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UO cops busted in KWAX door, looking for Bowl List’s Justin Bieber

Last updated on 03/23/2016

3/23/2016: While the FBI quits after the Ten Most Wanted, the UOPD’s Bowl List is more comprehensive, as Betsy Hammond explained in the Oregonian. Page 3 of 11, here:

Screen Shot 2016-03-23 at 12.33.03 PM

Diane Dietz has the latest KWAX story online. Here’s an amuse-bouche, as Debussy would have called it:

… the University of Oregon Police Department broke into the station’s locked door to perform a “welfare check” last Jan. 29 or Feb. 1, records show. Soon after, General Manager Paul Bjornstad got word that he was forbidden entry and, instead, had to play the recorded music by remote.

While UO Strategic Communicator Tobin Klinger can neither confirm nor deny that Bieber has been kept in a Matt Court holding cell, VP Kyle Henley is “thrilled” that normal KWAX operations can resume. [Redacted] has left the building, any damage that may or may not have resulted has been cleaned up, and live broadcasts resume Thursday with renowned classical DJ Peter van de Graaf in charge:

“I’m thrilled that we will be able to get back to normal operations,” Henley wrote, “and on behalf of KWAX and the University of Oregon, I’d like to thank listeners for their patience over the last two months and apologize for any inconvenience caused by the disruption in the station’s normal broadcasting schedule.” KWAX listeners say they’re excited about the arrival of van de Graaff, who is the popular host of the “Through The Night” overnight show. He’s also program director of the internationally syndicated Beethoven Satellite Network.

The BSN is Beethoven’s syndicate, not Bieber’s? I want to bieleb Henley.

3/11/2016:  UO secrecy about KWAX classical music about Justin Bieber – or Putin?

This intriguing Diane Dietz story in the RG leaves many questions unanswered:

“Nobody there gave a crap about letting their audience know about these unexplained changes,” [Classical music aficionado and Private Investigator Bill Lioio] said. “I cannot understand why this is being treated like a state secret. “This is a listener-­supported radio station.”

Really? There is a long history of the strategic use of music, e.g. Hitler and Wagner. The CIA’s devastatingly effective weaponization of jazz and Broadway musicals during the cold war was a state secret for years, until Satchmo brought the Soviet Union to its knees, and the history was revealed by public records requests:

The CIA in particular utilized a wide range of musical genres, including Broadway musicals, and even the jazz of Dizzy Gillespie, to convince music enthusiasts across the globe that the U.S. was committed to the musical arts as much as they were to the literary and visual arts. Under the leadership of Nabokov, the CCF [a CIA front] organized impressive musical events that were anti-communist in nature, transporting America’s prime musical talents to Berlin, Paris, and London to provide a steady series of performances and festivals. In order to promote cooperation between artists and the CCF, and thus extend their ideals, the CCF provided financial aid to artists in need of monetary assistance.

So while the faculty club is awash in rumors that the CIA is planning to use KWAX and Justin Bieber against Putin, I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that this KWAX mess is all about who owns the freebie comp records and now CD’s that labels send to radio stations. Not that I’m a former Interim DJ for WTJU’s “Nothing But The Blues” or FCC licensed First Class Radio Telephone Operator who’s still bitter about not getting my cut of the Chess LP’s that Zef snuck for his collection.

For information on KWAX’s incoming music director Peter van de Graaff, who seems very well qualified to turn this around, read Bob Keefer’s Eugene Art Talk blog here. I’ll assume this is the truth, although Keefer’s suspiciously extensive knowledge of matters like the Malheur Bird Refuge occupation may have blown his “art and music critic” cover.

Update: An occasionally reliable JH insider has sent this document, revealing another possible explanation for what’s happened to KWAX. (Link fixed.)

3/9/2016: UO strategic communicator Tobin Klinger redacts Justin Bieber

The RG’s Christian Hill has the scoop, here:

A tour promoter paid the University of Oregon more than $5,000 a day to rent Matthew Knight Arena, according to the lease agreement, so An Artist To Remain Nameless could rehearse for a week for an upcoming concert tour.

… “We are not in a position to share who the artist was,” UO spokesman Tobin Klinger wrote in an email.

However, as is so often the case with Klinger’s efforts to hide the truth from the concerned public, there was a leak:

… Bieber songs “As Long as You Love Me” and “Sorry” could be heard through the arena’s doors.

28 Comments

  1. Old Man 03/09/2016

    “The following criteria was…”
    Sorry, Bill, that one was too offensive to ignore.

    • uomatters Post author | 03/09/2016

      Headline: “Noted UO scientist calls out Justin Bieber for offensive language!”

      Oh, wait, you were commenting on the Gen Ed policy language in the Senate post: “The following criteria was proposed by the Undergraduate Council and the College of Arts and Sciences Curriculum Committee.”

