Cleveland City Council on WCSB

Описание: Councilman Kris Harsh weighs in on WCSB. Full meeting here:    • Cleveland City Council Meeting, Oct. 6, 2025  

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"In one half hour, fifty years of community, culture and history in Cleveland was obliterated by Ideastream radio. They spent months planning behind the scenes to take over the signal without telling anyone. The station engineer had no idea this was happening. They orchestrated all of this; they didn't tell anybody; they locked the students out of the radio station, disconnected their keycards. They didn't have access to their own music collections or their personal effects inside the station. But the really big deal here is that, as the one gentleman said earlier, our community is a fabric of cultures. It is a diverse group of people that we bring together as a city, and I don't think anyone exemplified that diversity better than WCSB or the college radio community in Cleveland. Just for instance: Every week they had radio shows dedicated to Hispanic, Hungarian, Slovenian, Polish, African, Asian, Arabic and German musics. Just that community, put together by people from that community for their community. Not to mention all of the other different genres of music: there was a reggae hour, there was a metal hour, there were a few of those. They had up to ninety-eight different shows every single week, programmed by up to ninety-eight volunteer student DJs, who didn't get paid. They were volunteers who came in because they loved music.

I want to tell you about one of those shows. It's called Anti-Urban Contemporary Thang. It was hosted by Herb. Herb hosted this show for decades, and he used to have his show from three to five on Friday afternoons. And when I painted houses, I got the guys on my crew to all tune in to CSB on Friday afternoon and count down to the end of the week. And Herb did a two hour show, and his two hour show worked like this: He started at the beginning of recorded music - late 1800s, early 1900s - and played nothing but Black artists. So he would start with Gospel hymns; he would move into blues; by about halfway through the show he was into the jazz and rock of the fifties; the second hour would go through soul, funk, R&B; he'd end up with hip hop in the last half hour. And he curated the African American experience every single week for two hours because he loves his community and he loves music. And Councilman Conwell knows there is no better way to know a people than through their music. And WCSB educated Clevelanders throughout the region on not just African American music but Slovenian and Polish and Hungarian and Czech. There was the German radio hour - not my favorite music, but the German people love it, and they had a place to tune into to get their fix. And they did this for people free, at no charge, and the difference between streaming online and terrestrial radio is cost. Everybody has a radio. Grandma's got a radio. There's a radio in every single house in this town. You can just tune the dial and you might find that sound that changes your life.

And it is no understatement to say that college radio pieces together a community that could not exist without it. WCSB did that for fifty years, and Ideastream ought to be absolutely ashamed of themselves. And I hope that we can hold them accountable. I've already canceled my membership.I know that other people have as well. We can demand that Ideastrem return programming to the student group. Cleveland State University retains the license for 89.3 FM; they hold the license for WRUW (sic). They could turn programming back over to the students like that. It's simply a choice.

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I encourage people to reach out to Ideastream and let them know that this was a dumb idea. Let them know that we can cancel our memberships until they return this back. And I just want to emphasize one more time: What makes Cleveland a beautiful place is the amount of people that we can support in our community. Not just the mainstream, not just the normal folks, but those weird misfits that need their own island. Those people that don't belong anywhere else. Those people like me that tuned in in the middle of the night and discovered grindcore, all right? We need a place to go. We need a home. And college radio gives us our home. It gives us a place to say 'I belong.' And it gives that place to thousands of people. And I don't think the people that run CSU - Dr. Laura Bloomberg - or the people that run Ideastream understand how important this has been to the cultural fabric of Cleveland. So I just want to share that with you all so you know what happened, and so that when this comes up when you're out and about it doesn't surprise you, and to please help us lean in on Ideastream to hand programming back over to the students.

Lastly: Ideastream thinks that culture is something you program, but the DJs at WCSB know that culture is something you create. Thanks."