Thursday, May 28, 2009

WBAI’s Delicate Condition

In the midst of a national economic decline, the original listener-supported radio network has been experiencing its own financial and organizational meltdown. As Executive Director in 2006 and 2007, I was in a unique position to identify many of the dilemmas facing this important progressive media organization. This article chronicles my experiences and efforts to avert a crisis, continuing a narrative begun last year and reporting on recent developments. To read previous installments, see Planet Pacifica: An Inside Story at Maverick Media.


Part Two of Real Life on Planet Pacifica


During the March 2006 meeting of the Pacifica National Board, held just two months after I became ED, a report from WBAI put the network’s problems in high relief. As Indra Hardat, the station’s Interim General Manager, and Program Director Bernard White took their places at opposite ends of the board’s large horseshoe the seating itself underlined the distance between them. I’d asked them to attend and explain what was happening. The idea was to get the divisions crippling the station out into the open.


Hardat had been interim GM for almost a year. She talked about “team spirit” and connections being made, but the station was still running in the red. The problems, she claimed, were lack of cooperation from the local board and poor communication with White. What WBAI needed, in her opinion, was “more women of color in programming” and a “sane and equitable work environment.”


Then she dropped a bombshell. “I am surprised that incidents of violence are being downplayed,” she said, “because it’s real, it’s happening. I have been the victim of verbal abuse more than three times in the last month or so.”


The room was stony silent. To understand the “conditions I have been forced to work under,” she went on, “We need to have some background. There are certain producers, LSB members and staff who never wanted me to be the IGM and have never hesitated to show it. And that’s a fact.”


She talked about Valerie Van Isler, the former GM who had originally put Bernard White in charge of programming – before both of them were fired in 2000. “She was attacked on a weekly basis by different members of the staff, and she took it quietly,” Indra recalled. “Folks, I’m not going to take it quietly. I’m not going to swallow it. Because I’m a woman, and a woman of color, I’m not going to take abuse.”


Van Isler had been “demonized” but she wasn’t the enemy, Indra claimed. “She was just trying to be objective and not belong to any of the camps. I’m the independent party. I do not believe in any factions or anything like that.” This was starting to sound a bit disingenuous. “We need dialogue with the programming department, and maybe mediation. But so far, on any kind of programming changes or preemptions, I’ve not been informed or included.” The excuse was that she wasn’t “qualified” in radio or programming, she added. “But I think it’s because I’m a woman.”


Bernard was prepared for the attack. Disarming yet stern he offered a starkly different portrait. Pacifica was “suffering from post-traumatic coup syndrome,” he said. The primary players who had hijacked the organization were gone, but “many of their supporters are still around and are involved in a well-funded, public campaign to destabilize WBAI.” Here lay the real threat to the station’s solvency.


He didn’t name Steve Brown, but the words left little doubt. The conspiracy’s “chief architect, financier and spokesman” was using “venomous poison pen e-mails” and “fabrications” to undermine trust with the listeners. And without trust, he predicted, the station would die. The fact that the attack focused on him was significant, he claimed, but his real concern was what it was doing to the station.


So, there it was: a serious conflict of perceptions, style and priorities between the station’s two top managers, and beneath the surface an ongoing struggle that dated back years. The comments that followed revealed still more.


For Lisa Davis, a new board member from New York, the real problem was racist remarks and charges of “corruption” leveled at Chief Financial Officer Lonnie Hicks. “I’ll be all night telling you about that,” Indra shot back, referring to her suspicions about the CFO, “and I would probably be fired for that.” Don White, a mild-mannered, veteran activist from Los Angeles, was concerned about the whole culture at the station and whether the GM was really in charge. “Is there a kind of culture that could be threatening to people entering the building?” he asked.


No, it was safe at the station, the two managers insisted. Violence was down since the bad old days. But discussions about programming were minimal and strained. “The only time I’ve talked with her,” Bernard said, “is when she talked with me about what I should do.” Making it plain that he wasn’t taking orders he quickly returned to Steve Brown’s critical e-mails.