      Yeah, pretty bad. I’m not sure when that was adopted, back in 2000 or so I think.

      • Prufrock 03/16/2016

        The shift from the words “criteria were” to “criteria was” appeared in the Fall 2013 Curriculum Report, and has appeared in all subsequent reports. But it has had a long, and mostly secret, history.

        That “was” was the was that wouldn’t went. When the Committee on Courses finishes its meetings each term, staff puts together the preliminary report, which gets sent to the chair, catalog and registrar for factual review before being returned to J. Hall for distributing to departments senators. In preparing the preliminary report, staff uses templates for the “boilerplate” in the report. This boilerplate may, or may not, get updated with recent edits. UOmatters is correct that “was” was substituted for “were” in the boilerplate in the early 2000’s. (This occurred as part of the “font wars” during the first branding campaign dictated the use of Mellior (sp?) font in J. Hall, while most faculty used Times Roman for internal documents.) This “was” was well known to the chair of the course committee, who tried to make sure in each report that that “was,” wasn’t! By a rough count, it got caught in at least three dozen reports during the 2000’s, before finally escaping captivity and roaming free in the last few years.

        As practicing journalists might complain about their copy, “if it looks like it needs editing, it probably has already been edited.”

        Edits happen!

  2. awesome0 03/09/2016

    Didn’t know you were a belieber.

    • uomatters Post author | 03/09/2016

      Your accusation is defamatory per se. I’m a Johnny Cash man – ask John List.

  3. Anonymous 03/10/2016

    Who is this Justin Bieber?

    • Duckduckgo 03/10/2016

      Part Duchamp, part Bach… a dash of Rasputin and Matthew Barney, mixed with Curie and Erdős, Magnus Nilsson and Peter Singer, but uniquely Justin.

      • uomatters Post author | 03/12/2016

        I’d offer you a UOM coffee cup for this comment, except that it deserves so much more.

  4. Thom Aquinas 03/10/2016

    You did not just praise Tobin Klinger for once, did you? Redacting every aspect of JB is a GOOD thing right?

  5. honest Uncle Bernie 03/11/2016

    The KWAX matter is no joke. UO better clarify this pronto. If anything happens to KWAX I guarantee that thousands of supporters are going to be really pissed. Millions of dollars to general UO purposes will be in jeopardy. If that sounds like a threat, please regard it instead as a friendly tip from your benevolent Uncle. OK?

  6. UO supporter 03/12/2016

    KWAX has degenerated into static this morning, malfunctioning transmitter. If they’re not careful, they could even lose their license.

    Does anyone know who is in charge of KWAX at UO, i.e. above the station? This needs attention, fast.

    Time to let UO know that we are not amused, from Schiller on down.

    • Diane Dietz 03/14/2016

      “Does anyone know who is in charge of KWAX at UO, i.e. above the station? This needs attention, fast.”

      Kyle Henley
      Vice President for University Communications
      [email protected]
      Kyle Henley is a veteran communications leader who became vice president for university communications in September 2015. His portfolio includes brand management, development communications, digital communications, marketing communications, public affairs communications, and KWAX, the university’s classical music radio station.

    • Prufrock 03/17/2016

      When someone at FEMA said off-the-cuff that in the “big one,” everything west of I-5 “will be toast,” it caught Oregonians’ attention. One question they might pay attention to is how they will get emergency information. The legacy system for providing emergency information is the Emergency Alert System of TV and radio broadcast stations, and now, cable providers.

      Recently, a significant link in the EAS system in the south valley has been absent.
      The FCC requires stations to broadcast a Required Monthly Test (RMT) of the Emergency Alert System (EAS) each month, or to log the reason for failure to do so. These tests are evidence of a properly working EAS system. Omission of a test is an indication of a malfunction of the EAS system.

      Listeners have not been hearing the KWAX emergency alert tests for the first three months of 2016, and possibly longer.

      The main problem with KWAX not broadcasting these alerts is this: KWAX is a significant link in the EAS chain of stations in the south Willamette Valley. As you may know, an alert message ripples through the EAS network of stations one after another. Each station listens to at least two others; if it receives an alert, it re-broadcasts it. Any station monitoring that station’s signal will then broadcast the signal again. And so on, until all stations in the network broadcast the alert. As you can imagine, some stations get the signal earlier than others. And are thus more critical than others. If they drop the signal, the rest of the system may not hear the signal, and hence could not rebroadcast it: the EAS network then fails.

