Many moons ago, when I was appointed Manager of WBAI by Pacifica President Hallock Hoffman, he told me that I would be the face of the station to the outside world. "Don't worry about it, Chris," he said, "just remember that you represent the city's most significant and revered radio station."
I thought of that last night as I heard my current counterpart make two rare appearances on the air. This, I said to myself, is a man into whose hands WBAI has been placed for close to a decade—the personification of the radio station I once spoke of with pride. What happened?
Here are the two pitches by Berthold Reimers I heard. First, we hear him with his friend, master scammer Tony Bates, a live tag that followed the KPFK originated Jimmy Dore Show. Next, he shows up on Green Street, sounding desperate and incoherent. Bear in mind that this is the man who supposedly meets with the outside world to generate interest and support for the station.
"...In fact, we are now in much bigger trouble than we were two weeks ago. As most of you are aware, neither WBAI nor Pacifica has a cash reserve. Pacifica can no longer bail us out when we are short of cash. So we need to raise money fast." [Berthold Reimers, St. Valentines day, 2014]. Berthold should continue to make guest appearances on the air so listeners can hear for themselves what an inarticulate idiot he truely is. Tony Bates should just take his guitar and ride into the California sunset. Really, enough is enough.
ReplyDeleteMy mistake. He says they do French programming. When is it on, because I haven't heard anything about it.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, this is just two examples of a desperate man unfolding.
SDL
I think he may be getting French confused with Ebonics..
DeleteBerthold is a POS. Spoke with a current producer at WBAI and she says she hates the place. Berthold should take what is left of his dignity and leave.
ReplyDeleteThe first part where he is talking to Bates about comedy shows is not bad but he sounds just awful in the second part. If he's going to go on the air, he needs to prepare a script or at least be on the air with someone. You can hear the frustration in his voice. He's getting it from all sides including Pacifica, both factions and programmers resisting his changes to the schedule.
ReplyDeleteIt seems Off The Hook is cancelled for tonight due to their refusing to hawk any premiums until premiums owed for their past shows are delivered. A little hypocritical and a bit too late, in my opinion, since they have been hawking premiums for years knowing they wouldn't be delivered.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, there is a discussion raging over on twitter on their account @2600 and elsewhere.
SDL
It is presently 4:27 AM. Nothing but "dead air" silence on WBAI. I don't know how long. Margaret Prescod was on pitching her rehashed Cuban material when I nodded out.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Matthew the Merciful blew her out off listening range.
DeleteSome interesting points from the LSB 'meeting'. They're concerned about programming changes being done unilaterally by the GM and are finally looking at program evaluation. I agree with that but I expressed concern it could be seen as self-serving because it appears to be in response to specific changes as opposed to the need to update programming in general to boost listenership and funding.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like there is support for recreating a program council. I don't know enough about it but that would be three separate entities weighing in on programming including the LSB and the CAB.
Bob Lederer reported that two stations, not including WBAI, no longer qualify for CPB funding based on overall listenership and number of minority listeners.
For all the blather from Null last beg-a-thon about his pitching paying for all past due premiums to be mailed, I still want to know why so many premiums remain to be mailed. His shit doesn't seem to organic anymore.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you have to wonder how many of the Cubans in Africa DVDs (which must be burns and not pressed official ones) must have been sold and how much the filmmaker received in royalties for it.
SDL
blosdale with the greatest lies of history pack ... the bai story . get it now !!! haha
ReplyDeleteIt's really funny that WBAI pushes the same premiums, considering they aren't selling well enough to matter. I bet they would do better selling "official" Black Lives Matter T shirts.
ReplyDeleteMaybe they can get a liquor license and just hawk malt liquor? Forties are a popular drink among their target market, you know.
SDL
What gets me—besides their reruns of established flops—is that they claim buying these DVDs helps to solve some of the world's problems. It does not seem to occur to them that the listenership is so low that it defies measure, that it now mainly consists of people whose world is often restricted to the hood, and that the DVDs they buy are not likely to be played more than once. WBAI's con artists don't give a rat's ass how the lies and distortions they sell will be used—they just want the money.
DeleteBates stresses the fact that WBAI does not receive funding from other organization—he wants the naïve listenership to regard the absence of CPB funding as evidence of the station's courage and independence. The truth is, of course, that they haven't received those sizable grants because of their own mismanagement.
People like Bates, Reimers, Kathy Davis, Haskins, et al are crooks who prey on WBAI's dwindling, ever blacker audience.
Never thought I would say this, but Pacifica's plug needs to be pulled,.
To be fair, ever since I started listening in 1978, WBAI never mentioned receiving money from the CBP until recently. It was always the people as the sole supporters.
DeleteEven more silent is the renting of the two sub-carriers to a religious station. I'd really like to know more about this, but it seems to be pretty secretive.
SDL
There was considerable opposition to taking CPB monies for fear of becoming dependent on them and less closely tied to and accountable to listener support.
DeletePreviously there had been a scattering of minor individual grants here and there, eg, to support training an intern or two, but the grants were diffuse, fairly minor in scale, and generally sought and secured by individuals or individual department heads.
The decision to go with CPB was, as most things came to be, politically motivated, in order to support the redefinition of the station’s purpose as one of political advocacy rather than its foundational purpose of wide-ranging coverage, discussion, presentation of the arts, children’s programming, etc.
