Saturday, November 16, 2013

Summer Reese visits WBAI: the plot thickens

Once you get past the humorous parts of these interactions, there's some serious stuff to consider at the end.


A letter from Steve Brown to MC, bearing today's date.
First, the letter to which he is responding:

If the interim Executive Director (until she signs the contract) wants to meet with the WBAI LSB, she could at the very least email a message to the LSB Secretary or any of the officers. I'm certainly not going to jump through hoops for her and start scrambling all over the place just because she imperially snaps her fingers and expects the moon to blow her kisses.

On the other hand, if the WBAI LSB wants the officers to set up an emergency meeting with Summer Reese for Tuesday, say, and IF the other officers agree on the date, I will be delighted to again invite the suddenly taciturn iED to a meeting at a reasonable time and place, even though she seems to have blocked my emails and phone calls for at least 3 months, now.

HOWEVER, I absolutely refuse to approve of an official emergency meeting of the Board if she will only meet in Executive Session with the LSB, and will not first meet in public session with the listeners and staff.

Mitchel Cohen
Former WBAI LSB Chair
_______________________________________________
Steve Brown's response to Mitchel Cohen

Dear Mitchel –

Yesterday night, Pacifica Executive Director Summer Reese got off a plane from California after an emergency flight to New York, which she had evidently felt it necessary to undertake in order to address two urgent matters:

(1) the status of WBAI’s general manager, and (2) what steps (if any) the national board had taken with regard to a possible Lease Management Agreement for the station. The moment Summer got off the plane, she sent a polite message asking if the LSB would make time to meet with her, at its convenience, to discuss these important matters, both to inform the LSB of the national board’s thinking, as well as receive the thinking of the LSB. She asked that her meeting with the LSB take place in executive session, because the discussion would touch on contractual issues and personnel matters that were legally privileged and could not be discussed in a public forum. This seemed to me both reasonable and proper.

How did the LSB respond? I did not see any response – not from the Chair of the LSB or its Vice Chair or from any of its elected members. But what I did see was a response from you, appended below. This response seemed to hijack and short-circuit the prerogatives of the elected Local Station Board, even though you are not an elected member of this board, and had not been delegated by it to speak on its behalf to the executive director.

So unless I missed the “Mitchel Cohen Special Privilege Clause” in the Pacifica’s bylaws, I do not think you have either the legal right or the moral authority to issue ultimatums to the executive director, especially in such a snide and bossy tone of voice, as if you were berating a lazy serf who had failed to polish your boots to the precise level of glossy perfection that your position merited. I call particular attention to the passage in your email below, in which you draw yourself up on your tippy toes and announce to Summer Reese, in the petulant tones of a thwarted 3-year-old: “I'm certainly not going to jump through hoops for her and start scrambling all over the place just because she imperially snaps her fingers and expects the moon to blow her kisses.”

Then, to really show her who is boss, you add: “I will be delighted to again invite the suddenly taciturn iED to a meeting at a reasonable time and place, even though she seems to have blocked my emails and phone calls for at least 3 months, now” – as if inviting the executive director to meet with the LSB were your prerogative (and as if your righteous thunder against her was not so transparently and pathetically the result of your hurt pride at not having your emails and phone calls answered, as if our executive director had nothing else to do but sit wistfully by her phone waiting for you to call and invite her to the prom).

Finally, as if you were the Pope making an announcement ex Cathedra, you conclude with this presumptuous ultimatum:  “HOWEVER, I absolutely refuse to approve of an official emergency meeting of the Board if she will only meet in Executive Session with the LSB, and will not first meet in public session with the listeners and staff.”

May I humbly point out that you do not have the right, let alone the power, to make official demands on the executive director – certainly not the right to “absolutely refuse to approve of an official emergency meeting of the Board.” As a non-LSB member, you simply cannot parade about as if you were speaking for and reflecting the will of the LSB (which it must be said has not done much speaking nor demonstrated much of a will in the past year or more).

