The Connection

This show is cancelled by WBUR. Please see the new KSFC schedule.

On Aug. 5, the date of The Connection's last broadcast, The Boston Globe printed this commentary from its host, Dick Gordon:

THIS MORNING I get to say the words ''I'm Dick Gordon. This is 'The Connection,' " for the last time.

I won't be there, mind you. WBUR has been rebroadcasting archived editions of ''The Connection" after its surprise announcement that it was killing the program.

And I need to be up front here. I lost my job. My colleagues did, too, and I'm angry about that, but there's clearly something larger at stake.

Over the past four years, Boston has become more than a place for me to work. It has become my home, and even in that short period of time, I've come to understand that ''The Connection" was something unique in Boston, something bigger than me or my producers. I didn't grow up here, but I grew up with a sense of this city's history as a place of ideas and a place to exchange those ideas. For centuries Boston Common has been that kind of physical place. Today, public radio, at its best, offers that same space for intellectual and civic exchange.

I want to say something about what makes public radio public. It's the people who listen -- not the people behind the microphones. Our listeners demanded a mix of international news and poetry and politics, and science and in-depth interviews. We did that very well. The latest numbers I have show that more than 600,000 listeners across the country tuned in. No one at WBUR ever suggested we change or alter our format.

I'm still bewildered as to why the program was canceled. At a time when WBUR is clearly anxious about maintaining financial support from the public, they have taken down what they called their flagship program. ''The Connection" was carried on more stations across the country than any other news show produced at WBUR.

They've talked about ''flat ratings," but ''The Connection" has consistently had one of the top measures of listener loyalty at WBUR and some of the best such ratings among all NPR talk shows. Just over a year ago the station was boasting that ratings for ''The Connection" were up 22 percent.

They have said they are replacing ''The Connection" with the ''award winning" program ''On Point." They choose not to point out that over the past four years, ''The Connection" has won even more awards.

They have said it was part of a switch to more local news. But when people challenged that, the program director wrote a letter to this newspaper promising that WBUR ''will not deviate from a commitment to . . . discussion and analysis regarding world news and events."

When you're running a public radio station, and doing it with money from listeners, it seems only reasonable that those listeners are accorded some regard when such significant changes are made.

These are difficult days for public radio and TV. Organizations like NPR are under assault on the battlefield of left and right, liberal and conservative. But good radio journalism lives between those extremes. When that's lost, all you have is the staccato barking of the far left and the hard right. ''The Connection" was an on-air meeting place linking South Carolina and Michigan, Burlington, Boston, and Nashville. I think this country needs more, not less, of that.

There's one more thing that gets lost in all the talk of ratings and realignment, and it is radio's great secret.

Ours is the most intimate form of journalism. It doesn't matter if you are listening to the radio in your car, in the kitchen, or lying in bed. The speaker is never more than a couple of feet away, and that kind of proximity gives rise to this remarkable link between the people who are talking and the people who are listening. I know this. I've been in this business for 28 years. The intimacy of radio creates a connection that is almost physical in its emotional power.

It might be the anger in the voice of a Gaza settler, the thoughtful reflection of an artist, or the frustration of someone who supports the war in Iraq. It might be the giggle of a small child. These are real people. We let them talk. We hear them. That's how we learn to understand them. You will find an appreciation of this only on a few programs on public radio.

The people I worked with on ''The Connection" understood it. The people who listened to the program understood it. So when ''The Connection" (as WBUR so elegantly phrases it) ''goes silent" at noon today, a little bit of that humanity, a little bit of that Boston Common, will disappear as well. And that's too bad.