative employees talking to each other. Two paid employees talking to each other also describes █████ interviewing ██████ on one of the episodes of “Lies I Tell White People” (indeed).
7. Stop with the conflicts of interest in the music programming. The current self promotion of ███████████ is a continuing bad habit of ███████████████████ who for years has been playing tunes from his own recordings while very rarely saying it is him, including recordings from his own label including the two compilations called “██████████████” (um, did he get their trademark permission?), rewarded with positions on the charts, also never noting to the public on the charts that it’s him. He’s now apparently tied to ███████ records, something also I’m betting he doesn’t mention when he plays ████████label musicians, and █████ was self-promoting his own label even when he had “██████████” though he’s a bit more open about the conflict of interest, but ████ on one of his latest shows actually came out and promoted his own company “███████████████████████” on his show. The fact that he and ██████are the only people who play death or hard metal also underlines that our having a separate metal chart is a fraud designed to con labels into contributing, not to mention ████’s incessant naming of labels.
8. Stop with Indigenous hires from outside the area, if you need to have indigenous hires prioritized at all. We abandoned all local Indigenous peoples during COVID and I count a maximum of four total hours of new broadcasts since 2019 created by us (I don’t count the externally produced “Sasquatch” two hours) that deal with the specific people we acknowledge, despite having paid Indigenous staffers for the last three years. I’ve never even seen anything come out the two Indigenous hires made in January of this year yet there it is, one of the two hire’s band still showing adjacent to our charts – ██████████whose album went to number one on the first week of its release.
9. Get real with true local Indigenous participation. Kill the forced acknowledgements, especially that generic-war-chant station tag, which really shows that we won’t for the most part go beyond lip service. ████might feel like such a proud ally when she talks about settlers and murderers and stolen illegally lands but she always goes straight into white Electronic Dance Music (that it’s LGBTQ+ focused doesn’t make it less derogatory to Indigenous folks) and has been very cautious to not ever mention anything about the two hours of Indigenous programming that have not only evaporated before her show, but whose names still imply that they’re still on the air on our show board. Indigenous people across the country are now getting angry about acknowledgements being constantly said without real change even being intended. Time to put up or shut up and mandate minimum 90 seconds of music or sound per program identified and with the proper name of the peoples. And people have certainly (probably) said they missed the presence of “Native Waves” and “Coastal Voices” and “Si'em' nu ts ihhwulmuhw” but it doesn’t show much respect to air them as originally made (without even mentioning the fact of it being dated) not updated, unedited yet counting as filling the need of “Indigenous content” numbers, despite some that are still being aired eight years after they were created. I especially cringed when hearing the host of “Si’em” thank CFUV for airing his program during the 2019 fund raising drive… after we had stopped airing his program six months before those spots, which all ended with ███████saying “please support CFUV for producing programs like this”. There’s a reason nobody seems to be complaining that there aren’t any more Dene programs to listen to, as Stats Can pointed out that only very few of the 13,000 to 20,000 self-identifying Indigenous residing in the Victoria self-identify as Dene. There were even times when “Indigenous” recordings from other countries were added to our “Indigenous” new releases. And I am puzzled about ███’s concentration on the term “indigiqueer” which erases the traditional and universal term “two spirit”, and wonder if he was doing a concession to the power held by the LGBTQ+ folks at the station to fulfill his paid job expectations, before he got “promoted” to being a national correspondent (is he still there?) for the not-Victoria-based-but-why-do-we-edit-it Canadaland?
10. Stop promoting Spotify and Amazon and especially put an end to DJs who are nothing more than shelf readers, of which ███████████████████ is the worst offender. “Good evening! You just heard Artist from their album Title and the track Title and they’re from Location, and before that we heard Artist from their album Title and the track Title and they’re from Location and before tha-at, we heard Artist from their album Title and the track Title and they’re from Location. Okay, so enough talk and let’s return to the music. This is Artist from the album Title and the track With A Naughty Title (giggle) and they hail from Location.” ████ is barely better, the difference being he quietly mumbles his intros and extros and actually speed talks, almost eliminating spaces between words, I presume so as to create maximum shock effect for the black metal he plays. He is more likely to also add Label to each and every shelf reading. To demonstrate the art of Shelf Reading DJs, take a bunch of books, stack them horizontally and read the spines out loud from top to bottom. It does absolutely nothing to help the music artists and if there more than three tracks in a row, it’s as if the DJ says, yeah, you can remember the fourth of those six tunes because you know which title goes to with. Amateurish to the hilt. And no wonder people don’t want DJs, they want Spotify which not only rips off musicians, is now a company that has created its own AI soft jazz which Amazon is likely to go to first when someone says to Alexa, “play me some soft jazz”. Spotify is killing not only musicians, but we are complicit in using it and promoting it ourselves and killing the audience for radio. Now that fake voicery is on the AI horizon (hopefully not event horizon), you betcha they’re getting ready for the era of robojocks.
