Defending the indefensible or misinterpreting Hill...

Yesterday, Mitch Cohen—on the defensive since his inclusion as a litigant in the current Gary Null lawsuit—reacted to  a series of posts by Steve Brown on the Pacifica Radiowaves list. Mitch's later is addressed to Dennis Goldstein, but posted publicly, so I decided to add my remarks (in orange text here). Alex Steinberg, a WBAI LSB member has since expressed his agreement with Mitch. He needs to step away and give that seat to a liberated mind. Actually, the whole Board and the Robert's Rule system has proven to be a curse upon Pacifica. here is Mitch's letter to Dennis:

I've been trying (and not fully succeeding) to stay out of your colloquy with Steve Brown, as Steve has taken a propagandists' position and everything he says with regard to WBAI and Pacifica these days needs to be understood in that context.

Mitchel, you should be among the last to take a dim view of what you refer to as Steve’s “propagandists’ position”.  That is the common stance at WBAI—one which you, yourself, took to a point only to be outdone by Knight shill Somers. You, at least, will slip in the occasional truth.

Note, for instance, that although Steve has responded to everything else you've said, the one comment of yours that he's ignored is your blaming of Kathy Davis alongside the others for the station's ills.

Why has Steve not commented there? Because he needs Kathy's vote as a WBAI delegate. The 12 Indies on the LSB are (rightly) contesting the seating of Vajra Kilgour instead of Kathy Davis, and the PNB has voted to accept Vajra and not Kathy. (Whether the PNB has the right and authority to arbitrate the dispute of who is and who is not legitimately elected as a delegate is itself in dispute, as the PNB is itself elected annually by the very delegates in question, and will be the subject of a lawsuit.)

So, Steve's views-of-the-moment are colored by political expediency.

I agree that Steve should not have spared Kathy Davis in his criticism, but I don’t know if that departure from reason was dictated by the need for a vote or the fact that his friend, Gary Null, inexplicably wastes a weekly online radio hour on her mindless delusions and the scam they nourish. 

My own view is that Jeannie Hopper is trying to improve the sound quality of the shows; political context is not her strong point. 

Neither is substantive programming. Hopper’s “Liquid Lounge” is a shallow foray into the blandest of music, sprinkled with inane chatter and petty promotions. Reimers’ appointment of her to the PD position, however “interim” it might be, underscored his lack of judgement and failure to grasp even the fundamentals of radio broadcasting.

Mario Murillo started off great, but then personal issues began piling up, and after the first couple of months on the job he lost his focus. (His wife was very sick. She died a few months ago. The commemoration held for her was truly beautiful and jam-packed with folks from the art world, who far outnumbered the numbers from WBAI.)

Murillo came back to WBAI laden with a personal agenda. Just as a dysfunctional group of ad hoc “activists”—advantaged by the lack of professional management—had sprouted and redefined “community” as comprising disaffected people of African ancestry, so Murillo poured his Nadinola upon the remnants of WBAI to lighten the hue… but only up to a point. No whitener, he.

If Murillo "started off great”, I would like to hear how you reach that conclusion. As I recall, he wrote the obligatory letter of good intent and only much later introduced that fast-dwindling listenership to a bag of individuals who share his political beliefs. What he put on the air often bore little or no relationship to New York or, for that matter, the U.S., thus packing even more listeners off to perdition.

Mrs. Murillo’s illness and hastened death was a tragedy for which he deserves our sympathy and understanding, but the attendance at her funeral is not relevant to the topic at hand.  

Jeannie was thrown into the mess temporarily. She has focused on technical issues (which are legion) at WBAI, and has made some headway.

Had she really had the station’s interest at heart or, for that matter, understood its purpose and current weaknesses, Ms. Hopper would have relinquished her dominance of Saturday evening air time and sought good advice, such as that which comes to WBAI regularly and, just as routinely gets ignored.

Also, I do not share your opinion of Kathy Davis, who has worked extremely hard to raise funds for the station and to keep it afloat, and who, along with Paulette Spencer, have been heroically keeping Robert Knight's flame alive on WBAI. (There's more to Kathy -- and to all of us, actually -- than a one-dimensional view of her perceived politics.) I see her spirituality show on WBAI in that context. 

Kathy Davis has never apologized for teaming up with Tony Bates for that scandalous Double Helix Water infomercial, which gave false hope to listeners with fatal diseases and robbed them of money that would have been more prudently spent on seeking professional advice. Kathy’s approach to fundraising is bereft of moral conscience and blatantly dishonest. She is an opportunist who so clearly puts her own need for attention and money ahead of any concern for WBAI or this who are truly devoted to its welfare.

