The question we most frequently get asked at WFMU goes something like this: "How many more innocent people must be publicly disemboweled before freeform radio can be restored to the glory it once knew?" I hate it when people ask this. I usually mutter something about having to take my dog to the vet, and try to get off the phone as soon as possible. But if I'm pressed, I fall back on the same line: "Many more. The carnage will continue."

And then it does. Which proves nothing. Except that life in this damp netherworld of non-commercial radio is very cheap indeed. And of the various strains of noncommercial radio, "freeform," or "free radio" as it's called in other lands, is the cheapest of them all, in both senses of the word. It's not only inexpensive to perform, it's also as expendable as a disposable diaper. It's low cost is due to its reliance on volunteer programmers who use cheap sources and facilities. It's expendability, for station gatekeepers, is linked to its low profitability, when compared to any other programming format. But while the number of true freeform stations continues to dwindle, a market researched impostor format known in NPR circles as "Triple A" (Acoustic Adult Alternative) may be poised for takeoff.

Freeform usually implies diversity, and simply put, diversity doesn't sell. You can always hook more people in by narrowing your focus, and that means more money for commercial and non-commercial stations alike. But commercial stations are in the business of making money, so their tactics are at least understandable. Non-commercial stations aren't supposed to be in the business of making money, but their survival is dependent on their ability to do so. And in the course of surviving, most non-commercial stations put a higher priority on audience building than on using radio as an expressive medium. While expressive radio is nowhere near making a comeback, diverse music formats may be. Seeing how it came to be this way means looking back twenty five years.

Freeform has roots in both commercial and noncommercial radio. While a handful of programmers on early Pacifica stations like WBAI and KPFA were doing some pretty weird things even in the Fifties, freeform got a big boost in the late Sixties when community radio visionary (and Pacifica grad) Lorenzo Milam criss-crossed the country spouting a noble media philosophy and leaving non-commercial licenses in his wake. Lorenzo wrote the book, literally, on transforming the blank space from 88-92 FM into something potentially beautiful. Around the same time, the FCC enacted a little statute called the "non-duplication rule." The rule forced hundreds of commercial FM stations to come up with original programming for a majority of each broadcast day. Prior to the rule, a lot of FM stations merely rebroadcast the programming of their sister AM stations. The non-duplication rule went into effect during the summer of love, and it wasn't long before every city had its very own commercial "underground" FM station playing album sides, mixing genres, running ads for head shops, and airing collage newscasts that pre-dated Negativland by twenty years. It wasn't much longer that the airstaffs of these stations walked out on-air due to the institution of a playlist or some other harbinger of corporate commercialism. Commercial freeform turned into AOR, which evolved into classic rock or CHR (CHaRrt radio=Top 40) or any of the other MTV-derived formats that now infect most of the airwaves.

Meanwhile back in the jungle, those freewheeling liberals in the Nixon administration created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and National Public Radio, and the number of community groups and universities setting up stations on the left end of the dial continued to grow. While a lot of new stations (and NPR itself) went on the air with high ambitions and wild ideas, programming economics forced a steady tightening of formats, resulting in the preponderance of bland classical and jazz formats that we see today. "Community" stations, in varying degrees, adopted Pacifica's coalition-based approach, in which a few hours a week (or month) are meted out to dozens of political and musical factions, most of which guard their turf aggressively, narrow casting to their own audience. Some community stations even have a few hours reserved for, you guessed it, freeform.

There's still stations here and there that try to take advantage of radio as a uniquely spontaneous, creative medium. But most of them are student operated and have a hard time of it. First, there's the pressure from the music industry, which discovered in me early Eighties that a concerted nationwide PR campaign directed at college stations could push a new band into the lower rungs of the Billboard Top 100. And from there, as so many indie bands have learned, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to total world domination. The emergence of "college rock" as an industry unto itself has put pressure on many stations to ignore the creative potential of radio in favor of moving product for the record companies. This, coupled with civilization's inexorable slide towards conformity, has led many student stations to adopt more rigid formats. In the last few years, two longtime stalwarts of creative radio, KCMU in Seattle and KUNM in Albuquerque have reportedly had their freeform hours slashed in favor of tighter formats (or "contiguous appeal" as the market researchers refer to it).

Now, with dozens of NPR and APR stations abandoning jazz or classical formats in favor of "Triple A," the situation has come full circle. Decades of ever narrowing formats on both commercial and non-commercial stations have created an unserved national market for a more diverse approach and the CPB is betting over a million dollars in funding that this is where public radio's future lies. Some of the fastest growing NPR stations in the country, like KCRW in Los Angeles and WXPN in Philadelphia have had enormous success with this approach, and a 1992 CPB study showed that the only public stations that aren't completely dead in the water are those that have "mixed formats." WXPN now syndicates a two hour daily Triple A format called World Cafe, and over fifty stations nationally subscribe to it. But thinking about it as though it were freeform is kind of like when Barney Rubble's voice changed on The Flintstones; it looks like him, but something's just not right. If you want some idea of what Triple A is like, listen to the brief musical snippets between the reports on All Things Considered: it's elegant, ethnic, textured and tasteful. The only thing missing is an edge.

The real irony is that while NPR, the National Federation of Community Broadcasters and Pacifica have concerned themselves with programming and audience building, the religious right has gobbled up what's left of the non-commercial dial (88-92 FM). Around the time Lorenzo gave up the fight in the mid Seventies, groups like The Moody Bible Institute and Family Radio, Inc. picked up the gauntlet. Dozens of conservative Christian groups have gone on an application frenzy in the last fifteen years, and the result is that most of the new noncommercial stations during this period have ended up in the hands of the right. Of the 300 non-commercial stations in construction across the country right now, over eighty per cent are owned by evangelical Christian groups. And some of these groups have taken advantage of loopholes in the non-commercial law to amass dozens of stations, all repeating the same programming taken off of satellites. Family Radio is now the largest owner of electronic media in the country, with over eighty FM stations nationwide (the maximum ownership rule of 18 stations nationwide applies only to commercial operators). Why, it's enough to make you thankful for the stale professionalism of NPR. But even more for stations like WCBN.

Ken Freedman is Elder Scapegoat of WFMU in East Orange, New Jersey, and did a show on WCBN from 1977 to 1982.