WWCR

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
You gotta spin it to win it
Media
Icon media.svg
Stop the presses!
We want pictures
of Spider-Man!
Extra! Extra!

WWCR is a shortwave radio station broadcasting from Nashville, Tennessee. The call letters stand for "World Wide Christian Radio" but listeners have bestowed more accurate names on it such as "World Wide Conspiracy Radio" and "World Wide Crackpot Radio". When it comes to brokering airtime, WWCR is the station all the other shortwave stations wish they could be, allotting time to Christian preachers (both mainstream evangelical and fundamentalist fringe), conspiracy theorists, survivalist-oriented shows peddling canned food and end of the world hysteria, truthers, and worse.[1]

It started out as 'World Wide Country Radio', broadcasting, of course, country music. Shortly after, it changed to Evangelicalism and, then, starting selling time to conspiracy theorists.

Playlist[edit]

  • Tony Alamo[2]
  • Pat Boone playing Christian rock
  • William Cooper and his conspiracy-mongering "Hour of the Time" show
  • James Dobson and his Focus on the Family program
  • Ted Gunderson, former FBI agent and conspiracy theorist, who broadcast an interview falsely claiming that Art Bell had molested his own son, resulting in Bell suing WWCR for libel[1]
  • Chuck Harder, in the early 1990s
  • Alex Jones - can be heard on WWCR several hours every day (Note: Jones' last broadcast on WWCR was September 8, 2023.)
  • "Mark from Michigan" (Mark Koernke), a militia movement leader. WWCR pulled the plug on his show just after the Oklahoma City bombing with the station's general manager quoted as saying "We've got to get the gasoline off the fires"[3][1]
  • Texe Marrs
  • Peter J. Peters - who has in the past leased one of WWCR's transmitters, until he moved to another shortwave station
  • Radio Newyork International, a former pirate, in the early 1990s, who later founded WBCQ. Unusually for WWCR, this show had left of center views[1]
  • Joyce Riley, a prolific if generic 9/11 Truther
  • Lester Roloff and "The Family Altar" - an Independent Baptist whose singing is so bad has to be heard to be believed
  • The Salvation Army
  • Gene Scott - another preacher who has leased at least one of WWCR's transmitters, and still has a heavy presence on WWCR even though deceased
  • Brother Stair - who, despite being dead, is currently leasing the entire programming on one of WWCR's four transmitters
  • Chuck Swindoll and "Insight for Living" - rather mainstream Christianity by WWCR standards
  • "Unshackled", a melodramatic old time radio styled drama produced by the Pacific Garden Mission, an evangelical Christian rescue mission in Chicago. "Unshackled" always tells the story of somebody who hit the skids due to booze or loose women whose life was turned around after finding Jesus.
  • Tom Valentine and "Radio Free America", sponsored by Liberty Lobby and The Spotlight, during the 1990s. A "fractal Friday" science woo show every Friday, "mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" populism the rest of the week.
  • Ernst Zündel - incredibly, WWCR once leased airtime to him to broadcast his German-language Holocaust denial program.[4] WWCR pulled the plug on him too claiming they had allowed the show because they "didn't understand what he was saying" because no one at the station spoke German.[5]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 J.R. Lind, How a Nashville Radio Station Became a Conspiracy-Theory Hotbed in the ’90s. Nashville Scene, 28 October 2021.
  2. Glenn Hauser, DX Listening Digest 9041, 20 May 2009.
  3. Terror in Oklahoma; Rightist Leader Is Off the Radio. The New York Times, 29 April 1995.
  4. Glenn Hauser, DX Listening Digest 5038, 3 March 2005.
  5. James Careless, The Odd World of U.S. Shortwave. Radio World, 7 April 2004.