SEVEN MONTHS OF THE "NEW" WBAI

An Evaluation of What's Happened Under the Management of Utrice Leid

Mimi Rosenberg
July 29, 2001

   It has been seven months since the so-called "Christmas coup" of last December, when Pacifica management fired WBAI General Manager Valerie Van Isler, program director Bernard White and a host of others, and installed Utrice Leid as interim GM. Since then, there has been an escalating war of words and actions between Leid and her allies at the station and the coalition of concerned listener-activists and fired producers that has sought to roll back the coup. Now - at a time when the national Pacifica crisis has reached a major turning point that could lead to either a negotiated settlement or heightened confrontation - would seem to be a suitable moment to dispassionately and objectively review what has happened at WBAI with an eye towards achieving a local solution that could itself help ease tensions at the national level. 
   A basic premise of this review is that Leid should be held responsible and/or given credit for what has happened at the station under her tenure. While she was installed by Pacifica Executive Director Bessie Wash, we are assuming that - except for the firing of Van Isler - Leid herself is primarily responsible for taking action against the more than 20 other people who have been fired and banned from the station, ranging from White to the most recent victim, celebrated journalist Robert Knight, who was removed just last week. Therefore, it makes sense to evaluate what has happened at WBAI over the last seven months by comparing the product that has actually gone out over the airwaves to what had been produced by the many programmers who have now been silenced. 
   Is what WBAI's listener-sponsors have heard so far in 2001 an improvement over what had gone before? To avoid politicizing the issue, we will address it from two basic perspectives. Is the content and character of the programming in keeping with the mission statement of the Pacifica Foundation? And does it meet basic standards of professional radio? ("Professionalism" being the very criterion by which Leid herself has claimed she should be judged.)

Content & Character: The biggest and most immediate change was the decimation of "WakeUp Call," the station' s highly rated signature morning program that ran from 6 to 9 a.m. Under the direction of Bernard White, the show served as a forum for community organizers and other activists who used the airwaves to provide empowering information that listeners could not get anywhere else on the radio dial. In addition to guests, other programmers (all of them now gone) with explicit areas of expertise in areas such as finance, health, and law and social justice were given regular segments to further educate WBAI's knowledge-hungry audience. All this was in keeping with Pacifica's mission statement "to obtain access to sources of news not commonly brought together in the same medium; and to employ such varied sources in the public presentation of accurate, objective, comprehensive news on all matters vitally affecting the community." 
   And now? After a chaotic initial period in which different hosts came and went, the new WBAI has settled in with a morning show hosted by Santiago Nieves and Paul DiRienzo. One has only to listen to the show for an hour to realize how much has changed. There are no regular, produced, specialized segments. There are fewer guests overall, and even fewer guests with genuine roots in the community. Instead of issues like corporate globalization and police brutality that WBAI's traditional listeners want to hear about, the hosts prefer to talk about such things as the state of the subways, cell-phone etiquette (discussed with a representative from Sprint, no less), and Mayor Giuliani's mistress. That is fodder for AM radio, and far from Lew Hill' s dream. On top of that, Nieves and DiRienzo (who often bicker and clearly don't like each other) spend most of their airtime venting their own opinions and stressing their own supposed expertise instead of being facilitators for the few progressive guests they do have.
   Leid has said: "We are fast developing an intolerance for individualism; it is self-destructive. So we are working hard at developing a consciousness of collectivism - we are a collective, not a collection of individuals." Let's leave aside the curious idea that individualism is "self destructive" at what is supposed to be free-speech radio. And let' s leave aside the fact that far from being a "collective," WBAI is now being run in a dictatorial manner, with no apparent input from anyone at the station aside from Leid herself, that very few shareholders of for-profit corporations would tolerate. But even taken at her word, the contradictions are obvious. The morning show is now nothing but a celebration of the individual egos of Nieves and DiRienzo - it is purely personality-driven radio that, again, belongs on the AM dial, not the Pacifica Network. 
   Even when the new WBAI attempts to be political, the results have frequently been disastrous. Marjorie Moore now hosts the 6 to 7 a.m. slot before the morning show. She often discusses New Age topics, like "Egyptian Yoga," for which there is certainly a place. But one of her very first guests was a former CIA agent who hawked his book justifying CIA intervention in the Third World. More recently, during WBAI's Spring Fund Drive, Moore gave many hours of airtime to far-right conspiracy author Jim Marrs and used his book "Rule by Secrecy: The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids" as a fundraising premium The book recycles the tired, odious myths about Jewish bankers running the world.(Marrs also claimed on the air that the Civil War was unnecessary because the South would have ended slavery on its own by the 1870s.) Though some - perhaps the "new listeners" Leid is searching for - pledged money for the book, many listeners were left appalled. Weeks later, for example, when an elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor called in to politely point out that Marrs' viewpoint was straight out of Hitler, Moore abruptly cut him off She then allowed another caller to quote at length from the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" before bidding him a fond goodbye. 
   Wherever one stands on the crisis facing Pacifica, we can all agree that virulent anti-Semitism has no place on the network's airwaves. And what about race-baiting? Here's Leid attacking the principled, multi-racial movement that opposes her while soliciting contributions during the Spring Fund Drive: "We are talking here about the European psychological warfare against Africans, and that's what the whole thing is about. I need you stalwart solders out there [to] put an end to white supremacist thinking. This is a call to arms - I told you it's a war." (This quote was featured prominently on a recent National Public Radio piece on the WBAI crisis that was heard nationwide. ) 
   The idea that the movement fighting to restore WBAI to its progressive roots is a "white plot" would be laughable if it wasn't so irresponsible and dangerous. One has only to note that the most prominent people removed from the station - including Van Isler, White, Knight, and Sharan Harper - are progressive people of color. And the most prominent white programmers fired by Leid had focused much of their work on concerns of particular interest to poor and working-class African Americans: "Grandpa" AI Lewis, a leading advocate of prisoner issues and reforming the Rockefeller Drug Laws, and Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash, whose "Building Bridges" show explored labor and social justice topics from an unapologetically working-class perspective. 
   In short, it appears the content and character of WBAI's programming has indeed changed sharply under Leid's leadership, and not for the better.

Professionalism: As originally formulated, Pacifica's so-called "gag rule" was designed to prevent producers from attacking other programmers on the air and from discussing internal station business. The situation has become a bit more problematic since Pacifica's travails have become nationwide news. Nevertheless, it would be one thing if Leid had enforced the rule across the board - i.e., that there be no on-air discussion of the crisis, either from the side of management or the resistance. Instead, she has allowed her partisans to rant at length on the air, leveling unsubstantiated charges of racism and violence against their opponents without even attempting to present an intellectual discourse on the roots of the conflict. A few brave late-night programmers have tried to address the issues, while worrying whether they will be allowed to return the following week. (The firing of Robert Knight shows that those fears are well-founded.) As for Gary Null's much-hyped "in-depth investigation" of the crisis, it appears he had originally prepared what was to be little more than a pro-management whitewash, and that literally at the last moment - thanks to protests from informed listeners - he was forced to take a slightly more even-handed approach.