Arlington’s embarrassing waste of a low-power FM license
For the first time in many months, I tuned the radio in our car to 96.7 FM Thursday evening and realized I hadn’t missed anything: WERA, Arlington County’s sole low-power FM station, was once again playing a canned loop of instrumentals, without a live human voice to be heard.
That this rated as an improvement over the dead air previously on that frequency shows how far WERA has fallen from the promise of “LPFM” after years of funding problems compounded by what seems to have been rampant mismanagement bordering on fraud. All of this ineptitude, as ArlNow reminded me in a report Wednesday afternoon about the station’s unexpected but unstaffed return to the airwaves, has left the station in a zombified state.
In other words, WERA has become the sort of lifeless broadcaster that it was created to counter.
When this station went on the air on December 6, 2015, dozens of guests packed Arlington Independent Media’s studio in Clarendon and toasted its debut with sparkling wine in plastic cups. Advocates of LPFM had spent a decade lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to ignore the opposition of incumbent broadcasters and authorize a class of nonprofit, hyperlocal stations; almost five years after President Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act into law, listeners next door to Washington finally had their own indie LPFM listening option.
WERA almost immediately earned a preset on our car’s radio for its delightfully eclectic mix of music and talk programming, which the limited reach of its 21-watt signal meant I could only hear within a few miles of the station’s transmitter. As I wrote at Yahoo Finance in late December of 2015:
The station has since served up a free-form mashup of music that you almost never hear on commercial FM. One DJ with his medium on his mind followed R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe” with Donna Summer’s disco hit “On the Radio” and Rush’s “The Spirit of Radio,” but the selection has also extended to French chanteuse Edith Piaf and 1950s mambo king Pérez Prado.
But over subsequent years, the ongoing decline of cable TV left less of a subsidy for Arlington Independent Media from taxes paid by Comcast on that revenue. Arlington’s government chipped in, but the real problem was not income but expenses. In March of 2024, ArlNow reported that the county had suspended further payments until it could complete an audit of AIM, while AIM staffers alleged “reckless” management of the station’s funds.
(The irony of one small, independent local-media organization doing such a good job of covering another small, independent local-media organization while the Washington Post has ignored this story is duly noted.)
Days later, AIM sacked its entire staff and took WERA off the air. The county’s audit, finally published in February of this year, revealed seriously sloppy financial management under former CEO Whytni Kernodle that included inadequate documentation of more than $1 million in expenses over two-plus years. The County Board referred the matter to a special prosecutor who then declined to file charges against Kernodle.
(My wife works for the county government’s IT department but thankfully has had no role in any of this.)
Things could be worse: The lack of paid employees somehow did not stop WERA from getting back on the air in time to prevent the FCC from revoking its license. But as ArlNow’s Dan Egitto wrote Wednesday, the entire operation seems otherwise dead on the inside. Would-be AIM turnaround president Amanda MacKaye told him that she’s no longer on AIM’s board or otherwise involved with the organization, nobody still on the board answered his questions, and the County Board seems set to wash its hands of this whole ugly affair.
You shouldn’t read this an indictment of LPFM, which was and remains a good idea and a useful antidote to soundalike corporate FM. The D.C. area’s other LPFM station, Takoma Radio, has been on the air since 2016 at 94.3 FM, and the chance to listen to WOWD on the way to and from D.C.’s Costco makes the traffic a little more pleasant. I’m listening to its stream as I type this.
But you absolutely should read WERA’s miserable saga as a stupid squandering of cultural potential. And everybody in media-policy circles who worked so hard to make LPFM a reality should be angry about it.
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