      In our area, KWAX and KKNU occupy the keystone locations in the overarching architecture of the Emergency Alert System in Lane, Benton, and Linn counties. Additionally, KWAX serves to propagate the signal to the Douglas County cities of Coos Bay, Reedsport and Roseburg. A simple glance at the state’s monitoring assignments (see link attached), one finds that of the 58 stations listed in the south Willamette Valley, 35 are required to monitor KWAX as their local primary signal source (LP1) for EAS alerts. While there is considerable redundancy in the EAS system, the loss of KWAX in the EAS network considerably reduces this redundancy and resiliency of the network.

      Furthermore, KWAX is one of the local entry points for alerts generated by the Lane County Sheriff’s emergency communication center, which is responsible for launching alert messages for not only Lane County, but also Linn and Benton.

      The state plans and frequency assignments can be found at
      http://www.sbe141.org/?page=EAS

      • Prufrock 04/04/2016

        A Required Monthly Test (RMT) is scheduled for all broadcasters in Lane County at 12:15 am on Thursday, April 7 (Wednesday evening, Thursday morning). It should be generated by the state emergency communications office in Salem. If any of you insomniacs are up at this hour, your might confirm that RMT’s are propagating through the EAS system. (Otherwise, how are we to know to drag our boards to the beaches to catch that tsunami?)

        • uomatters Post author | 04/04/2016

          Boy does this take me back. As Operator on Duty I did these for WCHV and logged them in. You had to go behind the control room panel and throw a few switches on a rack mounted panel, which would then broadcast the famous tone and “…. Had this been a real emergency …”. One day I asked one of the other first phones what we were supposed to do if it was a real emergency. He had no idea either. We were great at running the test though.

          • Fishwrapper 04/05/2016

            Somewhere I have one of our station’s EBS notebook, with a few still-sealed notification envelopes, salvaged for posterity when we put the EAS equipment (and auto-logger!) into service.

            Nowadays folks have no idea that EBS means Educational Broadband Service, few remember that it was set up to mean the bombs were coming…

  7. KWAX listener 03/12/2016

    Possibly the worst part of this debacle is that the Spring fundraising letter went out at the end of January and faithful supporters have been sending in pledges AND checks not knowing what is transpiring with the station THEY support, trusting that what the fundraising letter said is true. For years, KWAX has quite bluntly said the UO does not support the station financially–that the station is the subscribers station. Transparency is paramount.

    Honest Uncle B is absolutely correct, in my estimation.

    • uomatters Post author | 03/12/2016

      I’m sure UO will handle this with the same kind of transparency we saw with UOPD Chief McDermed’s resignation.

  8. Anonymous 03/12/2016

    Not a listener so can someone clue me in to the point of KWAX in this age of streaming music?

    • uomatters Post author | 03/12/2016

      People voluntarily contribute $500K to pay for a public good, despite the free-riding incentives. There’s no disputing tastes that are that strong.

    • Jack Straw Man 03/12/2016

      Solipsistic much? Do you really think that everybody (a) can afford, (b) has, and (c) uses the technology that you, personally, do?

      • Anonymous 03/12/2016

        Good point. (a) yes (b) yes and (c) no for the old white people that listen to KWAX. They probably don’t know about streaming music.

        • KWAX listener 03/12/2016

          “… old white people… ” and ones who “probably don’t know about streaming music? Ha!

          Personally, I’m pink with purple polka dots, but my life matters! I like the easiest tech possible and the on/off radio button is all the tech I need.

    • KWAX fan from the Kuiper belt 03/12/2016

      I personally enjoy KWAX and your other earthling broadcasts a great deal. The hell with streaming.

    • Fishwrapper 03/12/2016

      Anonymous, for starters, it’s a free, over-the-air broadcast for the listener. The service is compatible with technology that is fifty years old and found in most homes and very important for many users of the service, cars.

      Radio stations serve their communities in a variety of ways that streaming services simply cannot, with accessibility being at the top of the list. This accessibility is a crucial link in public safety plans, for example.

      Believe it or don’t but the fidelity of the service is pretty much fixed once you have established a good reception point. There are not any network issues that can bog down data packets on their way over the air to your receiver leading to buffering and re-buffering of the audio stream. Indeed, good old analog radio is, depending on the ISP available, better when it fades, as a fading analog radio signal is there; fading packets stop your stream while the data catches up. A good FM receiver will offer the option of switching off the stereo function, with the resulting monaural sound being full-bandwidth and fidelity, often without background noise a weak signal will offer in stereo mode.

      The ubiquity of the radio spectrum, while often overlooked, is the greatest advantage to the end user. When was the last time you had to wait to enjoy a radio program because the app that caries it to you was applying an update to your system that is incompatible with a variety of other plug-ins you had for other similar apps? Hell, even the black-and-white to color TV upgrade – an analog process – went far better than any service upgrades since…

    • Youngin' 03/14/2016

      We aren’t all old guys who don’t know about streaming. I’m under the age of 30, a computer scientist, and a google play music subscriber. I also (religiously) listen to KWAX and donate on occasion.