There was nothing heroic about Kathy Davis taking over Robert Knight’s Thursday morning show. He had long since stagnated and made it insignificant, so his death left no gap in WBAI’s offerings. Kathy, however, rushed in to seize the time slot under the guise of keeping this man’s faux halo lit. To lend a modicum of believability to that takeover, Kathy brought Knight’s other half, Paulette Spencer, aboard, albeit in a very secondary role. It wasn’t long before Knight’s name ceased to be mentioned and the time slot became yet another weekly soap box for Kathy’s rambling pseudo-spiritual gibberish and the commercial ventures with which it is laced.

As for keeping Knight’s “flame” alive? Look how quickly his memory shrank into a rarely-used footnote.

Similarly, Tony Bates worked his ass off to raise funds for the station, which is what he was hired this go-'round to do. Berthold decided that we need instant cash (true enough) and that the main things to make money are health-related premiums and promotion of financial counseling. He's right about what makes the largest percentage of money for WBAI in our greatly shrunken audience. Of course the fact that so many have been driven away by this approach throws us into a vicious cycle, with no management plan to break out of it. Tony was doing the best he could these last two drives within that framework.

WBAI promoting financial counseling is a priceless absurdity! 

Tony Bates was kicked out of WBAI against the will of Berthold Reimers but at the insistence of over 100 staffers and volunteers who had seen him screw up the programming, and at least two people who claimed to have witnessed sexual harassment on his part.

Mitchel, you seem to have adopted the notion that money can be raised in good conscience by any means necessary. This, I believe, is a fundamental flaw in the desperate reasoning that the current management follows. If funds cannot be raised honestly and in keeping with the station’s principles, one must either seek a different source of income or declare Lew Hill’s grand experiment more of a failure than it now appears to be. Desperate need for funding should never adversely affect programming… WBAI’s on-air offerings are the products up for sale… years will change their nature as new needs are answered, but nothing should ever be allowed to downgrade their quality or intellectual content.

I know that you agree with that, but I wish you would not accept any downgrade as inevitable.  

The problem is the framework. I once again for the sixth or seventh time proposed that WBAI air a folk music show. There's a whole new wave of folk music happening, a new scene emerging, in New York ... And Eli Smith -- one of the leading (and young-ish!) folks afficianados who has put together festivals and performs as well has submitted a proposal to host a folk show, which is so missing from WBAI and would do a lot to stabilize and expand our audience (not by itself, but in conjunction with other shows, such as the great Arts show that has been added at 5 pm on Fridays). But Berthold is clueless here, and so is Tony Bates when it comes to the importance of folk music. (As an aside, I met Eric Anderson a few weeks ago, and asked if he'd be willing to call into a folk show from his home in France, I think (not sure). Eric is the writer of my favorite song (if I can pull one out of that wonderful hat) -- "Thirsty Boots" -- which has been my anthem for decades. He said he would LOVE TO call in to WBAI, maybe provide commentaries as well as original material.

Bringing back folk music, real or ersatz, is not even remotely a solution, for today’s generation has moved on; that which appealed to the love-beaded young of the Sixties is, for all intents and purposes, as passé as the Bob Fass show. It may see a trendy revival one day, but not today and WBAI’s programming should never rely on one or two spheres of interest or ethnic origin. The “community” people like Haskins should be aiming at has no color—it is a community of the curious and forward thinking, a community of demanding intellectual needs. 

That community is global and without ethnic prejudice.

I am so very depressed at what is happening in and around WBAI, with Steve and Gary's lawsuit topping off the nasty insanity (as opposed to the good kind that we need!), when there is SOOOO much potential and, in my view, not too difficult to set right, with proper leadership. The great Sandy Boyer died a few weeks ago (I owe my meeting with another of my heroes, Bernadette Devlin, to Sandy Boyer's bringing her to the U.S.); Simon Loekle is gone (and WBAI management was nowhere to be found at his memorial). Same with the killing of Dani Lamar, who was the young man responsible for working his ass off to mail out WBAI's premiums, and who was indeed affected emotionally by Gary's lawsuit (even though Dani isn't named in it) because it obliquely sought to address (and pressure) his work. Steve and Gary really either have no idea or just don't care about the effects of what they've wrought (Steve had the stupidity and immorality to call it, in one of his letters, "collateral damage", for shame!)

WBAI management’s absence at Simon Loekle’s memorial reflects its warped priorities. Reimers not only showed up for a screening of the Radio Unnameable documentary, he sought ways in which to use the film for fundraising. 

I wish I could end on a more cheery note, but when Berthold leaves for his other job, I have no hope at all that the ED will appoint someone competent as GM, and that it will fall to EVEN WORSE hands than we have now.

Berthold Reimers is leaving for “his other job”? If that’s not a cheery note on which to end, well...