Monday, May 30, 2016

Can WBAI get it up?


It all seems finally to be falling apart beyond repair. There is no noble effort in evidence, just the same old costly ineptitude and a steady overdose of fabricated history and racism, with a lot of help from a likeminded faction on the Pacifica National Board. As I always say, may the real Pacificans find new outlets when Lew Hill's shattered dream becomes but a memory.

At the bottom of this post, you will find Steve Brown's reaction to Reimers' staff notice as sent by him to Lydia Brazon, Pacifica's extraordinarily mis-cast Executive Director.

Schedule from May 31 to Sunday


Lydia Brazon
Executive Director
Pacifica Foundation
1925 Martin Luther King, Jr. Way
Berkeley, CA 94704

Dear Lydia –

It is my sad duty to report an increase in the rate at which WBAI is rushing towards bankruptcy, thanks to the latest announcement from its general manager, Berthold Reimers, to WBAI staff. That email is posted above. In it, Reimers lists the programs to be pre-empted during the fund drive. He says these programs are being pre-empted either because they do not raise enough money or because they have refused to pitch.

But Reimers appears to be lying – intentionally lying – in the case of at least one pre-empted program. He may also be lying about some of the others, but I have no first-hand knowledge about them. So let me focus on the program about which I do have first-hand knowledge.

One of the programs that Reimers has scheduled for pre-emption (and which, in fact, he has already been pre-empting for much of this fund drive), is the Gary Null show. Yet the Gary Null show is, and always has been, the biggest fundraiser for WBAI (as it has also been for KPFK). During the past 37 years, the Gary Null show has regularly accounted for up to one-third to three-quarters of WBAI’s entire fund drive revenue.

So Reimers cannot claim that the Gary Null show “does not raise enough money.” Nor can he claim that Gary Null “has refused to pitch” – since I have seen copies of numerous emails sent by Gary Null to Reimers (and to Development Director Andrea Katz), reaffirming his willingness to pitch for the station “on any day, in any time slot, during any fund drive.”

In fact, Null’s email response to Reimers’ notice the he would again be pre-empted (again) from the fund drive for allegedly not raising enough money or refusing to pitch was:

“You are preempting my program but I have repeatedly volunteered  to pitch. When will you stop this personal  vendetta…it is not professional or helping the station.”

To put it bluntly, Reimers is telling a deliberate lie to his staff, and to you, as executive director. His announcement pretends to be concerned with maximizing WBAI’s fund drive revenue. But by pre-empting Null’s show during past, present, and future fund drives, he is deliberately choking off the station’s revenue stream.

Why should Reimers want to choke off WBAI’s revenue stream (and lie about his reasons)?

After all, with Gary Null already pre-empted from this fund drive, WBAI is barely averaging $7,500 a day (really only $5,200 a day, given the collection percentage). But Gary Null has often raised $13,000 to $20,000 a day on his show. This would mean WBAI could earn – not $7,500 a day – but as much as $27,500 a day.

Which means that Reimers is shamelessly deceiving you and the national board (not to mention his staff and the station’s audience) into believing that the station can raise no more than $7,500 a day (or $52,500 a week), whereas the truth is that -- if it stopped pre-empting the Gary Null show – the station might be raising up to $27,500 a day, or as much as $192,500 a week.

Or consider another, even more telling example: Only recently, in the month of December, three of Gary Null’s pitches – tickets to the world premiere of his new documentary; tickets to his lecture on self-actualization; and a raffle for a one-week “retreat” at his Texas health facility – raised a total of $90,000 for WBAI, at zero cost to the station (i.e., the station did not have buy or fulfill a single premium). That was a fundraising record for the station.

And Null was ready to repeat it, for this or any other WBAI fundraiser. But instead, Reimers cancelled his regular Friday program without explanation, and then pre-empted numerous other of Null’s regular broadcasts during the fund drive. This action (and since Reimers had the figures, he knew what he was doing) deprived the station of several hundred thousand dollars in fund drive revenue.

Why would WBAI’s general manager want to cripple his own station?

Reimer’s deliberate crippling of WBAI’s fundraising ability – and his lies about it, as illustrated in his email appended below – are nothing new. For example, by deliberately refusing to fulfill the premiums pledged for and paid for by thousands of WBAI supporters, Reimers predictably caused our listenership and membership to fall precipitously during his three-year tenure as general manager. From a high of approximately 18,000 members just a few years ago, we are now down to a pathetic 6,800 members. This is less than a third of what WBAI needs to make it solvent and healthy.