11. Be honest about the difference between funded documentaries (the only ones we seem to be airing apart from Notes from the Underground), programming from outside we have nothing to do with (if we had something to do with the sometimes horrible sounding “Victoria Anarchist Bookfair” productions, we should be ashamed - “Future Ecologies” and the two Sasquatch programs, the we-had-nothing-to-do-with-and-have-never-reaired “Dark Traveler”, and the it-seems-███-assisted-by-turning-on-the-microphone Ry Moran series of which we have only aired episode 1, and three times) and NCRA programs (“Earshit” and the so-called “local initiative” program “Viewpoints”), not to mention programs that are companies-getting-free-advertising like “the Surkeus Podcast” and the astonishing gift slot to a Toronto promoter to promote his own productions - “Orange Grove”. Sure, we might have a good reason or two to do so, but at least state the conflict of interest.
12. Stop using equity as a shield to prevent criticism of poor performance. ███████was certainly trying his hardest as ████████████ but was hired with little to no knowledge about balanced programming or music – and proved not capable of doing anything beyond fulfilling way too many duties, probably taking little to no major personal initiative during his tenure (blocking off mid-days with a equity stamp is not programming, it’s setting up a rigid wall) I presume mandated and supported by the station manager especially during COVID. It’s certain that anyone even thinking of criticism was having to consider the possibility of endangering themselves of entering the █████wars.
And then there’s ████████████ whose sound and sycophancy should have been enough to at least get him proper training, but he still yells to the point of the distortion in his microphone and he still opens with a streak of gushing praise to whoever he’s interviewing, something which makes it no surprise that the only person he’s ever interviewed twice was ████████████.
███████████ was obviously hired more for his politics than his abilities (and his desperation to get out of racist █████████████████████) but hiring someone who says out loud “I’ve never done a fund raising drive before” being put in charge two months before our fund raising drive was a leap of faith not quite worth it.
And why did ████ end her ███████ interview last barely a half hour (his shows always contain uncredited music filler) when, well, most of us wanted to know if ████ had real program ideas to offer to the listeners in her new position?
13. Stop abusing the place of the disabled. █████ is one example, but “Volunteer Noise” is another. It’s nice that █████got a paid job to help out but any time that program has no funding, half assed productions by staff or no programs at all are produced – ██████ seemed never to really want to get into it and it’s always puzzling why we have to treat the real hosts as people that know nothing more than the recital of pop music idols (that have generally no place in our programming). And why has no one ever gone to where they live so that we can stop presenting them as fuzzy bad sounding fans over a bad phone line? The sentence “and what awards has X gotten” is a concession to the mainstream and the show doesn’t even have a theme song – “Shaun’s Pop Corner” doesn’t count because it’s a segment theme song – despite our actually paying someone to do the production. If we do nothing more than show the people can be trained to “DJ” like a real “DJ”, and do nothing to give a context about how they live their lives, all we are doing is presenting a bunch of disabilities without human beings attached.
14. Reach out to Royal Roads.
15. Kill Eventide. The unlistenable sound quality – Centennial Place is not the Young Hall - and half-assed presentations of our tapes are little justification for our using up time and personnel that should be used for never-detailed BCS broadcasts when all 400 BCS programs recorded prior to 2018 rot in Soundcloud hell. We are not in the concert business – that’s the business of the █████████████████████ corporation. We are in the radio business. If we do it for the money from the city, we should find other ways to generate funds from the Capital Regional District.
16. Thus, reach out to the City of Victoria with real community programming. Start with real community programming that doesn’t stipulate Must-Be-Equity-Based.
17. Reach out to people who do not share your views.
18. Resolve the embarrassing conflict with Gorilla Radio and Plant Powered Radio.
19. Give programs that have been terminated at least one goodbye episode, do not censor them and don’t air these during the fund raising drive.
20. Suspend airing of programs that have put the station’s license in jeopardy and there needs to be immediate investigations into their conduct as well as suspending of their presently held slots. Dump ALL of the story minutes, most of the documentaries that have reached the point of 20 airings since 2018, and “Earshit 20”. And about charts, why do we air an NCRA Toronto pop chart based program (with an Abbotsford host who opens each show reminding us how much he sounds like LeVar Burton) twice a week and why hasn’t ████ bothered with any kind of locally based chart program in years? Is it because “four” is considered a high number of “locals” in our top thirty? I’m guessing it would be kind of embarrassing to have two chart programs (as we used to do when we aired “The Spins” which shows that we highly diminish the music of creators from here because we’re only interested in polls that indicate popularity. Here’s a solution: create a poll show OF ALL GENRES and limit it ONLY to broadly defined (the Islands, upisland but not Vancouver) “local” musicians, even if we have to include more Basement Closet Sessions recordings and permit Randy and Tal Bachman to be on the chart. We don’t have to make lists that fit the NCRA’s needs to easily compile data and we are not like academics forced to be hardline on due dates because the computers dictate when and how they can be submitted.
