Pledging in the Dark

Will you receive the product they sold you? Well, that's still the big question, but now we learn that it's not the only one. All is apparently not well at Pledge Call Center.

Clicking on the text will enlarge it.

March 11, 2014: Total raised (sans ca. 93 sustainers) appears to be $306,691. $193,309 short of $500,000 goal. However, this drive was originally scheduled to end in February.
Note: figures may be wrong—their records appear to be screwed up.

If I had a sledge hammer....

They can't blame this one on hurricane Sandy. It's the not atypical 2009 WBAI LSB meeting from which the sledge hammer still of Tony Ryan stems. The frustrated suspendered finger-pointer is BlueBoard overlord R. Paul Martin, getting an overdose of free-for-all speech. I could be wrong, but I believe the most prominent disrupter is the late Monroe Litman, best known for his perennial call-ins.

The "family" that shouts together goes down together.

As the deck chairs pile up...

WBAI is an amazing place. You've got people working hard to make up for inexcusable neglect in fulfilling pledge deals (collecting the money seems to be less of a problem) while that and other avoidable problems are driving the station deeper and deeper into a cesspool created by Pacifica and the amateurs it hires to occupy the front office. In the meantime, those who could do something about it seem oblivious to the outrageously bad, stagnant program schedule, which now continues intermittently as listeners are insulted with reruns of questionable infomercials and relentless marketing of Gary Null's products. WBAI has never been more deserving of the "Radio Unlistenable" tag.

The station's web site was always clumsy and inadequate, but now it is more unreliable than ever—the program schedule is hopelessly outdated and names are misspelled; Berthold Reimers' claims regarding its efficacy and popularity are—like so much of what he says—untrue, and even the on-air people are confused. We have seen this before, but—like everything else at Reimers' BAI—nothing is corrected, so hosts are still showing up for programs that have been pre-empted by this marathon without end, or not showing up for shows that are, in fact, still scheduled. It's bad enough that they haven't been given the right information, but Reimers compounds the confusion by issuing misinformation. Even his right-hand person, Andrea Katz, is a victim of his ineptitude. Here she tells the producers that she has not been told how long the extended marathon will last. No communication, no planning ahead, either:

That was yesterday, March 5th. Here's today's:   

The severance pay has still not been received by the 19 people laid off, so there is a great possibility of lawsuits in that connection, and then there is the matter of Reimers' raffles—funds were raised from listeners with the promise of a weekly Apple iPod Nano, but there were no Nanos nor could Reimers come up with the money to acquire them. Ditto an Apple laptop. The whole matter was simply dropped, as far as I can tell, no announcements, no apologies, no respect for the listener-supporters, no morals.

Tony Ryan patrols a 2009 LSB meeting, armed with a rather
menacing stance and sledgehammer. To see this startling still
in context, go to the previous post

Reimers has surrounded himself with sycophants, people who—for various reasons, mostly to hold onto their air time—cling to WBAI in the knowledge that they would not be accepted elsewhere. Of course, it isn't really their air time, but bad management gives them reason to believe that it is—and therein lies a big factor in WBAI's decline.

Why, for example, was Sidney Smith among the 19 and not Michael Haskins or Tony Ryan, who cannot hold a candle to Sid when it comes to operating the equipment?

Don't you love what Reimers and his cronies call the WBAI "family"?

AND THEN THERE ARE THESE OBSERVATIONS:

They are part of Terry Goodman's response to a rambling, somewhat disconnected post ny Jim Dingeman, who heads the WBAI CAB. Terry Goodman has been associated with Pacifica and KPFK for about forty years, serving station and foundation in various capacities and on various levels. Over the past few years, I have been impressed by his knowledge of the bylaws and mentalities that dictate Pacifica's directions and misdirections. He is an astute observer whose honesty may not always win him friends, but certainly respect—Pacifica needs more people like that. I wish he would contribute to this blog, because he has a marvelous way of cutting through the crap.

