The Mouse That Killed the Press?
Merry Winter Solstice to all! I'm in another rush to get this Web page done after I fell asleep. I plan to update this Web page this weekend, so it's probably worth checking in later on for that update.
The next regular WBAI LSB meeting will be held on Wednesday January 8, 2025, at 7:00 PM. That meeting will be held on ZOOM, even though ZOOM compromises privacy and security.
We had the first meeting of the 14th WBAI LSB this past week. I've termed out, so I couldn't fully participate in the meeting. In fact I was supposed to have given an oral Treasurer's Report but we never got to it.
This is not all that much of a new WBAI LSB. In fact of the 24 members of the 14th WBAI LSB only one is actually new.
So the usual suspects did their usual stuff again. The former Chair of the LSB had termed out, as I have. The Vice Chair was chairing for the first time. The disruptors are well practiced at what they do. We spent time arguing about adding a minute of silence, and also on someone who wanted to add that minute to the end of the meeting. And later on that person claimed that her motion was to add all of the time spent talking about her motion to the end of the meeting, which she said was 14 minutes. This is the underhanded way some people do things.
Anyway, the people who wanted to make a mess of the meeting largely succeeded. I didn't get to give an oral Treasurer's Report, the interim General Manager and interim Program Director did not get to give a report, the WBAI Directors on the PNB did not get to give a report. We sure did hear a lot about the nonsense one faction pushes, however. I suspect that the one new person on the LSB was left puzzled about it all. We'll have two years of this LSB, if we're lucky and Trump doesn't destroy the entire thing.
Some years ago the WBAI LSB voted to hold its regular meetings on the second Wednesday of every month, subject to change by the LSB, so we have the following schedule:
These meetings are set to begin at 7:00 PM.
WBAI has a program schedule up on its Web site. The site has gotten many of the individual program pages together to provide links and such, so check it out.
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Here is WBAI's current Internet stream. We can no longer tell if the stream is working without testing every possible stream. Good luck.
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WBAI is archiving the programs! WBAI has permanently switched to yet another new archive Web page! This one is more baffling than the previous one. For some time I was unable to post archive blurbs, then I could, and then I couldn't again. Now I can again and there are a whole bunch of archive blurbs up there now.
This is a link to the latest version of the official WBAI archive. The archiving software appears to have been at least partially fixed. To get to the archive of this program you can use the usual method: you'll have to click on the drop-down menu, which says Display,
and find Back of the Book on that menu. We're pretty early in the list, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Once you find the program name click GO
and you'll see only this Back of the Book program. Management has fixed some problems that we'd been having with the archives.
For programs before March 23, 2019, we're all out of luck. The changes that took place once WBAI Management took control of the WBAI archives seems to have wiped out all access to anything before that date in March. You'll have to click on the same drop-down menu as above, which says Display,
and find Specify Date
, it's the second choice from the top. You are then given a little pop-up calendar and you can choose the date of the program there. Then click GO
and you'll see a list of programs that aired on that date. For those previous programs you can get the audio, but nothing else, since I can't post anything to those pages anymore. Good luck.
Since the former General Manager banned Sidney Smith from WBAI he's not alternating with us on the air. As of November 2020, Back of the Book airs weekly.
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So Donnie Bonespur
Trump went after ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos for saying that the jury in the E. Jean Carroll case had found Trump, liable for rape.
Trump sued. And this week ABC News settled with Trump for a total of $16 Million, $15 Million for the settlement and one Million for Trump's legal fees. But I have read that it was actually Disney, which owns ABC, that caved to Trump's bullying in this cowardly way. Disney cares nothing for journalism or freedom of the press, they just want a platform that will let them show their Disney products as they please to a national audience. And $15,000,000 is a trivial amount of money to Disney. The impact of their gutless capitulation will be terrible for media organizations.
And now, on the heels of Disney showing what cowards they are, Trump is suing the Des Moines Register newspaper and its former top pollster Ann Selzer in order to intimidate journalists. He is emboldened by how easily he beat Disney. We can expect to see him attacking more journalists. In some countries the dictators just shut down news outlets and other media that do not show them in a favorable light. Trump can't do that, yet, so he's going to try barratry to shut things down. I hope no one else gives in to this kind of extortion. The First Amendment is at stake here.
In 1783, George Washington said, telling them If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
In 1798, the Federalist Party was in power and they attempted to stop criticism of their activities with the Alien and Sedition Acts, which said that making, false, scandalous and malicious,
statements about Congress or the president was a crime. In 1964, in The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case the Supreme Court ruled that if a plaintiff in a defamation lawsuit is a public official or candidate for public office, then not only must they prove the normal elements of defamation like publication of a false defamatory statement to a third party — but they must also prove that the statement was made with actual malice,
meaning that the defendant either knew the statement was false or recklessly disregarded whether it might be false. So Trump is trying to take America back into the past. George h made a mistake, Disney should not have caved in.
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There are a lot of issues that are considered hazardous to talk about on the air at WBAI, even though the gag rule was lifted in 2002. However, there is the Internet! There are mailing lists which you can subscribe to and Web based message boards devoted to WBAI and Pacifica issues. Many controversial WBAI/Pacifica issues are discussed on these lists.
One open list that no longer exists was the WBAI-specific Goodlight
Web based message board. It was sometimes referred to on Back of the Book as the bleepin' blue board,
owing to the blue background that was used on its Web pages. This one had many people posting anonymously and there was also an ancillary WBAI people
board that was just totally out of hand.
In June 2012, I ended up having to salvage the bleepin' blue board, and so I was the moderator on it for its last seven years, until it got too expensive.
Sometimes we used to have live interaction with people posting on the Goodlight Board
during the program.
Our very own Uncle Sidney Smith, whose program Saturday Morning With the Radio On used to alternate with us, has a blog these days. You can reach his blog here.
There used to be a number of mailing lists related to Pacifica and WBAI. Unfortunately, they were all located on Yahoo! Groups. When Yahoo! Groups was totally shut down in December 2020, all of those mailing lists ceased to exist. One year earlier their file sections and archives of E-mails, had been excised leaving only the ability to send E-mails back and forth among the members. Now it's all gone. Older Back of the Book program Web pages tell a little more about those lists.
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