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.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Morning Mix nix brings Uprising
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This morning, while No Questions Asked played on my radio, I asked myself: Which is more annoying, Gary Null interrupting Michael G. Haskins, or Michael G. Haskins interrupting Gary Null?
ReplyDeleteYou sure ask yourself some tough questions, Justine. :)
DeleteI vote Haskins interrupting Null as worse, because it's like a heckler interrupting a great comedian...
ReplyDeleteAnyway... Null would tell you not to cook the books because the paper isn't organic and you're not supposed to heat things, etc. You can find out more for donating $150.00 for a premium, which you MAY get three years from now...
SDL
Well, at least Null got to the meat of the matter the other night.....it couldn't have been easy for him :)
DeleteWatching this and comparable bits of coverage here and there – including of course, audio of national board and other meetings – I wonder if I'm the only person who's inclined to think that Pacifica has evolved to become, quite simply, Angry Crazy Person Radio.
ReplyDelete~ 'indigopirate'
How about a slight analog shuffle.... Crazy Radio for Angry Persons/
DeleteOne Flew Over The Cuckoo Left?
DeleteSDL
They certainly manage to give the various reactionary lunatics that dominate the landscape a run for their money, I'll give them that.
Delete~ 'indigo'
The past several days I've been watching the LSB meetings on youtube and am simply in awe. These aren't adults! It's a tragic comedy. One listener said that they should run them on the station. He's right! I bet they would get one huge audience, like a train wreck or person threatening to jump off a building.
DeleteI so wish I could time warp to 1979/1982 and listen to people I grew up with, like Lenny Lopate, Robert Knight, Tom Leykis, David Wynyard, Lynn Samuels, etc. At least they were doing radio shows and not daily repeated infomercials.
How many times do I turn this station on the past couple of weeks and have to hear the same damn infomercials? Maybe Gary Null can tell me what to take to stop my eyes rolling up into my head from disbelief...
SDL
Are you saying that "Dr/" Gwen Scott doesn't light your fire? :)
DeleteThought I'd nod my virtual head along with SDL here. It was precisely in 1979–1982 that WBAI was transitioned, at the direction of the national and local boards, to a primarily political entity – a primarily political entity the quality of which is nicely represented, I think, by this recent declaration from yet another of a long line of ‘revolutionaries’, which I’ve just snipped from Pacifica Radio Waves:
DeleteHi Jim,
Excellent focus on WBAI programming. In my view, WBAI programming has been marked by cronyism and lack of ideological understanding, petty bourgeois liberals and individualists "doing their own thing" and no one paying attention to common themes/dialogues with each other and the audience.
In my perception, there is new ferment all along the line nationally and globally as the contradictions within the system of captalism and imperialism are heightening which need to be reflected in WBAI programming. This as we move to class consciousness, class analysis and class struggle on the side of the working class and poor including allied stratas of the middle class.
Along with the above, I believe, building a mass left and progressive movement and a mass left and progressive party to represent that nascent movement is of the utmost urgency. This so as to wage a counteroffensive against the capitalist and imperialist ruling classes within the imperialist triad (United States, European Union and Japan). This needs to be reflected, I would have to say, in WBAI programming.
Best wishes,
Dennis
This is, I think, representative of what Pacifica and WBAI have seen as their ‘mission’ since 1979.
Compared to this sort of infantile quasi-intellectual drivel, a guaranteed irritant or soporific (choose one, possibly both), wonder-cures of the Null sort are a fitting complement.
The ‘mission’, of course, is that of ‘leaders’ with no following – rightly so.
~ ‘indigopirate/
Idiocy is the premium.
DeleteAmerica seems, all too often, to take as its central goal the demonstration of the possibility that Swift, in his depiction of the Yahoos, was excessively kind.
Delete~ 'indigo'
You are right, Angry Crazy Person Radio -- actually, Angry Crazy Old White Person Radio. Nearly the entire lynch mob, who sound like a bunch of conspiracy theorists.
ReplyDeleteThanks to Chris Albertson for posting this, but since there's nothing but derision here, there's nothing to respond to. I wonder why people so scornful of Pacifica bother to visit and comment on this blog.
ReplyDeleteThe squandering of a marvelous resource is worthy of scorn and contempt – it's a simple enough reason, is it not?
Delete~ 'indigopirate'
Thank you indigopirate. The people who are scornful of Pacifica and its mission are those handful of belligerent protestors. Truly pathetic.
ReplyDeletePoint taken.
Delete~ 'indigopirate'
I, for one, am not scornful or contemptuous of WBAI as a radio station or ideal. I AM scornful or contemptuous of the self-serving mentally unbalanced people who have turned it into a wasteland second only to everything else on radio in the NYC area.
ReplyDeleteIf nothing else, I would like to thanks those at WBAI in the old days that helped open my teenage eyes to the world and helped to teach me to think for myself. I don't think airing the current programming is going to help open the eyes of any teenagers these days. That's the saddest thing.
