GR 05-76 101.9 FM 104.3 Cable 'cfuv.uvic.ca'
Monday November 15, 2010
5:00:00 3:00 Welcome to GR, etc. In 1986, while Ronald Reagan reigned havoc across Central America and elsewhere, and the people of America, buoyed by a complicit corporate media cheered Reaganomics, the undermining of the social contract grown out of the Great Depression and ruinous Second World War, David Barsamian's Alternative Radio, or AR took to the airwaves.
Dedicated, as its founding manifesto says, to the principles of public broadcasting, and programming that should and would [quote] "serve as a forum for controversy and debate," and to be and provide a [quote] "diverse voice for groups that may otherwise be unheard," AR was in short dedicated to everything Ronald Reagan and his large C-conservatives abhorred.
Nearly thirty-five years later, Ronald Reagan is dead, long-moldering underground, but the Next-Gen. of the conservative principles he propounded persist, if in a twisted and perverse form. Happily for we who oppose those principles, David Barsamian too abides yet, along with Alternative Radio.
David Barsamian is the multi-award winning director of AR, which airs weekly across North America and beyond, (including right here at CFUV every Wednesday afternoon at 1:00pm pacific time) and remains an entirely independent voice of reason and humanity, an island of sanity in a toss'd sea of shlock jocks, puerile morning "mad men," and aspiring dime store mass media demagogues.
He is co-author of numerous books, his collaborators some of the foremost thinkers and social justice activists of our time; like: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Tariq Ali, and more. His latest books are 'What We Say Goes,' and Targeting Iran.'
David is the winner of the Media Education Award, the ACLU's Upton Sinclair Award for Independent Journalism, the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Award, and the Cultural Freedom Fellowship Award from the Lannan Foundation, and is recognized by the Institute of Alternative Journalism as one of its Top Ten Media Heroes.
David Barsamian also lectures across America and around the world, and best yet, he will be right here on the campus of the University of Victoria this Thursday, November 18th presenting in the David Lam Auditorium at 7pm.
David Barsamian and an alternative to (corporate) media in the first half.
And; the week past marked the observance of Remembrance Day here in Victoria, (Veteran's Day south of the 49th) and I went down to the memorial to the MacKenzie-Papineau Brigade, located off the main grounds of the Legislature, to remember those Canadians killed fighting the fascists in Spain during that country's calamitous civil war.
There I stood with the white-poppied peace activists who too hold this day in its original context, as a reminder of the promise that "Never Again" will violence and warfare be the preferred tools of failed diplomacy; if only it were so. Ape at the Mac.-Pap. memorial in the second half.
And; Victoria Street Newz publisher and CFUV broadcaster, Janine Bandcroft will join us at the bottom of the hour to bring us newz from the city's streets, and a follow-up on the attack on the mayor's house and property and that attack's aftermath.
But first, David Barsamian and keeping it alternative with Alternative Radio and more these past 36 years.
5:03:00 24:00 Discussion w/ David Barsamian
"Welcome back to the program, David; a check of my records tells me it is almost exactly seven years since we last spoke. Then you were celebrating the recent release of your book of conversations with the late Edward Said, and looking forward to the release of the 'The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile,' your collaboration with Arundhati Roy. As terrible a year as 2003 was, with the onset of America's war against Iraq, how do you rate it compared to today, 2010?"