But maybe that’s the plan -- to make WBAI insolvent and unhealthy. If so, whose plan is it?

As general manager, Reimers takes his legal marching orders from you, Lydia, and from your faction on the national board. So what is a reasonable person supposed to think? You and your faction on the national board have access to weekly and even daily information about the sorry state of WBAI’s finances, and why they are in such a sorry state. Yet you choose to do nothing about it. So why shouldn’t I assume that you are acting to implement the goals of your faction and its leaders, several of whom have publicly expressed the desire, in emails and media interviews, to break up the Pacifica network, sell off WBAI, and divide the sale proceeds (estimated at $100 million or more) amongst yourselves and your stations?  

Of course, the bylaws forbid you from selling WBAI – or any Pacifica station – without permission from the membership, which you would never get. So one obvious way to achieve your faction’s publicly stated goals might be to drive the foundation into bankruptcy, allowing you to seek protection under Chapter XI of the federal bankruptcy statutes, which would suspend Pacifica’s bylaws and permit you to sell WBAI without member permission. (And possibly sell WPFW and KPFT as well, which it is reported that you may also be planning. Indeed, CFO Sam Agarwal has already floated a public plan for selling WBAI “within 90 days.”)

Is that what is on your mind? Such an explanation would certainly help makes sense out of the otherwise bizarre and puzzling behavior of WBAI General Manager Berthold Reimers, who has been deliberately choking off WBAI’s revenues and driving it into bankruptcy, while hypocritically pretending to work on its behalf.


If my description of your plans is accurate, I do not expect this letter to change those plans, nor cause you to stop Berthold Reimers from deliberately wrecking WBAI. But writing this letter is good therapy for me. It will also, I hope, bring this issue into the open (for whatever good that may do).

Steven M. Brown
Director, Pacifica National Board

25 comments:

  1. The various factions of maggots are unhappy, then?

    ~ ‘indigopirate’

    ReplyDelete
  2. Reimers' memo is one of the worst I've ever read coming from a so called media professional; replete with typos, grammatical errors, etc.. This is what we get from someone who's paid a $100,000 plus annual salary?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Among the worst that money can buy.... And they have bought him year after year.

      Delete
  3. So, basically, WBAI is abandoning all pretense at content, and is now just a vehicle for zany infomercials. Not a big surprise.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You have a guy that doesn't return phone calls and emails wondering why he's not hearing back from programmers whose spots are effectively guaranteed. Even if they did want to comply, they would run into all kinds of issues including how to actually measure compliance. Enjoy the week off guys. Some of you are broadcasting elsewhere anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Reimer's memo is more interesting than it may seem on first reading. Taking a deeper look at it we see, with the exception of Daulton Anderson, all the "new" shows (Forlano, Blacks, Halper, etc.) on the list. That's such an admission that Reimers, Murillo and Hopper messed up big time.

    Also, notice how no overnight shows are affected. It's obvious that the Midnight to 6AM period isn't even a thought. In other words, Reimers doesn't even care about whether 25% of WBAI's broadcast day can earn any money!

    We also see OTH and TPCS on the list. These two shows used to make decent money until this year. My guess is that since they attracted a more intelligent audience, in general, that audience has said goodbye.

    Brown is just as much a slime as Reimers is. He wants Gary Null on regardless of the crap he hawks. In other words, to Brown, it's all about the money. Reimers and Brown are both morally bankrupt. It's two sides of the same coin.

    Oh, remember the Null retreat? If I remember correctly, it only brought in about $2,000. I doubt Brown's numbers...

    SDL

    ReplyDelete
  6. The other night, Max Schmid and his program were on for like six hours. Not that I mind him or his program. But that alone tells you something about the management, or lack thereof, in the station.

    He mentioned that he was, essentially, a one-man station during that time, in that inimitable tone of his: one of a parent who knows his or her kid screwed up again.

    Then, today, I turned on the radio just in time for Gary Null's show. Interesting that the signal went dead as he started to talk about his pre-emption and the duplicitous explanation he was given for it. Not that I want to defend Null's program or practices, but I think he had a right to be upset.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That wouldn't be the first time Null's show was met with a convenient transmitter power outage while talking about his troubles with WBAI and Pacifica. Maybe that is where Reimer's makes a reappearance, calling into WBAI and telling them to kill the audio.

      As much as I detest Null, as long as his show is carried by WBAI. he should be able to state his side of the ever crazier story.

