Tuning out a community

Sarah Ann Shaw compares the late WILD-FM to a drum, in the African sense of a drum as a means for members of a community to communicate with one another.

``WILD has been the drum of Boston for 50 years," the retired broadcaster said yesterday. ``It's not as if only black people listened to WILD."

The FM half of the longstanding community institution was sold -- dumped, really -- without warning a couple of weeks ago. Many people now worry that its AM sibling could suffer the same fate. It's believed to be for sale, though its owners, Washington-based Radio One, have not said so.

Then again, they never said the FM was for sale either, not until they were announcing that it would imminently be carrying the signal of rock station WAAF.

In a sense, it was a business decision like any other, deciding to sell a station that was believed to be breaking even. But it was a calculation that felt especially cold to black people in Boston. Many people, me included, are troubled not just by the loss of a voice in the media, but by the fact that no one in Boston could do anything to stop it.

The sale was another reminder that a so-called minority-majority city seldom feels like one when money and power come into play.

``It isn't easy, but maybe people in the black community need to figure out how to get a radio station of our own," Shaw mused.

The sale of the station has sparked a flurry of under-the-radar activity. Some activists are organizing a letter-writing drive to the Federal Communications Commission, while others are hoping that if the AM station is for sale, a local group will be in position to buy it. There is a 90-day review period before the FM station's sale goes through officially. That is generally a formality, though, and there probably isn't any reason to think that the sale is anything other than a done deal.

Even though WILD-FM isn't likely to magically reappear, the community's responses to the news are all positive. Looking for a way to fight back productively is a lot better than organizing a picket or writing letters to the editor.

``We need to get beyond whining and thinking of ourselves as victims," said public relations consultant Kelley Chunn . The former owners, she said, ``are entrepreneurs, they're business people. They make their profit, and they move on. It just means that as a people we need to be more entrepreneurial and build capital so we can keep institutions in the community or owned by people of color."

Among the grievances over the sale is that it was sold to Entercom Communications Corp., which counts among its other properties WEEI, the city's major sports talk station. WEEI has long been criticized for its lack of diversity; Michael Holley is the only black host of one of its major programs. It was also, infamously, the station that aired John Dennis's and Gerry Callahan's remarks demeaning Metco students in 2004, for which the hosts were suspended. Though the station vowed after that incident to become more sensitive, all has never really been forgiven in the eyes of black Boston.

As far as WILD is concerned, the Jimmy Myers show was a casualty of the sale, as well as syndicated shows hosted by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Michael Eric Dyson, a popular academic. At least the Radio One people had the judgment to shift the Tom Joyner Show, which has millions of listeners nationwide, to the AM dial. Boston shouldn't be the only major city where you can't find Joyner on the dial.

What's done is done. But there is a large community in this city clamoring for ownership and a larger voice that it can call its own.

Without those kinds of changes, the ``New Boston" will never be anything more than an empty slogan.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.