~ ‘indigopirate’
Ask your doctor about post traumatic slave syndrome . After he laughs in your face ....lol
ReplyDeleteThey have to be running this into the ground on purpose . NOBODY can be this stupid!!!
I listened to Randy Credico and Jimmy Dorr on the archive. I like having Randy in drive time. He has some interesting guests and is talking about current events instead of the usual blather. I heard so many complaints about Dorr that I had to check it out. They are right. He's just not that funny. I would like a more light hearted show in that time slot but not Dorr.
ReplyDelete10-6-2006- 8 p.m.
ReplyDeleteThis premium which being offered is on the internet for free:
https://soundcloud.com/guns-and-butter-1/the-assassination-of-jfk-the-garrison-interview-part-one-garrison-davis-and-stone-269
The assassination of JFK by Jim Garrison narrated by Roscoe Mercer
Yes, Bonnie Faulkner is as dishonest as the rest of them.
DeleteI just read the NY Times obit article on Rosko.
Delete"In 1992, when he learned he had cancer, he refused chemotherapy, turning instead to alternative medicine". Guess who he was listening to.
KGT
p.s.- I remember now- it was prostate cancer. He mentioned it on the morning show with Bernard some 25 years ago. He said that he was doing fine.
DeleteKGT
just checked in, only to hear none other than reparations ron ..guess their trying to tap the
ReplyDeletelate night racist crowd. How utterly sad is this ?
Hey Chris. I'm enjoying playoff baseball right now. Is there room on WBAI for sports-related programming or that too bourgeois? It might be fun to broadcast some amateur sports or some kind of sports talk with some Dave Zirin type programming and promote the station in the process.
ReplyDeleteOn Sunday nights they have their sports & racism show, Sports Qualified.
DeleteSDL
Don't forget Benjamin, the dodo who whines about baseball being too white. He is one of the race-controlled regulars on Haskins' morning mistake.
DeleteI just found out Zirin is on KPFA. Its a shame. Now would be a great time to have him on WBAI.
DeleteMumbles just said he is 81 years old. He lost two years. I hope it was on purpose.
ReplyDeleteKGT
It's a rerun from, I believe, the 4th of July, 2014.
ReplyDelete(JustAListener)
ReplyDeleteSDL said: "It's really funny that WBAI pushes the same premiums, considering they aren't selling well enough to matter."
Ah, you don't understand Reimers' logic. They've been getting too many complaints about unfulfilled premiums, but if they don't sell any premiums then they won't get more complaints about them going unfulfilled...
Remember, Reimers was brought in to solve the premium backlog, and he's gonna solve it through insolvency!
Oh! So there is a method to the madness. Now I see...
DeleteSDL
I'm waiting, with "bated breath", for Tony Bates to pull out the "Gwen Scott" bootlegs from his bag of tricks during this ill-fated Fall fundraiser.
ReplyDeleteFirst he will tell us that an autopsy revealed her to having been of Afrikkkan ancestry.
DeleteDammit! I'm having two slices of pizza when I could have had some unregulated mystery amino acid. Pacifica better hope no one ever gets poisoned or killed by this sort of crap they push. They'll get a lawsuit that will put them out of business.
ReplyDeleteSDL
Yup. Did you hear the main ameno sister lie about an Austrian "patient" telling her that WBAI is wonderful, because it allows free speech, citing as an example that Austrian radio would never tolerate critique of the government.
DeleteSuch BS!
Was that Dr. David Minkoff pushing Perfect Amino which addresses protein deficiency?
Delete@Chris: No, I turned it off pretty quickly. It's all crap.
DeleteSDL
For all of Gary "Waddaya Do" Null's yammer, the fact is the book he's pushing is less than one third the price on amazon AND, for as popular he wants us to think he is, it garners a mere two reviews.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Woman-Life-Womans-Healing/dp/1609806743/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1475887627&sr=8-1&keywords=gary+null+healthy+woman+healthy+life
SDL
It's Sunday morning and Daulton Anderson is missing in action (but that's okay, because he has another "gospel music" radio gig at WHCR-93.5 from 8-11 AM). Apparently Anderson's "spiritual" listener's weren't donating enough money in his 6-8 AM slot at WBAI. So what do the broadcast geniuses,Bates and Reimers,do? They replace Anderson with a Ron Daniels "secular" re-broadcast from a week ago which black and non-black listeners are also not contributing money to.
ReplyDeleteTo compound that slap in the face, Ron Daniels' guest was a man who wants reparations from the Catholic Church! :)
DeleteI stand self-corrected. I meant to say in my previous post here that Daulton Anderson's other radio "gig" is at WHCR-90.3 FM, not 93.5 FM. My apologies.
ReplyDeleteAlthough the radio signal is stll off the air, the internet stream is alive and well with Kathryn Davis pushing some whey protein powder as a premium. With all the "weight" Davis carries around she should be the last person to talk about anything related to health.
ReplyDeleteDT, the god of decency and technology, has finally spotted the missing "L" – these are not fund drives, they are fund drivel. Kathy is the queen of drivel. It is now after 6 AM and we should all be bowing to DT, who is sparing us the agony of Haskins & Brown.
Delete