What you see here is but a part of Terry's response—he may have me beat when it comes to writing lengthy posts, but he has a lot more to say that is worthwhile.

"A tipping point was reached about thirty years ago, when the most powerful staff members at several stations silently re-characterized the Foundation's purpose as broadcasting in alignment with their consensus political ideologies, a situation that has persisted with increasingly open acknowledgement. This new "left progressive" purpose is fundamentally hostile to all potential managers, staff members, and listeners with broader tastes or more open minds. Nonconforming staffers were made less and less welcome over the years, and listenership shrank more often than it grew. A corresponding steady decline in accuracy, honesty, research, professional quality, pre-production effort, educational value, and diversity of opinion severely limited future possibilities for change and growth. Even Pacifica's best programming now is frequently redundant, with different hosts exploring the same issues again and again in a similar manner from nearly identical perspectives.

The pre-democratization Pacifica National Board and management, also corrupted by the existing Mission drift, may have recognized part of the problem, but blundered terribly in attempting to address it. 

The post-democratization structure of Pacifica left the primary responsibility for addressing audience drop issues (as before) in the hands of station General Managers and Program Directors. Pacifica hired its new General Managers and Program Directors largely on the basis of political ideology, personal loyalty, or factional loyalty rather than Mission loyalty, broadcast vision or managerial competence. Managers did not believe themselves to have the option of rejecting the local consensus political ideology that severely limited possibilities for change and growth, so sometimes consolidated local supporters around a subset of the recharacterized Pacifica Mission, further narrowing each station's audience.

The LSBs do not control station programming. They support or resist the decisions of managers that they occasionally have a role in selecting, pestering, or ousting.

The low ratings of every Pacifica station is pretty clear evidence that they all need reformatting. If management with the vision and courage to attempt this was able to sneak in, its decisions would be loudly and perhaps violently opposed by local station staff, governance, and listener-subscribers.

Audio and video programming compatible with Pacifica's stated Mission is now more readily found on the internet than on Pacifica's terrestrial broadcast station.

The growth of "premium problems" is evidence of bad management. The shrinkage of "premium problems" is evidence of good management.

Pacifica must produce new programs with relevance to contemporary events, but it need never broadcast the immediately forgettable while it maintains a rich archive of well-produced educational specials and unique performances of historical interest or timeless merit. 

Any change that reduces the airtime of any program is opposed, at a minimum, by the impacted programmer and the program's fans. If a station's Program Director is allowed to be successful when cancelling a program, multiple programmers and listeners may feel threatened by such a success, especially if the quality or popularity of their favorite programs is low. A typical Pacifica response to PD or GM attempts to improve programming is complaints of improper process and demands from multiple programmers and their supporters to "restore the grid." 

It is not realistic to expect ego surrender from any air talent, especially good air talent. It is not realistic to expect any air talent to recognize that it isn't good. The best and worst Program Directors typically have egos almost as large as the programmers whose work it is their responsibility to evaluate.

I don't see any rush to sell a Pacifica station, which requires membership approval if not court ordered. I have seen a delay in the scheduled consideration of LMA proposals. If an LMA successfully facilitates a needed reformatting at WBAI, other Pacifica stations might well face similar remedy in the not-too-distant future.

One reason why they left...

Yesterday, on a list-serv far away, someone suggested that WBAI ought to conduct a listener study to find out why their ranks have do drastically dwindled. According to a recently published survey of New York FM listenership, WBAI now has fewer people tuned in than any other station, and that includes some whose call letters will probably not be familiar to you.

"How can that be?," ask some of WBAI's fossilized fixtures, "My show has lots of listeners." Unfortunately, that can not be said of any the current offerings, even the good and decent ones, for years of amateur, self-serving crap has spoiled it for those who worked hard and with true dedication. When you delude yourself and blithely keep treading the old wheel year after year, it may be difficult to face reality, but it is no secret that there has been a gradual, massive exodus over the past few years. I'm sure there are still some who think like Bob Fass, who called in to his own show a couple of weeks ago and more or less attributed the low audience figures to wishful thinking on the part of people who want WBAI to go under. 