21. A long term plan must get the station away from the horrible location of the student center.
22. Reach out to Radio Victoria and for God’s sake stop saying we’re the only community radio around.
23. Stop hiring EDM or pop-rock DJs just so we can say we’re playing chart releases. More effort should be made to find jazz programmers – and when did jazz stop being “B(I)POC” relevant?
24. Give to long-term and our best programmers extended slots – Jro still being limited to one hour is really offensive. “Daebak” deserves two hours and a better slot. “In the Mood”, “Masala Mix”, “Salsa del Barrio”, “She’s With The Band”, “Tread Lightly”, “Barrooms to Barricades”, “An Afternoon at the Opera”, “Gulyabani”, “Hellespont”, “We Are Ugly but We Have the Music” and the “Big Broadcast” all deserve two hour slots, but not “████████████████████” if ███████is going to continue with things like “Oh, I get to play more Tool now!” and “Okay, let me tell you about the newest thing I got for my guitar” segments.
25. Encourage changeover exchanges – when I only had an hour, I still made an effort to come out of Aldo’s show with something touching on his style and ending the show with something that might be heard on Sabine’s show. Or just acknowledge your neighbors. Brian Woolcock was always very cool when he introduced “Two Hours to Midnight” (modernist composers leading into traditional heavy metal) and I’m sure Casey appreciated it. The extent to which even staffers are unable to name other shows that follow them shows how we are less a family and more like separate isolated units. Isolated parts are easy to kill.
26. Have a true reconciliation series of meetings between volunteers and staff who have been disrespected by invisible rules created by secretive people. Issue formal emails to all to answer questions like these: What is the true organizational chart and functions of all of the staff and volunteers? Why do jobs appear, hires get declared and people disappear without a trace? Whatever happened to our hires for “Middle Eastern” local reporting and “Afro-Caribbean” reporting? (Yup, never a single program about Haiti.) Why is no one being told we no longer have ties to the Student Society apart from the physical place of the station and our using students as volunteers? Why do we lie and continually lie when we say “this is a volunteer based station” when volunteers have little say and no power? Why do we act as if CFUV is covered by the University Equity Office when it isn’t?
27. Edit out all ads more than a year old on rerun documentaries. Now.
28. Every show should state up front when it was aired. Georgie and Brian Woolcock don’t seem to think it’s a bad thing. Also, kill that “this might be a repeat” tag that mentions that we shouldn’t trust the weather. If it’s CRTC obligatory, this doesn’t cover it. And reruns should be noted as such at every half hour of every show.
29. Really make an effort to find volunteers.
30. Really make an effort to train volunteers. Find real people who know radio who are local to do so, not online resources, not grant-gobbling special guests. Bet it would be easy to find locally radio retirees give workshops and they could stay in contact as resources and we could pay them with say ten hours of airtime in thanks, if not a regular slot. Probably not Shelagh Rogers, though.
31. Podcasts are not radio. We have a radio license, not a podcast license. If we are just to make podcasts, we do not need the expenses involved in a radio station. If we are a podcast producer and media company who only uses radio as a way to suck in people to our podcasts, then we are hypocrites and are contributing to the dying media of radio. Commercial radio must be loving this.
32. Kill the funding drive as it is presently run. Make use of the midnight to dawn hours to fund raise all year with consistently new programs. Make those hours available via the archives again. Consider doing it twice a year rather than once if you have to. Stop using church lady bazaar and high school sports ideas highlighted as “special programming”. People aren’t that stupid.
33. Become a true 24 hour radio station and make use of the midnight to six slot for more than just a dumping ground of random reruns.
34. Discipline – even to the point of program removal – programs that continually emphasize a high school styled faux innocence, infantalization of presentation disguised as hipster attitudes and post-teen ways of presenting that must be very embarrassing to most serious academics, probably one reason why we barely have anything to do with any university department. The pre-funded Beyond the Jargon and the lazy You in the Ring (two of eight programs this year on gay fashion, really?) do nothing to reflect true academic standards and diminishes the reputation of UVIC.
35. Stop with the “don’t correct yourself” on air policy and come down hard on professional pronunciation. If you can’t say it properly, don’t, and especially stop with the “I know I’m not going to get this right” if you do. It’s almost like saying “I know I’m going to sound white…” If knowing a non-English title is essential and you doubt even trying to say it properly, spell it out. But first go to y2b where many many things come up when you search thingy “pronounce ______” and do something nice for that “other”.
