02/29/08 Leap Day!

OK .. I am back. There is so much going on..

First, let’s get to the WYPR stuff right away.

The board and management of the station keep saying that there are reasons they cannot divulge as to why they cancelled my show.

So, I am asking them now …. Freeing them up from any fears they may have …
DIVULGE!!!!

Tell everyone, the listeners, the press, why you did this.
Tell me, you have never told me. I and my friends and people who loved and listened to the show would love to hear your reasoning.

My guess: they don’t have one, other than the reality we have all witnessed over the last month.

Anyway, on to bigger and better things!

It is time to get back in the saddle, so we are going to be bringing you new interviews. Until we get our new website up, you can find them right here on our blog, ready to listen to or to podcast.

How many of you are fans of the WIRE? My guess is a lot of you are.

I love the WIRE. It is a show that speaks not only about life in the inner city neighborhoods of our land but about what they are emblematic of in America. It speaks to who we are becoming in America. The acting is just phenomenal and the writing is the best on television.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will air interviews with actors, writers, producers, and others from the WIRE. We will start with creative partners Ed Burns and David Simon. This week you will hear actors Clarke Peters, who plays Lester Freamon, Andre Royo, who portrays Bubbles, and Robert Chew, playing the ill-fated kingpin Prop Joe. There will many more this week and in the coming weeks.

We won’t stop there. More interviews with authors, public figures, artists and just interesting folks coming your way. Many of them will be multiplatform stories, with pictures and more. Download the scripts, download the interviews. The Marc Steiner Show is back!

Let us know what is happening in your worlds and what you want to hear.

I will be writing more after the weekend, reflecting on what’s in the news, in our communities, in the arts.

Stay tuned… more exciting stuff coming our way.

Have a great weekend!

marc

3/12 BOD meeting cancelled

Hello friends.

Just got this message in and I thought it was important to share with you.

Dear Guests,
 
WYPR’s March 12 Board Meeting has been rescheduled for April 15 – it will still take place at 3pm.  A location will be posted on the website by March 15. 
 
Thank you!
~ Alex
 
Alexandra Price
Associate Development Director
WYPR
2216 N. Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21218
 
ph. (410) 235-1446
fax (410) 235-1161
www.wypr.org
aprice@wypr.org

2/21 Child Brides; Stolen Lives

Sunam is only 3 years old. She is dressed up in her bridal outfit as she prepares to marry her 7 year old cousin. Photo Credit: Farzana Wahidy/AP.

We have brand new content for you from the Center for Emerging Media! Stream the podcast here. (Or just right click on that link, and choose “Save Link As.”  This will download it onto your computer.  Thanks to our intelligent reader Ron Counsell for figuring this one out!) Program length is 39: 21.

Female genital mutilation. Sex slaves. Human trafficking. These are the topics that journalist Maria Hinojosa thought of when she was deciding which global women’s issue to focus on for a special episode of NOW, the acclaimed PBS program. But a phone call to a source set her straight. The biggest issue facing women globally is not genital mutilation, or slavery. It is the millions of women that are forced to marry as children. 51 million girls under the age of 18 are married. According to a report by the International Center for Research on Women, that number will rise to 100 million by the end of this decade. Marc and Maria sat down and talked about her documentary Child Brides; Stolen Lives which premiered on PBS in 2007.

You can stream that interview here. (Program length is 39: 21)

Want to watch the documentary? Visit the website of Now on PBS.

Under the cut…resources and pictures!

2/21/08 thoughts today

I really want to get past this and build a new and creative world for us and for you.  We will and we are.  We’re going to post a new interview in just a few minutes. 

I wanted to write a few words about last night, as well. 

The gathering last night was amazing.  It was a cold snowy night.  A night that saw many events across the community cancelled.   But in Charles Village, an auditorium was filled with 300 people or so. 

The people there represented our community.   It was Black, White, Asian, Latino, elders, youth and middle aged, gay and straight.   There were truck drivers from Baltimore, school bus drivers from Bel Air, steel workers from Dundalk, university professors from every discipline, lawyers, nurses, doctors, social works, inner city activists, students, school teachers, filmmakers, journalists, artists and artisans.    Some were activists who came as an organized group but most were just folks there to speak there mind. 

It was inspiring to hear what my listeners and station members had to say.   Sure, on one one level it was about me and about the fact that I have been part of people’s lives in this community for the past fifteen years.     But all this was and is much larger and more important than any one man or any show on public radio. 

This is about community, about building community and a radio show that drew diverse communities together.  It is about the future of public radio and what the public means in public radio. 

Speakers stood to tell Tony Brandon, Barbara Bozzuto, Andy Bienstock, the management and board of WYPR that the program gave voice to the voiceless in this community. People testified that they had been introduced to voices, people and ideas from our community that they would never run across in their daily lives.  One inner city activist, Dante Wilson, said that all the media shows is negative images of Black communities.   He said that our program showed the world that there is a different side to the streets of Baltimore and people who were working to make a difference.   

School teachers stood up to say that nowhere else did teachers and regular working people have a forum to speak to the public.  Jewish-American and Arab-American leaders were there because our show was a place where ideas were non-threateningly shared.  

