The following was posted by Berthold Reimers October 20, 2013.
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An unvarnished blog that dips into the past and comments on the present of WBAI-FM, a once significant, intelligent New York radio station that for years has suffered chronic abuse from within and now nears extinction. Your comments are welcomed and will not be censored.
I don't know, Chris. With this memo, Reimers comes across like a solid station manager. A bit too cynical and commercial maybe, but that is what managers are supposed to do - keep the enterprise afloat. Topic of another discussion is the commercializing effect on listener sponsored non-commercial radio of chronic poverty. Perhaps if they did take the corporate donations from Wall Street, Big Oil, Nuclear Power and Tobacco, they would have to exercise greater tact with their sponsors, but in return, they could afford quality programming, maybe a real news bureau with international presence, and could avoid infomercializing their air time. They could still have the balls and police their big money donors, and if the material is well researched and documented, I doubt it will drive away the sponsors, but that's not the organizational culture of the BAI as we know it.
ReplyDeleteOf greater concern to me is the propagandizing spin the Reimers puts on the coverage of the anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I know why Reimers puts this spin - he does it to pander to and nurture the comforting beliefs of his aging audience. Maybe Reimers loves them, maybe he wants their money, who knows; but the whole notion that JFK was good and that the political establishment has turned right, is TOTALLY off the mark, just as that notion that JFK wouldn't have gotten the US involved in any wars. This is the same treatment that Oliver Stone gave JFK's assassination in his movie, again, I am guessing for the same reason to comfort his audience, or maybe it's a pop culture stereotype, in any case. JFK was a Cold Warrior. He established Peace Corps with a stroke of the executive order, and with the same executive order, he founded the US Navy SEAL teams and the US Army Green Berets. And while Peace Corps volunteers were aid workers, and the Green Berets were the Teachers and Nation Builders in a successful counter-insurgency strategy, that was pioneered by the British to keep the Communist expansion at bay, Navy SEALS are the invisible snipers and infiltrators, not exactly Peaceniks, eh? JFK was a Rhodes Scholar, like Clinton, and when he was studying in UK, on the eve of WW2, he wrote a brilliant paper IN FAVOR OF INTERVENTIONISM on moral grounds, and if JFK was in power today, he would have likely sent Navy SEALS to Zimbabwe to spearhead the efforts to liberate that country from rabid Marxism. On the eve of his ascendance to Presidency, JFK met Khruschev on a battleship in UK for several hours of talks. Before they met, JFK was unsympathetic to the European colonial powers, did not want the US to help the French in the Indochina, and was basically sympathetic to the Soviets anti-colonial liberation efforts in the world, seeing in the USSR a new non-colonialist nation, like the US. In the one discussion that they two leaders had, Khruschev managed to turn JFK completely against him and after that JFK was ready to send troops to Vietnam and to support the European powers holding on to former colonies. From what little is known about what was talked about, was that Khruschev spent most of the time proselytizing Marxism-Leninism to JFK in a pedantic fashion, thinking in the end that he won an argument. If that is the case, that meeting was the single greatest failure in the Soviet diplomatic history.
ReplyDeleteThe US politics did not become more conservative after JFK assassination. Consider the Great Society reforms that L.B. Johnson rammed through the US Congress. Whatever it's other effects were, Lyndon Johnson has largely eliminated black rural poverty in the US and the Great Society Reforms did as much to change the face of the US, as did Gen. Eisenhower's Interstate System. So, Reimer's point a, that the country veered sharply "right" is wrong, just as the view that JFK was somehow "left".
Finally, I am sure that there will be a lot of paranoid conspiracy cookery a la Blosdale about the JFK's assassination itself aired on that day. The only cover up that existed, was by the guilty parties to hide the lack of preparedness and negligence that allowed one narcissistic sociopath murder the President of a rising superpower. Let's see how much of it WBAI talk show hosts are going to get wrong and screw up. One averagely famous 19th century author has once said of his work: "The extraordinary deeds of normal people in real world circumstance are far more extraordinary and fantastic than tall tales told later about these people by others". With its constant insistence on the conspiratorial and the alternative, WBAI misses the first and plunges into the second, when it comes to histories of the major world altering events like 9/11 and the assassination of JFK.
So because of this, Reimers comes off as a "solid station manager?" When was that ever remotely possible?
DeletePure and simple: it's a fire sale. Reimers et al don't care how far they have to pitch bullshit to get those dollars rolling in. Unfortunately, people have a wearout point. It's been a fire sale since Steve Brown and the LSB put him in place, and has only worsened.
I only talking about one instance above, not his track record. I agree, it seems like a fire sale at BAI, a last ditch effort to be relevant, both, to the new masters who will take over, and in the local politics, the way Bob Haskins was pandering to the CUNY protesters this morning. Several interesting observations were made about Reimers: He is not a radio person, nor is he a non-profit person, where did he come from? He keeps himself apart from the station staff - he is not one of them and he does not answer to them, BUT, he was appointed by the Steve Brown of the "Marketing" faction, and obviously he answers to the Steve Brown and Co, Why has no one compelled him to furlough himself or take a voluntary pay cut? Because his performance satisfies the needs of those who appointed him?
ReplyDeleteThe question to be asked of those defending Amy Goodman, if she is doing so well, and she makes so much money, why I she charging so much to the WBAI/Listeners? I think that it's not that simple and if Pacifica was to go away, so will Amy Goodman, or more correctly, she will exist via internet broadcasting. I mean, if I got my start at BAI and I was doing well, and if the BAI was in crisis, I would have donated my broadcasts to keep the station in the black the way famous actors act for free in the films that they fall in love with. But a 50% debt owed by BAI for Democracy Now!??