Questions of taste: Interest group liberalism and the campaigns to save classical music radio in post-world war Ii Chicago.

This article reports that in early 1968, Bernard Jacobs, the owner and founder of Chicago classical music radio station WFMT, sold his station to WGN Continental FM Corp., a subsidiary of the Chicago Tribune. Despite the fact that the Tribune claimed that it would make no changes to the station's programming or management, the sale was profoundly disconcerting to many loyal listeners, a number of whom wrote letters to the federal government opposing the sale and asking it to intervene. Listener Marjorie Newsome wrote that WFMT's audience was composed largely of persons or a more progressive bent, and was a group that possessed a certain level of judgment, sophistication, and discrimination, with respect to its listening preferences. Four years later, Chicago's other major classical music radio station, WEFM, was put up for sale by the Zenith Corp., the company that had owned and operated the station for more than 30 years. Claiming that the station was losing large amounts of money, Zenith sold it to General Cinema Corp. (GCC), a Boston-based entertainment conglomerate, and GCC announced that it would change the station's format from classical to pop music.