      SDL

      Delete
    2. Reimers has cronies who act as apologists, staff and volunteers who keep his secrets, and good people who are tolerated because their programs lend a modicum of intellectual credibility to a station that serves as a soapbox for racist black rhetoric and small-time hustles.

      Delete
  7. Prescod had me in stitches today while eating my lunch. First she's not going to offer the Cuba pack anymore to punish people for not donating, AND she doesn't have to be on the air because she can write a check herself for the $350 she needs to make. Well, asswipe, why don't you write the check and get off the air? I hear your husband can afford it.

    SDL

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love it when people whose everyday performance on the air makes you cringe threaten to go off the air if you don't cough up money. What they consider to be a threat is more desirable than any premium the wave at you.

      If money can silence these oafs for certain, listeners will see it as a bargain. Reimers is an absolute disgrace. Haskins has not had an original thought in all the time I have suffered his idiocy. Notice how he not only repeats what others say, he utters his own insignificant comments twice. And why has over 3 decades of giving contributing listeners a bad deal not taught him to keep his mouth shut when other who have something to say do so.

      He was angry this morning, because Reimers' staff message contradict his claims of the so-called Morning Show being a much listened-to success.

      Delete
    2. The same Hay-tie Haskins who told us a few days ago that WBAI achieved its beg-a-thon goal...

      SDL

      Delete
    3. He also told us that he had ten copies f the "premium", a videomentory on the gentrification of Brooklyn. Oddly enough, he had the same ten copies this morning—I believe he sold two, that's $150.00

      At $75 an hour, this might just be begathon to end all begathons.

      Spending two morning hour pitching a disc that probably only interests people living in one borough (two people, it seems) is not a wise decision... but a typical one.

      Delete
  8. I just heard "Dr." Majid Ali say, Asthma is colitis of the lungs". Next time you have an asthma attack, insert a Preparation H tube down your throat and SQUEEZE.

    KGT

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. He should tell people the way to cure constipation is to put Tiger Balm on their buttholes...

      SDL

      Delete
    2. ROTFL!! True story - WBAI many years ago offered a Gary Null Intestinal Cleanser Kit - it raised so much money that after two days they shut it down. Not because they were not happy with the money, but because it was basically an ENEMA kit!!! One could imagine the tube with the letters WBAI inscribed on the tube!! LOL!! They did not want WBAI associated with an ENEMA!!!

      Delete
    3. At least Ali has an ounce of humility and sometimes concedes that conventional medicine has something to offer, unlike Null, who, in his supreme arrogance, claims to know more than every M.D. on the planet.

      Delete
    4. WBAI NEEDS an enema... make that an upper colonic...

      Ali is an actual medical doctor, if I am correct? Null is a mail order nutritionist. Need I say more?

      SDL

      Delete
    5. Ali is not a quack, which does, I agree, set him apart from the rest of the WBAI make-believe medical advisory group. Does Dr. Ali have a thing going? I think so, but who among them doesn't?

      Real management with honorable goals for the station would have weeded that program schedule a long time ago, perhaps by arranging on-air discussions wherein genuine engages wannabe.

      Delete
    6. "Dr." Majid Ali doesn't get thrown off the air because of the fear of the "Big I".
      WBAI's fear of being called Islamophobic.

      KGT

      Delete
  9. I've been turning on WBAI for a couple of minutes every hour this morning and can just feel the desperation coming through. Prescod's way of howling is actually an ideal representation of said desperation, and she's not even a WBAIte.

    SDL

    ReplyDelete
  10. Mimi Rosenberg was on the radio, again, this morning "hawking" copies of Gil Noble's 1977 T.V. documentary of Paul Robeson. She mispronounced the title of the documentary at least 3 times; calling it "The Tallest Tree In the Forest". Michael G. Haskins followed her up by also mispronouncing the title as he resumed his pitching. The actual title of the documentary is "The Tallest Tree In Our Forest". A significant difference. It appears Rosenberg and Haskins can't see the "forest for the trees". This is the kind of superficiality that prevents me from sending in donations to WBAI.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I actually saw that documentary on WABC when it first came out. It was excellent.
      It goes for $89 on Amazon. How much on WMiMi?

      KGT

      Delete
  11. The PNB is supposed to decide on bylaws amendments tomorrow. The details are on Pacifica's website. Chris, do you have an opinion on any or all of these proposals which WBAI won't get to consider?

    ReplyDelete