New York Times - January 15, 2010 <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/nyregion/16wbai.html?pagewanted=all>
99.5 FM, Where the Board Meetings Make the Broadcasts Seem Tame By MICHAEL POWELL Comrades, comrades.
WBAI, 50 years old and still innovative in its programming, has suffered management coups and countercoups in the past decade, and assailed some of its own journalists as running dogs.
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.