Shortly after its December 2006 fund drive ended, WFCR announced that it was changing its programs, by abruptly and arbitrarily cutting four favorites - Valley Folk, Thistle and Shamrock, Afropop, and Tertulia -claiming financial reasons and its wish to make the WFCR programming more "consistent." These changes aroused a storm of protest, with the station getting over a hundred letters, but the protest fell on deaf ears at WFCR, except for restoration of half of Tertulia. (Read a typical response from WFCR to a listener's letter.) The aim of the WFCR Democracy Task Force is broader than restoring the cancelled shows - it is to democratize WFCR and make it responsive to its listening public.
The four shows which were cut, two of them locally produced:
- Valley Folk, the very wonderful program of folk music and notices of live, local concert information by local and nationally-known folk artists, produced for 22 years by Susan Forbes Hansen, a locally produced show;
- ¡Tertullia!, a four-hour weekly (mainly Spanish language, some bi-lingual) locally produced for 27 years for the Latino community, hosted by Luis Melendez, offering news, discusssion, and music, a locally produced show. After protests, two of the four hours were restored for this program.
- Afropop Worldwide, a program presenting music and culture of the African Diaspora, nationally produced.
- Thistle and Shamrock, a Celtic music program, nationally produced.
This website - orginally
Save Valley Folk - has been renamed
Put the Public back into Public Radio! to reflect the growing coalition of people united in the broader goal of making this "public" radio station responsive to citizen input. The people involved are those interested in the shows above
which were recently cut, as well as members of
Shays 2: Western Mass Committee on Corporations and Democracy, a citizens activist group concerned with challenging the lack of public process by a tax-supported station raising funds in the name of the public.