Commnity radio off the air, up in the air

Lou Marzeles
News Editor

     The first thing you should know about Java Talk, The Sentinel's new community live talk meeting announced on our front page this week, is that it was planned weeks ago, and the decision to announce it this week was made last week.
     That is to say, it was all planned well before Monday's luncheon meeting, also reported on this week's front page, at which Marshall Johnson of KLCK spoke to a confused audience. That the two stories appeared on the same day is something that, honestly, just worked out that way. I didn't know Johnson was speaking in town until Monday morning.
     Having said that, it seems abundantly clear that something needed to be done to try to fill the void left by the loss of KLCK's call-in talk show and the station's departure from the city. And, yes, it really did leave-I have to again be honest and say that Johnson's statement at the Monday meeting that the radio station did not leave Goldendale because the station's transmitter is still here was just plain bizarre. It takes deliberate befuddlement to a new level, and I can't for the life of me imagine how he thinks anyone could take his statement seriously. Having a transmitter in town cannot, by the remotest stretch of the imagination, equate to having a station in town, except in the blindest of legalistic myopia.
     Johnson's comments were mostly about the business of radio and only peripherally and occasionally about the community that radio serves. I don't mean to say that he doesn't care about Goldendale and or its listeners; I do mean to say that he gave the impression Monday that the concerns of the community were secondary to those of the business for which he works. This was hard on many of his listeners, some of whom made impassioned pleas for an understandable explanation of the station's changes and strongly conveyed their sorrow at the loss of community radio.
     So KLCK will do what it thinks best for its financial needs, and that's fine. That kind of thing happens all the time, though not usually with such hamhandedness. I wish it well, and in the meantime we will proceed with Java Talk. We saw a need for something like this a while ago, and we truly hope it can serve the community.