Oh, no! I just turned on the radio to hear Natalie & Gwen Scott again. Now I am wishing I had a dollar for every time I have run into this rebroadcast. I wonder if Mr "Hay-tie" is next...
SDL
Does Gary Null have one PWA as a supporter?. Null must leave for any credibly to be gained. Suggestions for programming:
ReplyDeleteCarolyn Casey, Ann Magnuson, Gay USSA' Andy Humm and Ann Northrup and put Hannay back following Null. PBS has let Null go, Pacifica must as well, or are we to the right of PBS now? John Iversen in Berkeley
I'm glad that someone has stated the obvious about "Dr." Null. I have no problem supporting a station that plays things I like and don't like, I agree with and don't agree with. Nobody should feel so entitled as to demand a station reflect only her/his values. But there is a line in the sand, where programming is so opportunistic and commercially self-serving in the most banal way, repeatedly, for decades on end... the paranoid "they're all out to get me" mantra... the pseudo-science... the "I am the money" arrogance... the "after all I've done for you" lies... and, finally, the vicious, evil assault on PWAs with HIV/AIDS denialism. Pacifica doesn't deserve a dime or a moment's listen as long as "Dr" Null or his enablers are part of the scene. Period. End of story.
DeleteYou need not do anything at this point. The two factions are taking care of business: as they sling verbal arrows at each other, they are actually—albeit unwittingly—working together to destroy WBAI and Pacifica itself. What is happening right now, on the PacificaRadiowaves list, is a nasty, infantile fight that shows each side to be as ugly as the other. At this point I am not only convinced that Pacifica cannot survive, I feel strongly that it shouldn't.
DeleteThat's not easy for me to say.
There’s no way to know what may or may not be going on behind the scenes, which may be what matters or doesn’t matter most, of course, but my reading of PacificaRadiowaves is the same as yours. It seems, remarkably, to be getting worse and worse, and it’s as if it’s almost a hermetically sealed discussion/dogfight in which external events exist only as bits of ammunition to be directed at one another.
DeleteIt’s also *very* quiet on the squalid little blueboard.
I wonder if the many-years-long-decline has now reached the point where it’s essentially sucked what little life remains out of the various participants. It feels as if they’re nearing the point of resignation as to their fate.
Only passing thoughts on my part, subjective superficial perceptions, for whatever little they may be worth.
~ ‘indigopirate’
There's nothing superficial about your perceptions, Indigo. What we have going on at PacificaRadiowaves is not new, but that snow job ball is coming down the hill at a faster pace, and picking up some really nasty stuff along the way. When it crashes, a slight ripple will be felt by a handful of trolls as the tumbleweed shifts in la blue goon.
DeleteSadly, it all comes down to this. The people willing to cough up the most money to WBAI are the ones who believe in the crackpot conspiracies, snake oil, etc. Their money is what talks, and their choice of premiums is what walks (doesn't get mailed, but it walks). I can't blame Pacifica and WBAI for giving the paying audience what it wants.
ReplyDeleteThat said, we need to look at this from another angle. That angle is that the WBAI audience is no longer an amalgam of various aspects of the left wing, but suckers who are based in conspiracy hypotheses. They want to be the first kids on the block with that esoteric answer to the question. In effect, they want to be the elitist people who think they know more than anyone else.
To be fair to Gary Null. I think the man is genuine in that he believes his own canard. He has a cult of people willing to spend all their money for his cures to what ails them. It's no different than any other cult. As I always say, if you find a sucker, fleece him before the next guy does. However, one day I think he is going to get a major lawsuit for wrongful death, which will sweep Pacifica and WBAI into its maelstrom. Televangelists do it better...
In the end, to make WBAI a viable and credible left wing voice again would probably take a few years of quality programming, promotion and word of mouth to get back old listeners as well as new ones with a serious political interest.
On another note. You know that infomercial for the Cuba, An African Odyssey $150 premium? Well, since it's a topic of interest to me, I went and looked on amazon.com. Guess what. You can rent the movie for $2.99. Which is more than it was worth. I'll refrain from my review...
And as I was about to send this post, WBAI went silent at 8:24 AM until 8:30 AM. "Hay-tie" must have fallen asleep and had his head fall on some button or other. If there were three seconds of dead air on a commercial station, someone would lose their job.
SDL
When we are as likely to hear WBAI air a few WEEKS of quality programming is as we are to grow wings, I think we can abandon any hope of seeing a return of the lost tribes of intelligent listener-supporters.
DeleteYes, the bus driver seemed to have fallen asleep at the wheel this morning when, after several repeats of a segment, Amy's Democracy Now went dead. I heard that, too—why couldn't that six-minute silence have occurred earlier, when Mimi rambled on in her unbearable fashion?
Never mind "commercial" station, if WBAI were an efficiently run non-commercial station, the bus driver would have been told to go to Hay-tee a long time ago.
@Chris: That was outside KPFA, not KPFK.
ReplyDelete