36. Make it clear to all announcers that saying “the opinions don’t reflect the policies or beliefs of the station” IS NOT a blanket disclaimer, only one to attempt to protect the station from liability. Using it to make false conjectures disguised as opinions, unchecked free form rants and ha ha we’re just joking insults is bad radio and still could leave the announcer to be sued for slander.
37. End the dominance of programming limited to hour slots. Our random programming and half documentary, fill it up with DJ-less music has already started getting our listeners used to it. We can fluid program shapes to our advantage and still fulfill all “must do” obligations of the CRTC. Kill the declaration of “this program will be chosen on the day of airing” and use social media for EVERY program change if you can’t. We need to give the listeners a reason to trust us again.
38. If there still really is something called “designated slots” which I presume existed when we were tied to the Students service, they are forceful, useless and destructive elements killing flow in overall programming, and will continue to make most listeners into one to five hour a week regulars (apart from overnight, we air 126 hours a week) who can’t stand the next incompatible-to-flow program that follows those programs they like. Even commercial radio knows that when you give listeners too many chances or reasons to turn off, they won’t turn back on easily.
39. Either tell people we offer downloads or take it off the service if we really are aware that it’s a copyright violation.
40. Break down the barriers between spoken word and music programming. Stop with the grant-only spoken word programs.
41. Create a real world policy about word usage, including and especially in rap music presented by white people. If you’re going to insist on the complicated rethinking needed that sometimes leads to things like “misgendering” then write out the policy in hard terms. Stop with the punishing and shunning and shaming of those who don’t get it right. The catastrophe it caused the Green Party should be a red flag that those policies have gone to far, and for Trans people, they need to lead in compassion if they insist they deserve absolute compassion. Find something else to replace LGBTQ+ and its now way too many additional initials and make it a word. A single word that can be pronounced, like “rainbow”. We can talk like that among ourselves, but we are broadcasters and to expect for the world to conform and worse, get angry when they don’t, is detrimental to all furthering of LGBTQ+ because it is just another form of patriarchy disguised as righteousness.
42. Eliminate the condition that all volunteers must surrender all copyright to anything at all created by them using of any of the station’s equipment, presumably even its transmitter. If we were like that former Board Chair who owns three music studios, we could record it at home where we retain the copyright and air the production as a gift to the station without ceding copyright. Thus, power to the rich who have good gear, wrong, wrong, wrong. And do we tell the participants of the BCS about this and that the majority of BCS have been transferred to our pay-by-donation Bandcamp page? My own experience is no. Compromise: make as many past programs public domain after consulting the people who created them. This would allow us to sell collections of recordings at fund raising time. They could sell the recordings as well. Win-win.
43. While the absolutely horrible “surrender of copyright” is still in effect, create hybrid programs and/or offer all programs to be reedited, preferably by someone who can create original program collages. There’s your real midnight to dawn attraction.
44. Reconsider all aspects of membership to the NCRA and take a real examination of the pros of leaving them. We are not a franchisee of a national chain – we are a local pseudo-campus and sometimes community but above all local radio station.
45. Highest priority should go towards hiring of a professional sound tech. You almost got there as noxious corporate businessman-turned-student █████████████ who apparently owns three recording studios was named Board Chair at the very sketchy 2019 AGM. I wonder why no one asked why he became a deserter, apparently to try out for the Student Senate just at the beginning of COVID just when we needed access to someone who owns three recording studios.
46. Have men, or “self identifying CIS-men” if you want to be painfully pedantic about it, participate in the annual women’s day celebration – better yet, give them a second day in which they can show their appreciation for non self identifying CIS-men people.
47. If we have so much of the station constitution take up space with something that doesn’t seem to exist, which is the women’s collective, then reawaken it. It was truly sad to see Lyn Davis be the only person (except for Nicola once if I’m correct) host the Big Broadcast since COVID, especially since our description has always said it’s a women’s collective program. (And please, someone go to her home and arrange for acoustic tiling!)
48. Re-engage or finally engage with the non-academic university activities, beyond the Martlet. Connect with the Ideas fest. Give each and every club or group an option to present twice a year their club and group, and don’t dictate to them what will be aired. Be their servant for two hours a year.
49. Fix the studio phone in line as a high priority. Enough painful broadcasting sound is enough in this era with iPhone and Android clarity.
50. Once you get the proper studio phone line in, create phone in shows, certainly offering people capable of handling calls on favored rainbow and B(I)POC topics, but it will prove to be beneficial to the university if we can get experts from all departments to drop in to talk directly to a public they never get to meet. Will probably help with student enrollment promotion as well. This can free up “Beyond the Jargon” to become a real unique program rather than one which tends to be “who can we find to talk about their work in the scope of an hour”?