I can understand your frustration over the difficulties at WBAI and Pacifica, Mitcxxhel. But you are not a member of the PNB, and not a member of the LSB, and not a member of station staff. Yes, you are a listener, and as such you certainly do have a right -- even a duty – to speak out for what you believe to be the best interests of WBAI. But you do not have the right to pretend to speak for the LSB, or make it appear that you do. My suggestion – and I have no more than the right to suggest – is that you try and adopt a more courteous tone with those who might not share your views. A little more humility might also serve you well in making your recommendations, many of which are sensible and in a saner station environment would have long ago been adopted.

Regards,
Stephen M Brown
_______________________________________________
Mitchel Cohen's response 

Steve Brown has maliciously taken a private email I'd written to the private LSB list, and posted a decontextualized portion of it publicly. What he fails to mention -- and no one would otherwise know (since it was a private email) -- is that not only was I not addressing Summer Reese as he claims, but I was responding to Carolyn Birden in what was supposed to be a confidential discussion. So there was no insult addressed to Summer as he states.

Additionally, Steve selectively removed what I'd actually written to give the impression that I would refuse to abide by the LSB's wishes and call a meeting of the LSB this week to meet with Summer Reese. Steve says that I wrote: "I will be delighted to again invite the suddenly taciturn iED to a meeting at a reasonable time and place, even though she seems to have blocked my emails and phone calls for at least 3 months, now".

Steve then snidely (though colorfully) remarks, "as if inviting the executive director to meet with the LSB were your prerogative (and as if your righteous thunder against her was not so transparently and pathetically the result of your hurt pride at not having your emails and phone calls answered, as if our executive director had nothing else to do but sit wistfully by her phone waiting for you to call and invite her to the prom)."  First of all, I did not see the email containing Summer's message that was passed along  to me by Frank Lefever until 3 a.m., after subwaying home to Bensonhurst after meetings (and food) all night.

My complaint that she cut me off her "response list" months and months ago is not one of hurt pride (come on, Steve, who the *^$% cares?!) but of her failure to write to me directly as Secretary of the LSB -- her job! -- so that I could timely communicate with the rest of the Board.  Equally important is Steve's inference made by intentionally deleting the key part of the sentence he quotes from me. See if my restoring of what Steve deleted changes its meaning for you (I underline the part that Steve deleted):  "If the WBAI LSB wants the officers to set up an emergency meeting with Summer Reese for Tuesday, say, and IF the other officers agree on the date, I will be delighted to again invite the suddenly taciturn iED to a meeting at a reasonable time and place, even though she seems to have blocked my emails and phone calls for at least 3 months, now."  In other words, if the LSB wants me to set up the meeting with the still-interim Executive Director, I -- as Secretary -- would do so.

So what's really going on?  Summer Reese has apparently come to town primarily to REMOVE BERTHOLD REIMERS as General Manager. She cannot legally do so without the LSB considering the question. If the LSB considers it but turns her down, then she is legally bound to take it to the PNB and obtain the national board's approval -- or else, she is not allowed to fire Berthold. Steve knows this. Thus, his support for her demand for a meeting in Executive Session, to get that process started. Summer wants to lease out the station, and removing Berthold is a necessary step. And is fearful of facing the public about that.

She is collaborating in that with one of WBAI's elected Directors to the PNB, Carolyn Birden. Along the way they have fooled or convinced two of WBAI's other Directors, Manijeh Saba and Janet Coleman, into going along with their destructive scheme, which would mean the end of WBAI. Steve Brown is cynically latching on because he wants Berthold Reimers out as GM, whom he criticizes for not doing many necessary things over the last few years. I agree with much of Steve's criticisms of management (although I think Berthold has greatly improved, does an enormous amount of work, and could lead us out of the mess we're now in).

But firing Berthold and bringing in a "turn-around" expert as a prelude to a lease arrangement, which will become a prelude to selling the station outright, will not fix things. Additionally, there is absolutely no financial reason for Berthold to be fired and for Pacifica to be considering a leasing arrangement. WBAI just completed a successful fund drive. We have decreased costs by moving out of Wall Street (* - See below) and by (very sadly) laying off 3/4 of the paid staff. We reduced costs by $1.1 million, and with the exception of a lump-payment of $225,000 for severance to those who were laid off, we've caught up with most of the current bills. However, we need 5 or 6 months for those reduced costs to kick in. Basically, this means that we need Pacifica to loan us TIME.

