What is a Community Advisory Board, and why doesn't WFCR have one?
When the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) started up, it required each public broadcasting station to have a Community Advisory Board (CAB), as a way of involving the Public in the operation of the station. For some reason, it made an exemption for university-owned stations such as WFCR. Here is the CPB's description of the CAB:
The Community Advisory Board meets regularly, has meetings open to the public, and makes its minutes public, for example on the station's website. Notice for its meetings is well publicized in advance and is sent to anyone known to have an interest in attending. Notice is to be given on air, on the website, in the newspapers, by email to those interested.
The membership of the CAB represents the diverse needs and interests of the listening community. It reviews the station's programming, community service, and impact on the community, and whether the station is meeting the educational and cultural need of the community.
It is intended to provide the public the opportunity to be heard on station programming, community service and impact on the community of major policy decisions - that is, to provide a vehicle for effective community input.
The station is to document the existence of the community advisory board, the mechanism used to determine its composition, organization, schedule of meetings and attendance records, the procedure for open meetings, the method used to give reasonable notice to the public, examples of notices of open meetings, examples of statements of explanation for closed meetings, and other information indicating community response, if any, to the open meetings, the role that it plays with respect to the station, and its position relative to the organization of the station.
Each station is encouraged to fashion its own maximum involvement of the community beyond the minimum requirements. It is CPB's position that only through enthusiastic and vigorous efforts can the intent of the Congress, as reflected in the law, be fully realized.
More details, and links to the CPB criteria, are here. A sample CAB, for CPTV, is here.
WFCR, being exempted from this requirement, does not have a CAB. When Martin Miller, the General Manager of WFCR, is asked about this, he claims that WFCR has the equivalent of a CAB. The alleged "equivalence" is thoroughly debunked here by a concrete comparison (suggested by Miller) and here more generally (using CPB and WFCR documents)
It is odd that Miller proposes the Friends of WFCR, a.k.a. the Foundation, as the equivalent of a CAB, since the Foundation is primarily just a fund-raising unit for the station and does not even claim to have open meetings. The WFCR Advisory Board is supposed to have open meetings and to have some interest in programming, but it consists primarily of officials of the five colleges (plus two "community members") and its involvement with the community is minimal or nonexistent. Unlike the spirit of a CAB, which "enthusiastically and vigorously" involves the community in the station, the current Advisory Board makes no outreach to the community and does not involve it at all.
Jeff Lee looked into why WFCR does not have a CAB and here is his interesting report.
What the CPB says about the Community Advisory Board Requirements with our emphasis added.
What the CPB says about the requirement for open meetings of a CAB with our emphasis added.
Our contention is that WFCR should create a Community Advisory Board, or reconfigure its current Advisory Board to be one, so that the listening community can be involved with the station. Currently there is virtually no public input to the station possible.