I wonder if this affects Amy Goodman. "From Pacifica, this is Democracy Now!"
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Kinda. It’s all more complicated than that (and I say that having only watched from a distance) but, yeah, various “personalities”, including Berry, contributed to things falling apart. There are indeed lessons to be learned from the demise of WBAI but and maybe some good will come of it in the long run but . . . it’s still sad to see it shut down.
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WBAI is avoiding takeover and will stay in the air ( for now) yay!
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Did the on-air staff take over the studio?
One of the early underground radio stations in San Francisco had a strike or something when Tom Donahue resigned as program director.
Okay, it was a picket line. A lot of the bands git behind the strike. I recall reading that Steve Winwood played a benefit.
It was the 1978 movie “FM” (about a radio station that stil had the freeform format) that had the staff taking over the studio when higher management wanted ti be more commercial. I remember one review saying it wasn’t a realistic plot, but surely it was based on the decadw earlier event at KMPX.
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I figured they were still joined at the hip, in any case (although where I live, DN! is on PBS as well). Amy Goodman participates in Pacifica’s fund drives (or used to; but well after 2002)
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I read that there is a temporary stay against the takeover on the face book page for soul central station, a program on wbai, and programs will continue as usual for now. https://m.facebook.com/groups/906026536220183?ref=bookmarks
Their program schedule has changed over to programing from other Pacifica Station programs; what they are calling Pacifica Across America. Most of the programs are pretty decent KPFA programs.
According to the WBAI website they owed the Pacifica Foundation $4M. To sustain the station on their own would have meant raising (and achieving) a pledge drive goal by a factor of 5 for at least one major pledge drive.
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No, Pacifica has 5 stations: KPFA(Berkeley), KPFK (LA), KPFT (Houston), WPFW (DC) & WBAI (NYC.) Because Of WBAI, Pacifica had to take out a loan to pay off an award of $1.8 Million to Empire State Realty Trust. The Pacifica National Board hasn’t formed a plan to pay off the loan, which comes due in a year.
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no big show will expose itself to this kind of drama more than once
that’s why they move out and build their own studios
the same thing happened with Uprising at KPFK
Radio is cheaper to do than anything else that reaches so many people. A high-power FM broadcast license, whether in a well-populated area or out in the sticks, a commercial or a noncommercial station, is a license to coin money. It takes a combination of criminally bad management, actual criminality and both inside and outside sabotage for a radio station to fail. This kind of collapse need not have anything at all to do with the quality of the shows.
But aren’t the Pacifica stations commercial free? I’ve never heard one, but since they are non-profit, I assume.
That makes it hard to “print money”.
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