These days, as a serious decision regarding the possibility of sale, lease,frequency swap, etc. is allegedly close to being made by the Pacifica Board, the panic level has heightened considerably. It manifests itself in different ways, depending upon the nature of the eventual loss: Last Sunday morning, we heard sincere emotion expressed by opera lover Ivan Hametz, who dutifully and without pay shows up week after week to share his passion for the music. On the other end of the spectrum, we find Gary Null, who seems to love himself more than anybody else does. He shows up every weekday and is all over the schedule during fundraising drives. His stake in WBAI is not as noble as Mr. Hanetz's, for he is there to further his own commercial business and one can tell by his threats and histrionics that the prospect of losing WBAI as a marketing venue is not something he takes lightly.

Of course, Null is but the most prominent of today's angst-ridden crew, and he does have his following—whether it outnumbers the listeners who left 99.5 in disgust over him has not been determined, but he is often cited as one of several factors.

It really boils down to an across the board lowering of standard and ethics. Null probably led the parade of quacks that are so prevalent on the program schedule, and he is no mere walk-on when it comes to WBAI's other listener-repelling blemish: fear mongering.

There is much of that inherent in his health crusade—probably more than there need be—but Mr. Null is now churning out videos as fast as he does books. These are tossed-in-the-pot, formulaic "documentaries" featuring spoken statements interlaced with bland music of the kind radio sound effects libraries used to offer. by people whose name is likely to be recognized.

Null's tabloid "journalism" is the perfect complement to the station's other fact-twisting fare—just enough truth to ignite doubts regarding the veracity of what people are hearing. If it were not for years of lowering WBAI's intellectual level, this sort of thing would have even fewer takers, but it does relatively well in terms of fundraising. 

As Null crawls farther and farther out on that limb, he competes with such established WBAI fabulators as Kathy Davis and Geoff Brady. Like Null—and almost every other WBAI interviewer—there is only one point of view. they still call it "free speech radio," but they make it decidedly one-sided, by omission.

Brady's weekly program, "In Other News," is like a satirical sketch, except that it isn't. If you have ever heard Kathy Davis' show, "Heart of Mind," you know that she is out of touch with reality, a person moved by age-old vibrations, angels, and such. Brady is perhaps more gullible than anything else. His guests can make insane claims and he will not offer a hint of challenge. Put these two together with Michael Haskins and you have your finger on the pulse of the intellectually challenged. Add a guest like Brit Stuart Wilde and you have something that will make a Dali painting look like Gainsborough's little boy.

Mr. Wilde's twin sister was a pop singer and he owned a Carnaby Street bluejeans business in the days of the British Invasion. As lifestyles changed, he retooled, relocated to California, and became a jack of all trades. His music endeavors included hip hop and lyric writing; he made frequent theatrical performances, gave lectures and took a deep, apparently lucrative dive into metaphysics. He also had a sense of humor, so it may well be that he was putting everybody on, including Brady (no challenge there). He wrote a slew of self-published books, one of which mesmerized Brady and became a WBAI premium.

Mr. Wilde passed away almost a year ago, but no mention is made of that nor of the fact that this program is old enough to have been originally aired from 120 Wall St.

Here is a series of sound bites from Brady's fundraising special of yore—I kept enough of Wilde in there to give you an idea of where he was coming from and there is a taste of Brady's awe over the purple hand of Jesus. My favorite part of this clip, however, is the "profound" input from local philosopher, Ms. Davis, and how can we not appreciate Haskins going all goosepimply over the thought of "blowing love." You have to hear it for yourself.  —Chris 

When it goes to your head...

R. Paul Martin's despotic monitoring of the BlueBoard is a subject of some discussion on the PacificaRadiowaves list these days, putting him on the defensive and conjuring up all sorts of images.