As you may have noticed, Ken Mills' Spark News has been following the Pacifica crisis. Yesterday, the news was finally favorable, but the problems—though considerably reduced will not cease to threaten Pacifica until there has been a thorough internal cleanup. Of course, Mr. Mills is aware of that and I have highlighted two instances where he hits the nail on the head with astute observations.
1. "Pacifica still is dealing with a massive debt, dysfunctional management, listless programming and a very negative public image."
2. "Does Pacifica exist to be the 'voice of the voiceless' or to be the 'voice of progressive politics' or does it super-serve a specific community?"
On the air, microphone-privileged like to refer to WBAI as the voice for the voiceless, but it has not been that in many years. Neither is it, strictly speaking, a platform for progressive politics, not even the new Left. The opportunists who now dominate the program schedule strive to serve "a specific community"—more accurately, they have chosen to aim their rhetoric at a very small segment of New York's black community, regularly resorting to propaganda and embroidered Afrocentric history.
A daily diet of such perfidious race-based—or downright racist—diatribe has sparked the dramatic loss that today makes WBAI insignificant and its listenership the lowest in its 58-year history as a Pacifica-owned station.
 |
| CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE |
Planning exercises? You're supposed to be the IED. Start kicking ass and taking names.
ReplyDeleteGet a CFO. Get rid of Berthold. Just do something anything to start the ball rolling.
The last thing he should be doing is taking surveys. Come up with a mission statement
and present it. When the inevitable pushback starts, present solid arguments for why
your program makes sense. You the IED need to set the tone. If you're working out of
your inbox, you're working on other people'e priorities not your own.
agreed with both article and comment above.
ReplyDeletesee more words, thoughts at http://KPFKcommentators.blogspot.com