      As to why, in addition to the reliability advantages of radio, there is the issue of curation. Disc jockeys produce quality musical *programs* and, at least as far as classical radio is concerned, there can be a lot of value in that. Case in point is a show KWAX buys out the University of Indian called “Harmonia” which produces really interesting episodes exploring different areas of early music. Example episodes include one (in December) on (if I remember right) “baroque advent music written in the western hemisphere”, which included several pretty good pieces which had never been recorded previously and an episode devoted to 13th century anti-imperialist rewritings of popular songs. Suffice it to say I wouldn’t hear this stuff otherwise. Harmonia is just one example of a national broadcast KWAX plays that is worth it for the commentary and curation–other special interest shows include the music history infused “Well Tempered Baroque”, the more than a little strange “Piano Matters”, and the Sunday evening set of church music shows like “With Heart and Voice” and “The Organ Loft.” Peter van de Graff’s own national broadcast show “Music Through the Night” has a more eclectic taste, but I often end up discovering new music at 2am because of it, and contrary your idea that radio is dead in the internet age, tends to post pretty dank memes on its facebook page.

      On top of this, *local* curation brings a whole extra level of value added by being able to engage with the Eugene arts scene. KWAX simply produces a superior product as far as a classical music stream is concerned to what I can currently get from a computer.

  9. Prufrock 05/21/2016

    From: Kenyon, Alfred [mailto:[email protected]]
    Sent: Friday, May 20, 2016 1:18 PM
    To: Kenyon, Alfred
    Cc: Holstein-Wallace, Pamela; Johnson, Amanda; Pullin, Kimberley (CTR); Roberts-Smith, Anne (CTR); Goldberg, Jeffrey (CTR)
    Subject: Confirming New Nine State IPAWS/EAS Test Date – June 15, 2016

    Please accept my thanks for your patience with us as we adjust the IPAWS/EAS test date for: California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming. Broadcast and cable operators serving these states are asked to participate in this voluntary test by configuring their EAS devices to forward an EAS message containing an National Periodic Test (NPT) event code.

    The new test date is Wednesday, June 15th at 2:20 PM MDT/1:20 PM PDT.

    We have added an additional webinar to our technical webinar schedule and adjusted the dates and time accordingly. Additionally I will do my best to keep the first few minutes of each technical webinar as basic and non-technical as possible for those non-technical folk that missed our non-technical webinar on May 12th. We will be using a new web service provider for the remainder of the test preparation webinars.

    Please feel free to distribute the following information to your members:

    These technical webinars are offered in preparation for voluntary IPAWS/EAS testing using a National Periodic Test (NPT) event code message. We will present a brief explanation of what IPAWS is and how it works in relation to EAS followed by step by step EAS device configuration instructions for those interested in participating in the test. The same material will be presented in all three webinars, there is no need to try to view more than one webinar. We are presenting on different dates and times in an attempt to make the presentations more readily available to busy people.

    Technical Webinar I:

    Topic: June ISSRT Technical Webinar I
    Date and Time: Thursday, May 26, 2016 1:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)

    Event address for attendees: https://fema.connectsolutions.com/ipaws-eas-test/

    Call in number: 800-320-4330
    Access code: 506 311

    Technical Webinar II

    Topic: June Test Technical Webinar II
    Date and Time: Thursday, June 2, 2016 4:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)

    Event address for attendees: https://fema.connectsolutions.com/ipaws-eas-test2/

    Call in number: 800-320-4330
    Access code: 506 311

    Technical Webinar III

    Topic: June Test Technical Webinar III
    Date and Time: Thursday, June 7, 2016 3:00 pm, Eastern Daylight Time (New York, GMT-04:00)

    Event address for attendees: https://fema.connectsolutions.com/ipaws-eas-test3/

    Call in number: 800-320-4330
    Access code: 506 311

    Please contact me directly if you have any questions or concerns related the test or the webinars.

    Regards,

    AL KENYON
    IPAWS National Test Technical Lead
    IPAWS Program Office, National Continuity Programs
    Department of Homeland Security – FEMA
    500 C Street, SW, 5NW-0407
    Washington, DC 20472-3153
    202-646-3308 Office
    202-538-4471 BB
    540-504-2389 eFax
    [email protected]

    _______________________________________________
    EAS-OR mailing list, for the coordination of the Emergency Alert System in the State of Oregon and Clark County, Washington.

    [email protected]
    http://lists.radiolists.net/mailman/listinfo/eas-or
    Be sure to check out the Broadcasters’ Desktop Resource at http://www.thebdr.net/

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