We have a number of fundraising events scheduled. Last week's Pete Seeger/David Amram/Tiokosin Ghost Horse concert netted WBAI around $10,000. There are also two bequests that WBAI anticipates receiving, one of close to $100,000 from our wonderful friend Jim Krivo, who died a few months ago. The other from a wealthy benefactor who left WBAI more than $1,000,000 but whose Will is tied up in court. We're also expecting around $25,000 more over the next months from pledges that were made but not yet paid, and a large grant -- I think it's around $170,000 -- from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. MORE than enough to sustain us through the next 4 or 5 months, in addition to the upcoming winter fund drive.

If Pacifica would just allow us the time, I have no doubt whatsoever that WBAI could stand on its own 99.5 feet in a few months. So why the rush to cut off its head NOW and review the leasing roposals NOW?

Could it be that the moment Summer Reese signs the papers to become the new Executive Director she loses her seat on the Pacifica National Board, and who knows where things will lead on the National Board?

Is WBAI being used opportunistically as a political football in some other scheming factional nightmare? I think that that's at least part of what's going on, why the rush is happening. It's simply awful. And for WBAI's Directors to not understand that we are being used that way, and that Berthold is the "collateral damage" in the wider scheme, is tragic.

It's all about those HERE who have given up on saving WBAI and who want to lease it out for 5 - 8 years; those from Berkeley who want to sell WBAI outright and apply those receipts to their own stations, which are doing as poorly as WBAI, or even worse, and could use the money; and those of us like myself and the vast majority of listeners and staff who understand that the importance of holding onto and improving this listener-sponsored, non-commercial, free speech,  anti-war radio station far outweighs the personal frustrations and factional slights that have made them bitter fools and stripped them not only of their vision of WBAI's potential, but of WBAI's ACTUAL and greatly improved financial situation.

Mitchel Cohen
former Chair of the WBAI Local Station Board,
and currently Secretary of the WBAI LSB


* Note: Carolyn Birden and others argued vehemently in the Summer of 2012 for remaining at the Wall Street location for another three years, and condemned me for even looking for other spaces, claiming I was undermining then-Executive Director Arlene Engelhardt's "master plan" -- there was none! So when I met with the owner of the building on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn in which WBAI now resides and proposed that WBAI move there, the resistance was palpable. That resistance cost WBAI a pretty penny; if it were not for Hurricane Sandy forcing WBAI to move from Wall Street, we would have been forced to close up shop altogether. But many persisted against that bureaucratic wall. Alex Steinberg (a fellow Brooklynite) and I set up meetings between the Atlantic Avenue building's owner and the new iED, Summer Reese, and, separately, with Berthold Reimers. We walked them around the neighborhood. They liked the building and negotiations began. The Manhattanites were none-too-thrilled. But this is not mostly about stuck-up Manhattan vs. working class Brooklyn -- that's real, but only a tiny part.

7 comments:

  1. Is that a photo of Berthold Reimers at the head of this blog? Is that a townhouse in Brooklyn Heights or Carroll Gardens? It must cost close to a million! Does he afford a million dollar mortgage by running a non-commercial radio station and squeezing every penny from his aging audience while pushing grossly overpriced premiums on them? Is that why he didn't give himself a pay cut, while laying off most of the paid staff? Well, whether PNB fires him or whether LSB will keep him on, the market forces will do to BAI what the sharks do to swimming prey leaving the trail of blood and what Stalin did to his left wing opposition (Zinoviev, Kamenev, shot, after they confessed to being agents of British imperialism)... There is a sucker born every minute, but I wouldn't give a penny to support Reimer's lifestyle, or his counterpart at KPFK, who is also profligate with her listeners money, among her other sins and short-comings.

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    1. So you wouldn't donate a penny? That may be a good thing, you remind me of the old saying -- with friends like you who needs enemies?