Another new board member, WPFW’s Acie Byrd, asked what they could do to improve the situation. Indra’s solution, to the financial crunch at least, was more music and arts programming. Bernard was skeptical about that and thought the station needed more attention to race, like an anti-racism workshop the board had been through the day before.


Indra wouldn’t budge from charges of “verbal abuse” and gender discrimination; Bernard professed a willingness to cooperate – despite the attacks. “Hey, I’m not perfect,” he sighed. “But you have to work with what you have.”


PNB Chair Dave Adelson tried to push past the stalemate. Looking at Bernard, he said, “People are motivated to defend you. But I don’t see Indra representing a faction, and some of the ‘he-she’ disputes are about a challenge to you. You getting along is the only way to de-escalate this war.”


“We need a united front,” Indra agreed.


“I’ve said we should sit down and talk,” Bernard answered.


“But you won’t talk. You walk away,” she shot back.


In the end, the combatants at least agreed to mediation, and I was ordered to investigate Indra’s charges. But there were no obvious solutions to the underlying problems – declining ratings, financial failure, and a racially-charged, divisive atmosphere.


Next: Uncovering Fault Lines


Previous: Rethinking the Experiment

2 comments:

RipRobbins said...

Being an outsider, I only had an outsider's understanding of the personalities at Pacifica. I was quite nervous about being on the PNB, surrounded by media activists who would be intellectualizing the role of progressive media that promoted democratic reforms to our government and business worlds. But when I got there, there were two over-riding concerns facing the PNB: First was the alleged racist comments made by one WBAI Director to another. Second was the battle to release the names and addresses of major donors to anyone requesting them, even when the requester intended to mail them angry denunciations of the station's management and programming decisions.

Both of these preoccupations were not what I expected from Pacifica. The donor question would require an entire blog of its own to parse the questions of transparency, legality of influence by donors, or the conspiracy of management to cater to donors. The other question really seemed like something that belonged on the Judge Judy show, not at the table of the Board of the largest community radio network/entity in the country. The statement was never racist, and mostly only a rude comment, and was the kind of thing that people need to get over. But almost the entire executive session was turned over to proselytizing by various ideologues over whether a "person" was racist or not. Later I was to understand that this personal battle, which had drawn up factions on the Board, was a microcosm of the dysfunction that was paralyzing that station.

Virginia Browning said...

I admire you very much, and appreciate your caring and the work put in, but I find that you often oversimplify even so.

Pacifica still has the potential to be an extremely important resource. (Of course in many ways it currently is.) Some of us are still working on it. Your criticisms of the elections shouldn't be used by those who may prefer bankruptcy then privatizing to working "things" out (governance, messy townhalls, etc. etc.). Yes, you worked hard, but some progress now has finally been made at WBAI, by chance perhaps in part, in part because the election process allowed to proceed, resulted in needed changes.

I certainly am convinced the current structure could be "streamlined", but I wish you had the luxury to take the time to really interview many more people before making what, despite the time involved, still amounts, in the big picture, to blanket assessments about the value of appointed board members, etc. Only 11% voting for board members may be small, but not as small as a handful of agenda-driven individuals, whom you may like but some of us know as untrustworthy.

Yes, the elections could and have gone the other way.

That's partly a problem with the fact that elections aren't publicized on the air as PART of fundraising: bringing community together in these atomizing times, reminding people they have a voice in shaping their network, encouraging that, training many more volunteers, using paid staff as valuable resources for such.

In the last election, Dan Siegel as Interim ED actually intervened on the side of a slate of candidates, against others making maybe impolitic but not illegal statements. I don't mean his properly disallowing a blatant racist comment at one station, but his disallowing free speech at another and conflating these two as if they were equal. He is a master manipulator who is now set to exercise huge control of the network if allowed to do so.

Money shouldn't run Pacifica elections either. Throwing out the baby with the expensive bathwater doesn't seem to me to be the answer.

In a limited time you felt compelled to make certain assessments and translate these into something readable. Sometimes honest confusion is better than scrunching complexities into even erudite-sounding bites.

I will try to make time to write more in the future. I don't have much time now.

Thank you for caring about this network and working for a more livable shared world,

Virginia Browning