Another purge at WBAI
WBAI’s program director Tony Bates has ousted another critic of his fondness for quackery and conspiracy theories: Bill Weinberg’s Moorish Orthodox Radio Crusade has been “terminated.” Read about it here. It’s highly likely that these purges—coming along with those at KPFA (recap here)—are being directed by Pacifica management. It all makes me wonder how much longer I’ll be on at KPFA. So a radio network with strong signals in five major metropolitan areas, with the capacity to reach about 20% of the U.S. population on terrestrial radio, is being turned over to advocates of… Read More
New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archives: March 19, 2011 Abe Sauer, who’s been covering Wisconsin for The Awl, on Walker, the protests, privatization • Steve Early, author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor, on the fights in & around Andy Stern’s SEIU
Meanwhile at KPFA…
Two updates on the KPFA situation (and apologies to those of you who find Pacifica news sleep-inducing): • A few weeks ago, I reposted the news, which I originally got from KPFA Worker, that “Amit Pendyal resigned because Pacifica executive director Arlene Engelhardt wouldn’t let him do his job.” Official circles denied this. An example of such: WBAI board chair Mitch Cohen commented, “[H]ere’s what a member of the KPFA Board just wrote to me when I inquired: ‘It’s not true. He is still on the job, despite efforts by Doug’s allies to… Read More
WBAI fundraiser: snake oil sells
WBAI—where I used to do my radio show until program director Tony Bates got other ideas—just finished a fundraiser. Management—meaning Bates, station manager Berthold Reimers, and local board chair Mitch Cohen—have been bragging about its success, and the station’s return to financial health. Close examination of the results make you doubt this analysis. Management has circulated a spreadsheet showing the fundraising results by show. Here it is, for those wanting to score at home (and those are my calculations of the Null vs. ex-Null performance at the bottom of the sheet called… Read More
New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archive: March 5, 2011 Jodi Dean, keeper of the I Cite blog and author of Blog Theory,interviewed in December on what digital culture is doing to us, returns to tell us how events in Cairo and Madison may have changed her mind • Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin on that state and its labor uprising
Chaos at KPFA
Having left behind the insanity at WBAI, where they’re now raising money off the loopy conspiracy documentary Zeitgeist (featuring, among others, the LaRouchie 9/11 conspiracist Webster Tarpley), I’m now confronted with the continuing chaos and decay at KPFA. The latest: newly installed station manager Amit Pendyal resigned because Pacifica executive director Arlene Engelhardt wouldn’t let him do his job. By all appearances, Engelhardt is in way over her head, and is acting like a tinpot dictator in the name of “grassroots” and “community”—which in practice means amateurish crap that no one wants to… Read More
New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archives: February 5, 2011 Lance Lochner, author of this NBER paper, on the social returns to education (lower crime, better health) • Vijay Prashad of Trinity College on the Egyptian revolution
New radio product
Freshly posted to my radio archive: January 29, 2011 Mark LeVine of the University of California–Irvine (and author of Heavy Metal Islam) and Gilbert Achcar of SOAS (and author of The Arabs and the Holocaust) talk (separately) about the popular uprisings in the Middle East • Bhaskar Sunkara on the new magazine he edits, Jacobin
New radio product
Just posted to my radio archives: January 22, 2011 Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on what the web is doing to our brains and minds • Robert Fatton, author of Haiti’s Predatory Republic, on Baby Doc’s return, the failure to recover from earthquake, the horrid class system
Letter on Null’s denialism: please read and act!
Since comments on this “blog” don’t get Tweeted and such, I wanted to point out two comments from George Carter of The Foundation for Integrative AIDS Research, and organization that sponsors clinical trials of alternative therapies for HIV/AIDS. Unlike Null’s ludicrous and dangerous HIV denialism, FIAR supports conventional therapies, but also sees great supplementary value in more “natural” approaches. This seems like an eminently sensible position, but apparently not sensationalist enough to appeal to the loons in the Null set. Carter’s first post outlines his position, and makes the point that HIV denialists, who… Read More
Pacifica death watch (cont.): Gary Null edition
Why care? Perhaps the wider world does not share my interest in the internal goings-on at Pacifica. I do have a personal interest. I grew up listening to WBAI and it helped make me who I am, for what that’s worth. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, it was an exciting and lively thing that showed a kid growing up in the intellectual wasteland of suburban New Jersey that there was a fascinating world out there. It not only featured radical politics (of all kinds—the coverage of the early gay movement was… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 