To the Editor:
I am writing in response to William Meland's column "Change the Channel" (The Dartmouth, Jan. 28). This article was impossibly inaccurate and irresponsible. Mr. Meland's flowery prose parades around proving nothing other than a staggering ignorance about his subject. Had chosen to investigate this matter at all before brandishing his pen, Meland would know that the "artistic wastrel know as '99Rock'" works its ass off to provide funding for our very own, free-form college radio station, WDCR. Neither radio station receives any funding from the college. That's right, AM 1340, just a click away on your radio dial, is "shower[ing] their localities with music played by DJ's who are free to share their own musical vision," and it's all funded exclusively by big, bad, wastrely 99Rock.
I ask you, Mr. Meland, in the parlance of our times: what's your deal? It appears that the only difference between what you envision and that to which you already have access is a preference for the FM signal. Are you seriously proposing that we surrender these airwaves whose sound has been forged and diligently maintained by generations of Dartmouth students working ridiculous hours just so that people playing what they want can come in stereo? The whole line of reasoning is downright absurd.
Dartmouth has no communications major, so this radio station is the only training ground that we can offer students interested in making a career in broadcasting. In recent years, we've sent former 99Rock staff to broadcast for the NBA and ESPN and to work at record labels and promoting agencies -- the Music Director/Assistant Program Director of WAQX New York (one of the largest radio and most influential radio stations in the country) and the program director of WBOS (another large radio station) also came through our staff.
Even if you choose to disregard the long tradition of Dartmouth Broadcasting, the question remains: who is going to pay for this free-form station? Clearly not the College; in times when Dartmouth is entertaining the idea of cutting the swim team, it is certainly not going to be picking up the tab on an endeavor from which it is used to receiving revenue.
Experience shows that stations of a free-format nature cannot hold onto a dedicated listening audience when their content is constantly changing. The truth is that inconsistency just doesn't sell, hence the commercial radio station supporting smaller free-form station model that has been working so well for us for the last half-century.
