THE MEDIA BEAT HAS LOST A VOICE. Early on a Friday morning for seventeen years, Marshall Miles would talk with me to create the half-hour radio version of this column. But now Marshall has died, departing this world on June 24th, 2023.
Marshall leaves behind a rich legacy of broadcast work, and his appreciative audiences are left bereft.
Since 2006 we very rarely missed our weekly date; there were a few times I couldn’t join him because I was in the midst of travel for an assignment. But even when I was at work in decidedly remote locations he would still reach me from his studio base in Sharon, Connecticut and beam me in to elicit my views that week on Big Media’s efforts, the good and the bad.
I once found myself pressed by Marshall, via an echoing connection with Rundu (on the Namibia-Angola border) to explain how shockingly under-reported the current heroic struggle was, the fight to reverse HIV/AIDS’ rampage through southern Africa. He was as fully a humanitarian as he was a consummate broadcaster.
Connecticut media have rightly been lauding him as “a local broadcasting champion.” To describe, and advertise, the public station he and his partner Jill Goodman cofounded, Robin Hood Radio (more formally WHDD, and its associated callsigns WLHV and WBSL), he coined the resonant tagline, “The Smallest NPR Station in the Nation.” Small maybe, but with an outsized, powerful voice.
I was honored to be part of the national and international perspectives that Marshall determinedly embraced across all of Robin Hood’s output.
We would go “live” with The Media Beat at 7.33am on Friday, and it would be re-broadcast several times more over the weekend for Connecticut’s Northwest Corner, along with parts of New York State and Massachusetts. With the internet revolution propelling us through the 2010 decade, a podcast would be instantly made from our broadcast and posted online every week. With the podcast, we gained a strikingly broad global following.
Marshall’s steady demeanor was key to the broadcast-podcast’s impact. As the best of radio broadcasters should be, Marshall took on an Everyman role, pursuing straightforward questions that many an expert would disdain as insufficiently sophisticated. Marshall didn’t care about sophistication. He wanted clarity.
His roots in the community were never forgotten. The Northwest Corner experiences its share of extreme weather, increasingly so in these days of climate change, and Marshall was renowned for tirelessly spearheading the 24-hour duty of keeping audiences fully informed and reassured during snowstorms, floods and whatever other calamities the elements might bring.
It’s at such disruptive times, we all know, that local radio comes most fully into its own, and Marshall was at his best when conditions were at their worst. It reflected his strong relationship overall with his audience, in regular times as well as emergencies.
It’s no surprise that a nearby town’s broadcaster should offer tribute by stressing how for Marshall “it was important to be in touch with and be honest with listeners. Connecting to their everyday lives is the essence of success for small-town radio.”
And, I would add, for Marshall’s worldwide audience as well.
Marshall Miles’ last edition of ‘The Media Beat’ was aired on Friday May 5, 2023
https://robinhoodradioondemand.com/series/the-media-beat/
