http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/nyregion/16wbai.html
By MICHAEL POWELL
Published: January 15, 2010
Comrades, comrades.
Alex Steinberg, a late-middle-aged self-described revolutionary
Socialist in a pullover sweater, attempted to bring to order to the
board of WBAI, also known as "free-speech radio." And even better
known as New York City's last FM outpost of lefty, vegan, hip-hop,
poetry-reading and often but not invariably conspiracy-minded radio.
His efforts did not go terribly well.
"You're a reactionary fraud, Alex!"
"Why don't you resign, you scab?"
Mr. Steinberg held the microphone on Wednesday evening, a bemused
smile frozen in place. He waited out the hecklers, not a few of whom
were his fellow board members, and turned to the next order of
business: whether to seat a newly elected member, Lynne F. Stewart.
Ms. Stewart is a well-known radical lawyer or rather was a lawyer
until she was convicted of material support for terrorism, disbarred
and packed off to a federal prison. Such credentials are like catnip
to WBAI voters, who elected her last autumn before she began serving
her sentence. Some board members worry that for WBAI, which is
forever on the edge of insolvency, not to mention anarchy, an
imprisoned member is of little utility.
For Stewart partisans, however, such talk is profoundly
counter-revolutionary. So Nia Bediako, a board member, dressed down
the chairman, Mitchel Cohen, who opposed seating Ms. Stewart. "You
very insensitively, very unprogressively, said perhaps we could meet
in prison," said Ms. Bediako, her voice dipped in an inkwell of
disdain. "This from a so-called revolutionary!"
For 50 years, WBAI, at 99.5 FM, has occupied a wavelength all its own
as one of the more eccentric outposts of countercultural politics and
arts in the nation. The station's license is controlled (that being a
loose term of art) by the Pacifica Foundation, which was founded in
1946 by Lewis Hill, a wealthy conscientious objector during World War
II. Pacifica also owns four other radio stations, in Washington,
Houston, Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif.
WBAI is where George Carlin in 1973 uttered "seven words you can
never say on television," not one of which can be printed in this
newspaper. The F.C.C. fined the station, and was upheld in a case
that went to the Supreme Court.
This is where Seymour Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre,
and where the station's reporters dug deep into the Iran-Contra
scandal of the 1980s. It is where Allen Ginsberg and Abbie Hoffman
exchanged howls and where international celebrities once pulled off a
four-day, round-the-clock, reading of "War and Peace."
Margot Adler is one of many WBAI alumni who have moved over to
National Public Radio. "It was a wild smorgasbord, from politics to
parapsychology to psychology to feminism," Ms. Adler recalled this
week. "And it created community on the air in a way that nothing does anymore."
WBAI still produces and broadcasts innovative programming from its
cramped studios on Wall Street. "Democracy Now!," an investigative
news program that was born at WBAI and is broadcast weekdays at 8
a.m., is now carried by well over 100 radio and public-access
television stations. Its co-host, Amy Goodman, and WBAI's senior
national correspondent, Robert Knight, have each won mainstream
journalism's highest honors for reporting from Indonesia, Panama and Nigeria.
And yet, WBAI has fallen into a trough in the past decade. It has
suffered management coups and countercoups, and assailed some of its
own journalists as running dogs. (The descriptive language can tend
toward early Lenin.) A governing structure that Mr. Knight describes
as "so-called democracy," controlled by elected boards steeped in
political and ethnic sectarianism, has threatened to extinguish what
made the station unique.
WBAI is awash in debt. Before Pacifica imposed new managers last
year, the station had fallen so far behind on rent for its
transmitter atop the Empire State Building that it nearly went off the air.
Even staying on the air on a coveted spot at the center of an FM
dial does not guarantee a mass audience.
Doug Henwood is the host of a weekly economics program, "Behind the
News," but he does not pretend that his show is widely heard. "If you
look at the Arbitron numbers, there are fewer than 1,000 listeners in
some hours," he said. "You can stand on a soapbox in Times Square and
get more listeners."
The median age of the audience is 62, station managers say, and 65
percent are white. Gray hair, albeit pulled back in ponytails,
predominated at the board meeting in a hall in Downtown Brooklyn, as
did Chilean sweaters and Palestinian scarves. A few of those in the
audience kept their eyes buried in history books, looking up only to
sigh, while others knitted as all hell broke loose.
The effect was like wandering into a dysfunctional family at
Thanksgiving. Everyone seems to have known everyone too long; the
backbiting never stopped.
"He's C.I.A., you know that?"
"She's a Stalinist!"
Michael Vincent Crea held aloft a cardboard sign celebrating Ms.
Stewart, and periodically shouted about totalitarians. At that, Mr.
Cohen, the chairman, would turn around to Mr. Crea (pronouncing the
name Cray) and implore, "Please shut up!"
Mr. Crea, in turn, would stamp his feet and scream: "It's Cree-a!
Cree-a! I've told you this a thousand times. CREE-A!"
Danny Schechter, who has worked in mainstream journalism and at WBAI,
adopts an anthropologist's detachment. "I wouldn't call it a
collective," he said. "I'd call it a collection."
Mr. Cohen, a poet, describes himself as "independently poor." He is
something like a voice of moderation, in that he wants the station to
feature more music and humor, and favors seating board members who
are not in prison.
"They put forth a proposal for a Rube Goldberg scheme where they
would get information to Lynne Stewart in prison and delay decisions
a few months while she ponders it," he said.
Mr. Cohen also embraces 9/11 conspiracy theory, or the moderate wing
of that movement, anyway. He draws a line at those who believe that
the planes that hit the World Trade Center towers were holograms.
"The 9/11 stuff was our fastest seller during the pledge drives," he noted.
Wednesday's meeting did not settle the Stewart question, but it
tarried late into the night. Robert's Rules of Order was a
fetishistic text, embraced and ignored. ("Lisa, you are out of
order." "Point of order, Mitch this is nothing but a fascist dictatorship!")
When the treasurer acknowledged a typographic error in a number in a
financial report, Mimi Rosenberg, an on-air host and a housing lawyer, erupted.
"You've got a C.F.O. who doesn't proofread?" she yelled. "You are a
backward, reactionary fraud!"
WBAI employs two hulking, tattooed bouncers to keep order, although
neither man was so foolish as to give in to incessant demands to
evict this member or that. As the yelling reached a particular
keening cacophony, the more hulking of the two whistled and demanded
a cease-fire: "You should call a time out and every one of you should
go to the bathroom and chill out."
For a moment, the room fell into something like decorum. Then the
revolutionary ruckus swelled anew.
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