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I didn't like the subjects of discussion and I didn't like the people and don't think they liked me. I left, wandered over toward Van Ness Avenue to catch a bus back, along the grasses outside the library where homeless hung out and said to myself, I would rather be homeless than work for PBS. So I told the Professor I quit. I would not be attending any agendas he might propose for me.
My last semester at Santa Rosa Junior College I took a night class given by a local radio station owner. This was something of an eye-opener. While the Professor and the college curriculum stressed all sorts of media ethics and idealism, the real world of radio was money, money and more money. The teacher was from New York, bought the station in Santa Rosa which was a country station, not something he would have thought he would be doing, but that was the market. The market dictated the content. He did country because that was the market, regardless of his own predilections. He said he got to like it, but was in it mainly because owning the station, he got to be the morning drive-time disk jockey.
I had watched TV all my life and kept track of things like ratings, popularity, why shows were pulled, and of course listened to radio, so I knew something of the market. Here I got to meet some of the disk jockeys and marketing people. This teacher stressed the market aspects with many examples of how it worked. Whereas the regular college courses did not emphasize all that much the market influence.
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