Pacifica ping pong

Leonard Lopate first came to WBAI in 1977, in the immediate aftermath of Ralph Engelman’s working in close concert with Percy Sutton’s cronies to attempt to redirect, refocus, and repurpose WBAI’s programming away from the original broad-based educational goals and mission to one of narrowing political advocacy, focused on a narrowing definition of ‘community’, accompanied by a move to an increasingly commercial ‘sound’, all in the hope and with the intention and expectation of folding WBAI in to Inner City Broadcasting’s then-thriving local media empire – where there was money to be made.

When existing staff resisted, unionized, and occupied the station for a month, with accompanying negative major press coverage, Engelman called on Sutton’s brother, a judge, to issue an order, and had the police evict all former staff from the station in order to secure complete control of WBAI.

[That same connection, a few years later, incidentally, denied the station’s existing real estate tax exemption, forcing the sale of ‘The Church’ on E62nd Street, the records of which sale, also incidentally, leave a good bit of the monies unaccounted for.]

The station manager, Anna Kosoff, and the program director, Pablo ‘Yoruba’ Guzman, then,  shortly after the police evicted the striking staff members, in the light of the accompanying negative media coverage, promptly fled/resigned in very short order.

Enter, stage left as it were, Leonard Lopate. Lopate, who was in the advertising game, and who had long aspired to a media role, and who was a graduate of Brooklyn College, represented himself as a graduate of Columbia, where his actual association was the fact that his younger brother, Phillip, attended, and who had via that connection gotten himself a program on WKCR, where he did jazz programming.

This credential secured him entree to WBAI, as a jazz expert and a Columbia graduate.

Mr. Lopate

Lopate quickly came to be widely disliked amongst engineering, scheduling, support, and management staff, which is arguably noteworthy as engineering and support staff were more than familiar with dealing with and working with ‘challenging’ personalities. Yet, even given that experience, Lopate stood out. At that time both the Director of Operations and the Chief Announcer, happened to be women. Suffice to say that he did not endear himself, in a fashion that makes it easy enough to visualize his later issues with WNYC.

He was arguably the most notable of the very few examples of on-air people who wouldn’t deign to engineer his own program, that being at that time considered effectively essential for any and all serious on-air talent.

It was something Lopate, however, considered beneath him.

In any event, what may be of some small interest here is not so much Lopate’s assumed superiority, complete with assumed/presumed ‘superior’ academic pedigree, associations, and qualifications, as his attitude toward other staff and talent, which provides a bit of insight as to why he was forced out of WNYC in abject disgrace.

Lopate would routinely assume an air of superiority, authority, and condescension toward other staff, particularly female staff. Within his ego-world he blithely assumed he was superior to, for example, staff who had in fact attended Juilliard and/or Ivy League schools, in part for the simple reason that he so assumed superiority that he was blithely and blissfully unaware of those facts, just as he assumed comparable superiority and condescension to a woman who, in fact, had done her graduate studies at Cornell and at Woods Hole.

Now, in a sense, with Lopate we’re talking about someone who is desperate to find someone – anyone – willing to give him access to air after his being forced out of WNYC in disgrace for his treatment of staff, women in particular.

These are not new behaviors, and the marvel is that it took so very, very long for WNYC to take public action.

So the circle closes, and it’s welcome home to today’s WBAI, where he will likely prove in every sense an exemplary fit.

~ ‘indigopirate’