Fighting for Public Radio

When I was listening to Radio London, Radio Caroline and Radio Luxembourg and even operated my own pirate-radio station in my teens, I couldn't imagine, not even in my worst nightmares, that I one day would find myself fighting for the existence of a Public Radio station.
Public Radio is a form of society or governement operated radio and TV that should serve the people with social, cultural and educational information interleaved with news and entertainment.
Most of the ether-media in Europe was and still is operated like that. Fundings for Public Radio is generally collected in the shape of something called "TV-fee" or "TV-license" and for the moment being it is around 230 EUR p.a. and household in Finland.
All the material is broadcast as "Free To Air" and can be received by anyone without encryption etc., the finnish brodcasting company is called Yleisradio - Rundradion, abbreviated YLE
In the 1980:s the broadcasting law was changed to allow commercial competition (okey, there had been commercials in Finnish TV long before as one company called "Mainos TV" or MTV hired transmittertime from YLE who thereby got some of their fundings) and people started escaping the TV-fee because "they did not watch /listen to Public Service TV/radio". Later on YLE disconnected their transmitter network from their core business, formed a transmitter company called Digita and sold it to a french broadcasting company who let the commercial stations into their broadcasting masts.

This flight from the TV-fee mentioned above got sharply accentuated this year when all the Public Radio went digital and some people on the fringe of the transmitter coverage found themselves without any picture in their TV-sets and/or malfunctioning subtitles/sound despite upgrading to new digital TVs and set-top-boxes. This digitalization process has been induced and directed from the top governement in a way that seems to be a carbon-copy of the way they produced and operated their 5-years plans in the former USSR.
Last week the management of the YLE declared that they are lacking another 50000 TV-fees this year and they have to cut down their operations, two radio channels and one TV-channel have to be closed down.

The thing that got me going was that one of the channels was the swedish-speaking youth-radio, Radio x3m.
That channel was established 10 years ago when the youth programs grew too big inside the one and only existing swedish speaking channel then.

You may wonder why a swedish speaking channel in Finland? Finland is a bilingual country with two national languages, finnish and swedish, as defined in the constitution from 1918. The citizens should be treated equal despite language and thats why YLE has been working using both languages from the very beginning. As per beginning of 2006 there were 6 finnish speaking radio channels and 4 finnish speaking TV-channels operated by the YLE, 2 swedish speaking radio channels and one swedish speaking TV-channel operated by the same.
There are dozens of commercial TV and radio channels, none of them broadcasting in swedish.
The big problem is that we swedes in Finland are hardly 300000 people out of 5 millions anymore and as such too small a group to be interesting to any commercial company. The other problem is that we are dispersed in some thin, elongated areas isolated from eachother on the south, southwest and west-coast i. And the Aland islands of course but they have their own autonomy and that area is by law unilingual and swedish-speaking.
At the west coast here arond the city of Vasa we could watch TV and listen to radio from Sweden before there were any finnish TV-transmitter in our region and that of course turned us closer to swedish culture, tradition and politics than in southern Finland where they could not watch TV from Sweden.
Up to the introduction of Radio x3m, swedish speaking youth from different parts of Finland did not really know much about eachother. Me myself was continuously listening to the P3, the youth-channel in Sweden but after some few years after the introduction of Radio x3m I found that I had switched to that channel on all fronts, in the car, at the summerhouse and at home.

Now this channel uniting all the young swedish speaking people in Finland was threatened. People reacted spontaneously, they wrote to the newspapers, they gathered on web-communities, they wrote petitions, they demonstrated on the streets and outside the YLE-building, they collected lists of names and they bombarded the parliament and governement with e-mails and I was one of them.
The political establishment went into shock, the reaction from the grassroots was totally unexpected and the propositions to axe the Radio x3m were withdrawn in a hurry last tuesday evening.

But, the problem with the lack of fundings still remains and we are told that one TV-channel has to go and that YLE has to further cut down their news-departement to save money.

YLE in english
Radio x3m web community