Doug Henwood had one of the good shows at WBAI, so of course it had to go.
Henwood published his resignation letter
For the record, as they say, here’s what I just wrote to Tony Bates:
I really don’t want to do a show every other week on Saturday morning, and you probably knew that when you made the decision. So I think I’ll just quit, effective immediately.
It takes a remarkable amount of balls for you, Tony, to engineer a reworking of the grid having just masterminded yet another failed fundraiser. Falling 1/3 short of your goal is a disgrace. But evidently your vision of WBAI is of chemtrails and footpads and 9/11 nuttery, so we obviously don’t mesh.
The polite thing would be wish you good luck, but I don’t feel like being polite. It’s a remarkable devolution from Samori Marksman to you.
Pacifica, for all practical purposes, is dead. It will be looted by the deranged, by an exceptionally pathological Marxist sect or two, and soon enough it will have no listeners (well, it’s almost there now, isn’t it.)
For a once-thriving left-wing radio network to be so totally castrated just at the time a real left alternative is needed seems to me to be beyond left stupidity and quite probably deliberately done.
The new WBAI management also showed its AIDSphobia and heterosexism by bringing Gary Null back.
Doug Henwood’s show was moved to an excellent time which would have doubled or even tripled his listenership.
He did not want to do a live show in the evenings or on weekends for personal reasons, he wrote.
So he will produce his show on Fridays, and it will be available to WBAI to air weekly as per the new program grid.
Hardly a “purge” as this website reports.
Mitchel Cohen
Chair, WBAI Local Station Board
But you certainly tried to. But enough people protested that the show came back. Your comment is disingenuous at best.
And stop spamming my posts about Pacifica with identical comments. If it happens again, you go into the spam killer and your comments will never appear.
I leave you to your “chemtrails and footpads and 9/11 nuttery conspiracy theories” and your ongoing destruction of what once was an excellent radio station.
That’s comical. No one is going to want to listen to in depth economic analysis early on a Saturday morning. Also, it was reduced to every other week.
This is the strategy of the far right management and narrow board majority at WBAI. They put people into ridiculous time slots in order to push them to quit. Then, they can say they didn’t get rid of them even though that’s exactly what happened.
Personally, I miss the hard core lefty stuff on BAI. It was comedy. The 9/11 stuff and west coast-NPR programming is just nonsense that no one– not even righties looking for humor– will listen to.
they need a live local at the top of the hour news cast, their news sounds like npr to me, i want to hear some 1 say I’m joe blow reporting on 34th and 5th ave for wbai news new york. The way their current news set up is just toal sucks to me.