      BAI Buddy

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  2. Consider me a Titular Demon. You ever read Dostoyevsky's the Demons (also translated as The Possessed.). It was 1880's satire of the radical left wing in Russia, but bears so much likeness to the American Left today! Anyway, they didn't have a radio station, but a Progressive Magazine at the University. A wealthy landowner gave them an endowment to publish it, and the radical student committee told him that he was a wealthy oppressor, totally uncultured and retrograde in his views, that he need not bother setting foot in the magazine he gave money to, ever again. In the story, the wealthy benefactor left, and they kept the money. In history, the wealthy Russian intelligentsia supported the Reds and during the Russian civil war, in the great bloodletting that was the settling of the perceived scores, these people paid dearly with their lives. We actually learn from our historic experience. Again, why should I pay to hear the arrogance of Esther Armah, cold malice of that closet Stalinist Utrice Leid, or the rage of that Christine Blosdale? In the interest of ethics, she at least can disclose that she runs a PR firm for the crackpots, whose agenda she promotes on KPFK. For that matter, why can't Amy Goodman come clean and explain the whys and hows of her arrangement vis a vie Democracy Now and that golden contract with the BAI. They only thing that came out that I liked recently is the Ian Masters Background Briefing. Ultimately there is a historical parallel here. I heard Summer Reese on the radio. All the lonely people in the Big Apple who had everything to give to BAI, except money, which they don't have, and Summer Reese partronizing a bit and humoring them. Sort of like that kids fairy tale a la Russe, a poor man's fishing vessel is sinking off the coast of South America somewhere. He sends out SOS. A rich man's yacht ignores his pleas, a Yankee battleship sails by. A poor peasant in Bolivia or Mexico hears the signal and raises the alarm. A working man in Italy. An old man in France. They all want to help, but they can do nothing! What to do? A Soviet cargo ship to the rescue, to save the old fisherman from the circling sharks! On the more somber note, Soviet leadership suffered from a delusion of Communist exceptionalism, i.e. they are the first state of the proletariat and western science does not got it and can not measure it, while the trials and trepidations in the Soviet leadership can be accurately analyzed and understood in terms of Western political history and economic development. By the same token, WBAI suffers from delusions of exceptionalism as well - it thinks of it as the lone progressive voice, but in reality it has been taken over by the lunatic fringe of the left and in its operation and scope it is becoming more and more like the commercial talk radio. I am afraid that at this time, NPR offers better journalism and BAI is essentially a left wing clone of the WABC. You can't compare today's BAI with the quality of journalism at Harper's Magazine or Mother Jones, and BAI is doing public a disservice, with its discredited conspiracy theories about 9/11 displacing any real analysis of the event that could have been hosted at BAI.

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  3. Interesting thoughts, although we're not sure how germaine the comparison is of 19th century Russian leftists to 21st century American progressives. Also, your negative remarks about Esther, Utrice, Christine, Amy and Summer, in comparison to your positive feelings about Ian Masters, seems to indicate that you have a problem with women, which is something that you may want to work on. We like Ian too, but we also like Utrice a lot (it should be noted that she is no longer on WBAI's air, but does a great show on PRN now). As for Esther, MSNBC seems to like her fine, as she is part of their Brain Trust panel.

    WBAI Listener

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  4. The comparison is germaine, as WBAI will fall in exactly the same way they did. Esther is arrogant and has nothing to offer to me as a listener, Utrice was identified as a Marxist of Stalinist bend and I can only be glad that she has no real political power and is irrelevant to the American mainstream. Christine is intolerant and is a progressive equivalent of a snake oil saleswoman. I would love to meet her in a bar and call her out on her act. Amy is a talented journalist and had shown courage, but she is more an advocate and less an objective journalist. Once upon a time she did a show about a murdered Russian journalist Istemerova. Her two apprentice journalists were interviewed on Democracy Now and on NPR. NPR coverage lasted for about three times as long, was done in greater depth and material was made comprehensible both to the American audience and covered new ground for me personally, which was a surprise, sine I followed the story in the Russian media. Either Lehrer or Lopate did the NPR interview, and did a better job, than Amy. If 50% of the debt is owed to Democracy Now! Isn't a little transparency regarding the DN! contract in order? I think that Amy got a sweat-heart deal as some sort of an out of Court settlement for the harassment that she endured at the BAI studio. Amy, obviously, dedicated her life to her show, but she likely crossed a number of lines to fund her show and tends to shamelessly promote her books. In the end, the DN! is not the best show, and label of a sell out might be appropriate (from the point of view of the listener supported radio that takes no grants from large foundations). I heard Summer on the listener call in segment, and she came across like an upper manager speaking down to the troops and not completely forthcoming. I don't have problem with women in journalism, as you seem to imply. I read Mother Jones, and it is edited by women. I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and have went out of my way to read works by Horney, Freud, Tuchman, and Ehrenreich, among others. I draw the line, however, when someone says that the station will have a white general manager over her dead body, they get no support for me, just as I despise any expressions of white racism or colonialism.

