> On Sep 18, 2008, at 10:45 AM, Ben Jackson wrote:
>
>> By the way, what is it with community radio stations and their
>> management?
>
> To start with, what's the "community"? And how is it connected to
> station management? The Pacifica model, in which listeners elect part
> of the governing board, is deeply stupid; the listeners know next to
> nothing about the candidates, the station, or radio. The Justice &
> Unity Coalition, the gang of race essentialist ultraleftists who ran
> WBAI until recently, mostly featured their political work in their
> campaign bios, as if 20 years in organizing around prison issues had
> anything to do with being on the board of a troubled radio station.
> Surely there must be a better way. I know this is heresy in some
> circles, but you need real managers and lines of authority, not
> second-
> rate amateurs.
I think that it is only in community radio that ultra-sectarianism *and* incompetence reach their fullest flower. I send WBAI money because if they ever went under, I'd never forgive myself for depriving the world of the kind of slapstick farce only the Justice & Unity Coalition can produce. They went from a slim majority to a slim minority at the station, but to hear them tell it, it's Tuskegee all over again.
Oh, and by the by, it's *radio*, as in, I can't SEE YOU. If you want to insure election results based on skin color, you might want to try community *television*. Or a bullhorn in Union Square. Something where I can SEE YOU, so I'll know who to vote for. Because I don't give a rat's ass if you want to run the place exclusively with transgendered eskimos, just leave me the fuck out of it. I am a *consumer* of radio, not a producer of it. There's a reason for that, I have no qualifications to run a radio station, although I'm starting to see that there's a lot of that going around.