It became clear that the people in that audience felt that the Marc Steiner Show was a place that built community, built bridges between the diversity we live in, and created communication.  One thing was very clear; people understand that and want public media to be a place to build community.

The concept of public ownership of the airwaves was foremost in the minds of those who attended last night.    The “your” in Your Public Radio is more than just words.    When I came up with those call letters, it meant that it was to be a community owned and run station.   I believed it, the people who gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the station believed it, and in the ensuing years those who became members of WYPR believed it.  I told them to believe it, and the station during its fund drives told them to believe.   We were telling them a lie.

Last night the community demanded that the station management and board include them in the process.    People believe that listener-members should have seats on the Board of Directors.   They should be part of the process of directing our public radio.   Some demanded that the board resign or that Tony Brandon and the management resign or that the board should fire the management and start over.  

A theme that was constant throughout the night was people demanding that the public mean something in public radio.

Out of this meeting the CAB will write a report to WYPR’s Board of Directors.  The meeting is March 12^th.  You may attend that meeting.  You just have to register with WYPR to reserve a seat.

This is about the ownership and future of public radio.

-marc

 

Share your CAB meeting reflections

I want to thank all of you who came to the CAB meeting tonight.  I cannot tell you how wonderful it was to see your faces and hear your thoughts.

I see some people already made post-CAB comments in the previous post, so I imagined others would follow suit, and I wanted to make a place for all the post-CAB comments.  So feel free to share your impressions, feelings, thoughts in this post.

I am sure Marc will write something to you tomorrow.

-Jessica

2/20 A few words from Marc

Hello everyone,

I have a few short reflections after seeing what I wrote last night. I don’t want to fall into the trap of he said/she said quarrel of inconsequential detail. On some levels I have allowed myself to do that.

First, I realized when I spoke of the $750,000 raised that I inadvertently left out that $70 some thousand dollars of that amount was really contributed or in a sense forgiven by Johns Hopkins University. I realized after I sent it in to my blog that I left that line out.

Second, I want to be clear how grateful all of us should be to the original guarantors. Bill Clarke, Jonathan Melnick, Anne and Jane Daniels, Tony Brandon, Charlie Salisbury, Earl and Darielle Linehan, Tom and Barbara Bozzuto and Albert Williams. Without their guarantees we could not have saved the radio station for Baltimore. I just want to be absolutely clear about that.

Finally, the problems boil down to certain things that leadership of the station just doesn’t get.

1. This should have been a partnership between guarantors, contributors and members to create a board to oversee the fiscal and fiduciary responsibilities of WYPR

2. Martha Rudski, WJHU Marketing Director, came up with the name Your Public Radio because we believed we could create a truly powerful and unique institution that belonged to this community.

3. When we first started, the story around NPR was the amazing marriage between this conservative Republican corporate executive and a community activist talk show host known for his progressive leanings coming together to build a community radio station. My belief in the myth hurt us all.

4. All this is madness. There was never any concrete reason for it to happen. They keep changing their story as to what led to the end of my show because they are grasping for straws. There is no reason other than a deep personal and political dislike for me from Tony Brandon and a few others. They could not stand what I stood for, or that I was the face and voice of the station. Ray Blank, the station consultant, has said to me more than once that they see you getting all the recognition. They feel they deserve some. I always gave it to them.

5. So, all this is for what?

 

I have nothing left to say unless they come at me or at the public with more specious comments.

See you tonight.

-Marc

CAB Meeting still on as of 2:50 pm

Hi All,

 I just spoke with the communications people at the Baltimore Museum of Art and they said the CAB meeting is still on.

You can call WYPR at 410-235-1660 and the BMA at 443-573-1870 for updates as the event draws closer.  If we hear that it is being canceled, we will let you know.
 
We know that no one likes to be out in the snow.  But we hope you will brave the elements and make it out tonight.  Your support is crucial.

New Links

Hi everyone,

Please note the new header tab above with the words “Protest Links”.  If you go there, you’ll find links to the following sites:

2/19 Writing WYPR’s History

In preparation for Wednesday night’s Community Advisory Board meeting, it is time for a little history to set the record straight.

02/19/08 First Day on the Job

In case you didn’t catch the news in Baltimore Business Journal or dcrtv today, thought I’d write a quick note to let everyone here know that yesterday was my last day at WYPR, and today is my first day working as a producer at the Center for Emerging Media!  I’m thrilled to be here, and looking forward to continuing working with Marc and Jessica.  The best way to contact me directly, for the time being, is justinlevy2@gmail.com.  If anyone knows who justinlevy1 is, I’d like to get in touch with him.

It’s been great to see the discussion that has exploded on the blog here the past few weeks.  Hope this will continue to grow as a place for increasingly broader discussion.

I’ve been thinking about all of these things that we would have been discussing on the air the past few weeks.  What’s been catching people’s interest lately, outside of the WYPR fiasco?  Fidel Castro plans to step down, Kosovo declares independence, the largest beef recall ever, the worst suicide bombing in Afghanistan since 2001, Obama, elections in Pakistan…

-Justin