GIVE WKCR A PRIZE
At the height of the “Free Palestine” tent un-settlement at Columbia University (just up the block from my apartment), when the helicopters multiplied threateningly overhead, buzzing louder and lower, I turned on WKCR.
I’ve probably listened to WKCR-FM, the Columbia University radio station, more hours out of my life than any other destination on the radio dial. (Remember radio dials?) The reason for this is simple: WKCR has long been the finest jazz station that I am aware of, in this or any other country. I listened to jazz on WKCR even before I came to Columbia as a student, and probably should have joined the station in some capacity once I arrived on campus, but I’m not much of a joiner. I have donated to WKCR, monthly, for many, many years. And I plan on continuing to do so.
Of course WKCR has always had a news division but I paid it little mind during what (I blanch to admit) is now verging on a half-century of listening. The late- and inimitable Phil Schaap, WKCR’s voice of jazz, was the only voice I tuned in for. My listening focus, however, changed dramatically with the onset of Columbia’s Gaza campus encampment. Suddenly, the voice I found myself turning up the volume for was a guy named Ted Schmiedeler, and other field reporters whose names I didn’t catch, as they interrupted the music with news flashes from the East Lawn of Butler library. There, embedded amongst the protesters and their tents, Schmiedeler — who turns out to be WKCR’s station manager — and his fellow journalists reported relentlessly, from 4:00 AM or so on April 17, when the tents first sprouted, straight through Tuesday night, April 30, when events devolved to the seemingly inevitable, sadly riotous, denouement that brought cops to the campus for the second and last time.
WKCR’s student reporters were simply amazing during all of this: clear-eyed, crisp in their delivery, low to the ground in their coverage, sifting fact from rumor, sourcing their sources — close enough to their fellow-student subjects to persist after the “Liberated Zone” movement leaders locked out all mainstream media. Only WKCR stayed and got the story.
This was journalism at its most fundamental, and essential. As the police presence up Broadway and down 116th Street swelled ominously and the gates of Columbia remained bolted shut, all that I could know about the action on the East Lawn — the lawn where I’d raised my two daughters, watching them learn to fall and walk there — came from these young WKCR eyewitness newshounds.
I had the sense, somehow, that I was the only one listening, which was silly. On that final, dreadful night, as the police ended things, WKCR’s website crashed from the intense listenership. Ever fleet on their feet (the station has long dubbed itself: “The Home of Technical Difficulties,”) WKCR techies instantly supplied outside links and we were all able to remain tuned in. I later discovered feature stories about WKCR’s stellar student coverage just about everywhere: in Mother Jones magazine, The Guardian over in the U.K., on NPR and NBC, in The Washington Post and, finally, The New York Times.
Guess I was too busy listening to notice. WKCR’s student journalists held me, riveted. (19 in total, I have now learned — all but one an undergrad.)
They deserve a medal, or a Pulitzer Prize even. They were that good.