They gave us wings to fly, but then they took away the sky

[sovay]

I am staring at the screen and crying because 99.5 WBAI FM was shuttered by its parent station today, with no warning to either the local station or its listeners. The archives also seem to be gone. My parents who lived in New York in the '60's and '70's used to wake up to its daily broadcast of Phil Ochs' "Outside of a Small Circle of Friends." I was interviewed last summer by Jim Freund for the long-running science fiction program Hour of the Wolf. Now all that history's pulled out as if it never had been. The station was a Brooklyn institution—local, political, progressive, hands-on. Syndicated nationwide content is not the same. And it cannot pretend it always was.

Comments

[redbird]

I am both sad and puzzled. I hadn't listened to WBAI (or much other radio) in recent years, but late-night programming there was valuable to 16-year-old queer me back in 1980.

I remember being told that WBAI was consistently having trouble raising enough money to pay its bills, and staying on the air because their creditors treated the license for 99.5 FM as collateral for debts. (The frequency and license would allow them to be an ordinary commercial station.) From that angle, dropping all the interesting local programming is puzzling in favor of syndicated Pacifica programs is puzzling.

[sovay]

I hadn't listened to WBAI (or much other radio) in recent years, but late-night programming there was valuable to 16-year-old queer me back in 1980.

It seems to have been valuable to a lot of different people in a lot of different decades on a lot of different fronts, and that should not be junked as though it doesn't matter.

From that angle, dropping all the interesting local programming in favor of syndicated Pacifica programs is puzzling.

Per the NYT: "Pacifica has not released any financial statements since 2017, when its auditor cited doubts that the organization could continue as a going concern." The money problems were not just WBAI.