You're hired!

There are still people who genuinely care about WBAI's disintegration (pun unintended) and have made efforts to put it back on track and turn it in the right direction. Such attempts are, as some of us have experienced, not only ignored by local management, but also mocked by those who feel threatened by it. It's a trite scenario lifted straight from the pages of a well-worn Hollywood script. A study in frustration that has us testing the edge of our seat even when the outcome is as obvious as the plot line. 

We have seen this played out on WBAI in recent years. A steady chipping away at the original principles (underlined or simply understood) has left the NYC area with  the shell of a radio station that once was a beacon of enlightenment, artistic vision and thought-provoking cultural and political insight. 

WBAI is no longer a station that reflects the likes and dislikes of its listener sponsors, a lone voice in former FCC Chairman Newt Minow's wasteland that engages in dialogue with an audience that keeps it on the air. It has long since lost the trust of that listenership and, indeed, the listenership itself. Today, it has been reduced to an outlet where inarticulateness and shallowness dominate a stagnant program schedule, a barely known speck on the FM scale that narrowly aims sales pitches and race-flavored propaganda at a small, gullible fraction of one ethnic community. It is a station that will sell us tap water as a "cure" for everything but the common cold, tell us that we have among us reptilians who are likely to steal our auras; that there was no moon landing in 1969, it was a studio fantasy with actors and a lunar hologram; that the trans-Atlantic slave trade never took place, because Africans migrated to North America on their own hundreds of years earlier and built amazing pyramids and cities. Of course, these cities are long gone and unrecorded, because it was against the law to publish books in the New World, or something like that. It's difficult to keep up with the lies they come up with—tell Haskins and others of his ilk that his obsession with slavery is being challenged by a newcomer's theory, another black man, and he is likely to have a nervous breakdown.

Apropos breakdowns, I think you might find interesting the incident that led up to Andrea Katz becoming the eternal Interim whose job as Director of Development shows neither direction nor development after several years. Word has it that she has become Reimers' unofficial gofer, but there was a time when she actually tried to introduce some sense into his compulsive dysfunction. She is now all but forgotten, yet—we are told—still on the payroll and, essentially, a victim of incompetent management.

Like Reimers himself, Ms. Katz is a Pacifica expense whose presence as a paid employee is inexplicable and almost—as 'indigopirate' so eloquently suggests—surreal:

It’s a little like the worst nonexistent episode of The Twilight Zone ever. No, worse than that… like watching the slow, lingering disintegration of something once living, once whole, once alive, once capable of growth, of… of… consequence…. No, worse than that, like an incarnation of the pathetic fallacy… an incarnation of self-loathing projected in impotent hushed fury against a wall of indifference, a wall of absence… the raving meandering madness of would-be performers as a simmering, stammering, guttural fear gnaws within them… that they are in fact absent an audience, they themselves inconsequent, they themselves absent… yet compelled to tell themselves in whispered voices that they aren’t alone, that they matter… as cardboard molders about them and the lights flicker ever dimmer, their voices fading, even in their desperation, their stridency, their despondency, their despair.

As somewhere in the night another voice whispers: Fear Rules. 

The video centered on the rash departure of Ms. Katz was posted by the producers of the reality show and brought to our attention by "Just a Listener," a concerned former devotee of WBAI whose past attempts to help the station were ignored. Friday, when the hiring of Ms. Katz was brought up and questioned in a comment by Ed Manfredonia, it occurred to me that it is a good, if regrettable example of the irrational hiring practices that form the basis for so many of Pacifica's problems. I decided to devote a blog entry to it, because it offers an important detail to anyone who might still be wondering what is wrong with WBAI's mismanagement. In the end, the slow trip that had brought WBAI to the edge can be traced to unprofessional, ill-conceived hiring practices. Berthold Reimers himself is living proof of that. 

Andrea Katz clearly has personal problems for which she should be given help, but hiring her to handle the station's public relations was not her mistake as much as it was Reimers'. It points to a systemic Pacifica problem that is as fatal to the organization tangibly as it is to the spirit that gave it birth over sixty years ago.