 |
| Please click on text to enlarge it.
If you have trouble reading this post in this graphic format, there is a text version here.
|
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.
John Proffitt's salad days? Think he's learning? No, I mean his lesson...
ReplyDeleteSDL
The kind of institutional corruption that exists at BAI/Pacifica is not unique to US broadcasting. Consider the Shenanigans at the BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors, formerly US Information Service, that runs Voice of America, Radio Marti, and a bunch of other station). BBG is composed of 8 members, and runs, among other things, Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, that was the most anti-soviet radio broadcaster during the Cold War. Radio Liberty started in the 1950's in West Germany, composed of die-hard anti-communist, some of whom were Nazi collaborators, and was a CIA asset. RL was aimed at the USSR, RFE was aimed at the Eastern Europe. Hillary Clinton used to sit on BBG.
ReplyDeleteRL survived the Cold War, survived Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and succumbed to Putin with the help from internal corrupt politics at BBG. RL was a solid broadcaster, that commented on topics, public discussions of which can land you in prison. In its heyday, they were a closed bunch of radio broadcasters, which KGB infiltrators could not penetrate and came home with horror stories, real or imagined, of its cult like screening practices. To my knowledge, among the valid news and analysis, RL did at least one fake story, which created a great deal of controversy and discredited official (and accurate) piece of soviet war history. I am not sure, whether it should be called propaganda, psych ops, or someone's conspiracy theory that took hold of the soviet peoples popular imagination. Amazingly, in the years that followed, the soviet establishment was never able to counter it, debunk it, or refute it based on the facts, which were on their side. Talk about editorial incompetence.
Anyway, after the collapse of the soviet state, RL moved its offices to Moscow, and became an excellent opposition media source of unsurpassed journalistic quality. True, I know someone who left RL, because they had an editorial bias for the independence and separation of the former soviet republics, but the individual news reports I seen were accurate and on the spot. Then came Putin. He redrew the frequencies for commercial broadcasting, rewrote the broadcasting laws, and effectively reduced RL's footprint on the Russian media landscape, forcing them to shift to the printed and to Internet broadcasting formats.
In the wake of it, BBG appointed a new editor in chief for the internet content. She was a flamboyant and controversial journalist, a dual US/Russian citizen, an outspoken member of Putin's opposition. Before she took a post at Radio Liberty, Put had her over for a informal talk, that lasted for 90 minutes. Shortly thereafter, she became a hatchet woman and fired 20 old time journalists from Radio Liberty. She was accused of hiring her elitist cronies and of changing the broadcasting content from political to National Geographic type. They also created controversy and lost massive number of listeners when their broadcasts aimed at the predominantly Muslim Central Asia switched from political, to western style entertainment and they ran the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Competition on their central Asian stations.
ReplyDeleteThere were a huge backlash from the Russian opposition, including Gorbachev, who criticized the firings and the effective shutting down of the Radio Liberty, which even the Soviets could not do. The hatchet woman, the free speech advocate, threatened with libel, commentators, who made fun of her, and quickly moved on to write about the Boston Bombers. When pressed on why she fired the RL 20, she said that the orders came from the American managers of the station. Upon closer examination, one was a failed Channel 4 exec, who lost his job over the incident, and another was an MBA, new to broadcasting. Her prior experience was to run an adventure tourism company in Hawaii. Both were BBG appointees. From what I seen, both were invested in venture capitalism type deals in Russia, and to anger Kremlin would have been against their economic interests. Still, no one has completely answered the question as to why the 20 old timers were fired and who made the decision. Most of the fired 20 were hired back after the public backlash.
Incompetence and corruption similar to Pacifica, whereas the attempt was to mainstream the RL, and the motive was financial gain, the attempt with BAI and Pacifica is to keep it from mainstreaming, and the financial gain in Pacifica's case (I am guessing), is to deliver the politically extreme progressive audience to clear channel caliber of advertisers for a bit of personal profit.
The big pissing contest at the BGG now is between VOA and all the little brothers, like Radio Marti, VoFA, etc. The little brothers want VOA to essentially stop broadcasting to the people/languages that they are dedicated to. Personally, I see each as having a different aim. VOA is meant to propagandize for the USA and its interests. The little brothers are meant to propagandize against the country they are broadcasting to.
ReplyDeleteSDL