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  5. So why do you think she's arrogant? Her accent maybe? I didn't care for it mainly because it made it difficult to catch all her words. For some reason WBAI seems enamored of accents that sound somewhat pretentious to me, maybe because people think they sound more cultured, and easier on the ears. Think about it, the last two PDs and the previous morning show host before Esther all had Aussie accents. I myself would prefer a New York accent, at least on the flagship show in the morning.

    I like Amy, but agree that the DN! contract needs revisiting because a) WBAI can't afford it and b) affiliates can supposedly air it for free.

    I thought Utrice's coverage of Obamacare has been really excellent. She's no fan of the Obama-Clinton dynasty. So you're a Hilary Clinton supporter? Oh dear, you want to continue the monarchy? Guess that makes you a Democrat, which could explain your NPR leanings. Oh, and last time I looked, Freud was no woman :)

    ps - the person who allegedly made the remark about a white GM was Bernard White companion Janice K. Bryant, who has long since left WBAI.

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  6. psst...Anna Freud... his daughter

    Not the accent. She rides a high horse and condemns American life without getting it. Ghana is actually a cool country, and their military dictatorship did a decent job keeping the country stable, vis a vie Cameroon and Nigeria. But she never talks about that. Merely pushes her own plays with an air of moral superiority. I find that irritating just as I am trying to relax on my days off in the mornings.

    I didn't take NPR seriously, merely as a cultural programming eye candy, but then I heard those two Russian journalist interviewed by NPR and DN! and I realized that NPR was doing a better job. Also, I caught BAI show hosts in obvious lies, i.e., claiming things that were contrary to known facts, that I decided that NPR did better journalism. For instance. During the second Afghan War one of the hosts claimed falsely that "EFE-gan" Arabs are ethnic arabs, who were living in Afghanistan for centuries, who were now being ethnically cleansed a la former Yugoslavia, when in fact, the "Afghan Arabs" were a large contingent of the islamist radicals from places like Algeria, who never learned the local languages, took part in atrocities alongside Taliban, and in the end paid dearly for it when the Northern Alliance took back Mazar-i-Sharif. BAI also failed to report on Colombian left wing FARC guerillas and it did not cover an arrest and trial of a US Army sergeant, who sold technical information to Cuba. That is why I listen to NPR, not because I am a Democrat. I wish BAI was doing work like Ian Masters instead of propagandizing. Also, I do not hear any balanced coverage of Snowden. I mean, to be a whistle blower, you have to expose the wrong doings to the US Congress and go through internal affairs and your own channels. Technically speaking, neither Snowden, nor Bradley Manning meet the criteria to be whistleblowers under the US law. You do not have to agree with this point of view, but where is the balanced coverage of this issue on BAI?

    In truth, I think that NPR is more diverse at this point, then the progressive BAI and both are politically correct, but NPR can laugh at itself and BAI can't, which makes them more of a pleasure to listen to.

    Finally, I voted for Clinton and Obama, because they were better qualified to run the country than their opposition. By the way, I heard the interview with Clinton that made Amy famous. She chose to grand stand and make statements with her rhetorical questions instead of letting him talk, and he was giving her very descent in-depth answers, and she essentially cut him short. She blew the interview, as far as I am concerned.

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