Public radio rancor

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Posted: 2/7/08

With the advent of "infotainment" and the 24-hour cable news cycle, our public discourse on matters of such importance as the 2008 presidential election has become increasingly shrill. The commercial media has rapidly deteriorated into mind-numbing entertainment, culling the sad minutiae of celebrities' lives and replacing genuine political discourse with partisan invective. Unfortunately, this is what sells.

That is why it is so important, now more than ever, to preserve those sources of news and information that have successfully insulated themselves from the countless blowhards and mindless bluster of our commercial press. Public radio has long been a bulwark in that collective effort, keeping our public discourse intelligent, informed and, perhaps most importantly, interactive.

Those three qualities - particularly the last - have nowhere been more invaluable to and cherished by the community than in Baltimore. Public radio in Baltimore has engaged the community in a substantive and interactive way, a public good the commercial media seems to have abandoned long ago.

WYPR - known as WJHU and owned by the University until 2002 - has been the flagship in that effort, and no one has been more iconic of or essential to its ideals than Marc Steiner.

Steiner has hosted The Marc Steiner Show, a daily public affairs call-in show, on WJHU and then WYPR for close to 15 years, and in that time has become a Baltimore institution. When the University decided to sell WJHU in 2002, he pioneered the effort to rally donors and keep the station a public one. He even gave WYPR - "Your Public Radio" - its name.

He was fired abruptly by the station this week for reasons that are not entirely clear, but seem a muddle of internal politics, personal power-grabbing and managerial discord.

It isn't our place to comment on the longstanding internal tensions that seem to have bubbled over at WYPR, except to say this: If an internal power struggle or political in-fighting are at the heart of this decision, it will be a disastrous blow to the ideals WYPR has fought for so long to uphold.

The rancor playing out now in the press and online has raised fundamental questions about the role of public radio in the community, and how responsive it should be to the influence of ratings and corporate support. If Steiner's show was losing its luster and its audience - perhaps an inevitability after 15 years on the air - it would have been more than reasonable to make the appropriate changes.

However, a report in the News-Letter this week suggests that the station's emphasis on attracting corporate underwriters - to whom Steiner's notoriously progressive politics may have been an affront - played a factor in this.

That simply should not be the case. Ratings and corporate support are only two of the many yardsticks public radio stations should use to gauge public interest - the most important being direct feedback from the community. Public radio is nothing if not insulated from commercial pressures like ratings, and programming decisions should be steered by station members and community advisors. WYPR needs to engage its listeners and resolve internal discord - the station's legacy, in Charles Village and beyond, depends on it.