Carl Moore is a retired journalist and broadcaster. He has been Chairman of the Barbados Broadcasting Authority from 1994 to 2003, and currently hosts a late-night radio show titled “A Little Night Music”, on CBC 100.7FM.

Everybody can broadcast. All you have to do is take up your phone and dial a radio station and, as the late Leslie Seon used to say: “You are on the air and you are broadcasting.”

The daily diet of talk radio, while allowing the citizenry to talk back, has become a free-for-all, and has resulted in a laziness at radio stations where the function of “producer” entails deciding who goes on the air and what’s to be edited out or “dumped”, thereby saving the station a possible lawsuit. But what else do Barbadian “producers” produce?

The laziness to which I refer is reflected in the absence of programming for listening. People still listen for education, information and yes, entertainment.

As I write, there are no less than 27 call-in programmes on just two of Barbados’ 11 radio frequencies, not to mention the normal continuity programming that invites listeners to chat with the duty announcer whenever they feel like it.

The Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation recently added three new talk shows called “Ideas”, hoping that ideas will emerge. This has not happened. It’s just more talk and most of it comes from the “regulars”. The failure of the “Ideas” talk programmes, to my mind, is not only the fault of the listeners; seldom does the CBC give listeners advanced notice of the subject to be discussed, as if thinking just happens off the top of one’s head.

People need time to think of ideas. How can you suddenly start a programme at 5p.m. and expect listeners to come up with creative ideas to discuss on a subject they hadn’t thought about?

At the start of every year, I listen out for any new ideas that could spring from talk shows. To no avail. Yet, the very programmes can sometimes point the way to the development of interesting, listenable features on an array of subjects, especially those of human interest. There is need for more than one David Ellis in local radio broadcasting.

This surfeit of talk radio has started to affect both listeners and moderators. People tune out the repetitive, the irascible and the incoherent, while some moderators are losing their cool and exhibiting symptoms of burn-out and irritability.

Barbadian talk radio has also created an addiction. A few months ago when one station began to broadcast a talk programme on Sundays one caller, in support, said he would welcome talk radio seven days a week!

I did not support the idea. Not because, even in its different format, it was not worthwhile, but I saw Sunday without call-in shows offering jaded listeners a break. Neither was I convinced that another talk show was adequate replacement for the  popular “Point at Issue” programme.

As the daily river of words flows on, Barbadian broadcasting ignores several festering social issues while focussing on the banal. How else can you explain the elevation of an innocuous bunch of “calypsos” to the pinnacle of cultural creativity as we witnessed in this year’s Crop Over season? They’re already receding into history, or is it oblivion?

How can you explain away the vacuity of inviting people to win a car by standing all day, all night, with a hand on its sometimes steaming roof? Then along comes a disappointingly egregious excuse that “Nobody held a gun to anyone’s head” and made them do it! But I ask:  Wasn’t daily bombarding of the listeners with the hype and advertising inducement akin to doing just that, in this materialistic environment?

Sixteen years ago, when I was Chairman of the Broadcasting Authority, we threw out the idea of international broadcasting via short wave radio as the Internet was in its incipient stage.

Broadcasters, to a man, threw cold water on the idea. The Internet was the answer, they countered. Well, the Internet is here and we are on the worldwide web. But how are we using the technology as people listen on their computers from Antigua to Australia; from Brazil to Burundi. Are we international broadcasters? What’s the content that we transmit to the world? The local, parochial issues? The potholes in St. Philip? The music on the ZR vans? Afternoon Delight?

The Barbados Community College offers language training courses in Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, French and Spanish. So when are we going to broadcast to the China, in Mandarin or Cantonese? When will listeners in Japan learn about Bajan and Caribbean cuisine? When will Germany hear of our research and development in solar technology?

When we get around to that kind of broadcasting, then and only then, will we have been considered to be broadcasting internationally.  Talk radio has firmly established itself as a worthy component of the democratic process. Its place is secure, but there’s too much of it. We could do with 50% less talk and more structured programming designed to educate, inform and entertain.

In his 1978 book “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”, Gerry Mander says: “Very little cognitive, recallable, analyzable, thought-based learning takes place while watching TV.” The same thing can be said of radio broadcasting in Barbados in the early years of the twenty-first century.