Four years ago, I sat in the kitchen of a crude, three-room house in an end-of-the-road town in rural Mexico. I was listening to my hostess, Maria, reminisce in Spanish while she cooked tortillas over a wood fire. With one of her twin sons, Manuel, balanced on her hip, she told me about his father, whom he’d never met. She talked about how her husband, the son of a farmer, left for the U.S. when he found out Maria was pregnant. He felt that working illegally in the U.S., where he could easily make seven times as much as at home, was the only way to guarantee his sons’ futures. He’d been away for more than a year and a half.

At midnight on Monday, February 13, WHLD-AM 1270 gave up its gospel programming in favor of a new message: The station’s managers, a partnership of journalists, activists and academics called Niagara Independent Media, call it “The Voice of Reason.” It is, in any case, Buffalo’s only true progressive news and talk radio station.