Hoosier Public Radio is largely the enterprise of one man, Martin Hensley, a former radio engineer who now describes his occupation as "serving God." And the effort by Mr. Hensley to take the F.C.C. license from WRFT, or at least force it to share broadcast time with him, offers but one example of a series of similar conflicts involving student radio stations. At least 20 high school stations, and a handful of college ones, have been fending off challenges to their licenses by Christian broadcasters in the last year.
This flurry of action, which seemed so inexplicable to Mr. George, actually has a fierce logic to it. A loophole in commission regulations makes educational stations unusually vulnerable to takeover attempts. Moreover, their frequencies are a lucrative commodity, a bargain-basement way to get onto the air.
MR. HENSLEY, for one, sounds unlikely to go away quietly. He presents himself as the victim of an "emotional hate issue" all because "someone finally stood up and said these stations haven't served the public all these years." He specifically faults the high school stations for playing too much music and doing too little "community-oriented" programming, which he says should include Christian shows. Asked why he simply does not buy a station - one of the commercial Christian stations in the Indianapolis area was up for sale last summer - he points out that it ultimately brought $3 million.
