Radio News

About Face is moving to Sunday afternoons at 3:00 pm Arizona and Pacific time, 6:00 pm eastern time. A paying customer bought our Saturday air time, so we get bumped to an unsold time slot. We are welfare airtime Veterans For Peace. Our first Sunday broadcast will be 20 July.

It's also the second anniversary for About Face. Pretty amazing for a program that has no sponsors other than the station itselfand its general sponsorship after our chapter couldn't continue paying for airtime. KPHX has been very supportive throughout. To mark the change in time and the advent of a third year on air, we are planning a program of progressive music that celebrates economic justice, universal brotherhood and speaks out against war and exploitation. Requirements are that lyrics be suitable for broadcast radio, understandable to a general audience and that the music, or spoken word, address issues in an intelligent if not necessarily respectful or reverential manner. Humor and satire are always welcome. We have about 40 minutes (give or take) so four minutes is about average time.

The music program will be my penultimate appearance as co-host on About Face. I begin a full-time job on 28 July. I will more easily meet the job requirements for non-partisanship, independence, objectivity and professionalism if I do not co-host an media program associated in some minds with activist politics. I can live with the limit for a while and I do not plan to give up radio entirely. About Face has shown me how much fun it can be and I love having a microphone. I'm pretty sure I can do a program based on my work as a veterans advocate once I pass the certification test, which comes up in about 10 days. In the meantime, I can also get some studio experience in both audio and video. If I get enough good music for the upcoming About Face and we get a good response, I will see about doing a few of those during the year. Possibilities always exist and I welcome change. Whatever regrets I have about leaving About Face will fade as new opportunities arise.

My last About Face program will be 27 July. Our guest is Dr. Larry Crook, president of the Thai-Burma Border Health Initiative. Larry is an old friend and accomplished photographer from Gallup NM where he was chief of internal medicine at the Indian Health Service hospital there. Since retiring he worked with Doctors Without Borders on the Thai-Burma border and has now created a non-profit to address the continuing health needs of the distressed population there. It's not exactly a veterans issue but we think it definitely speaks to peace.