The Miami Herald reports on the struggle for control of the city's public radio broadcaster, WLRN, and whether the school board will succeed in breaching the Friends of WLRN firewall that separates the licensee into a separately managed entity.
Our city and region deserves a cutting edge, vibrant public broadcasting station like those that serve the nation's major population centers; Boston, NYC, San Francisco, Chicago and LA. That's not what we have.
The lack of transparency at Friends of WLRN is symptomatic of a rigid and unyielding old guard in charge of programming and creativity. In important ways, WLRN has not served our community well. Whether moving the station into closer management by the school board would be a net positive, in the case of WLRN, change is long overdue.
Our city and region deserves a cutting edge, vibrant public broadcasting station like those that serve the nation's major population centers; Boston, NYC, San Francisco, Chicago and LA. That's not what we have.
The lack of transparency at Friends of WLRN is symptomatic of a rigid and unyielding old guard in charge of programming and creativity. In important ways, WLRN has not served our community well. Whether moving the station into closer management by the school board would be a net positive, in the case of WLRN, change is long overdue.
7 comments:
Who are you handing it over to? The school board, you think that is better?
Friends of WLRN has the radio station in its unaccountable grip.
Seems dumb to have the school board owning/running it in any case. Is there a similar situation anywhere else in the country?
Also, complete disclosure, I hate listening to their meetings (fortunately they are only once/month). Often poorly run with bad speakers.
In a separate note, possibly, WLRN needs to quit taking money from FPL and advertising their lies about clean energy!
I wasn't too pleased to discover my monthly contributions to the station were going to pay the chief exec $400k a year.
Change is needed. The school board has owned the station for 60 years, and all employees have been MDCPS union employees. This illegal activity by WLRN managers was done to break union contract.
What's happened is there are two WLRNs: the privatized one, operated by Friends of WLRN and its shadowy sisters like South Florida Public Media and of course the Herald - i.e., the news department - and the old public one, staffed by Miami-Dade schools employees. When veteran WLRN/schools employees retire, their full-time jobs are eliminated. The program hosts you hear every day are part time workers without benefits. The station's schools employees are governed by a union contract but it's been years since the union showed any interest in them. Pretty much all the money at WLRN goes to the privatized operation. For example, much is made of the awards won by the news department. But non-Herald news programs, some of which are quite good, can't even get entry fees to compete for awards.
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