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Apropos of my post from yesterday, Marc Steiner's blog is fascinating reading. In particular I'd like to associate myself with his thoughts on Barack Obama's speech on race Tuesday:
We live in a nation where race has always been at the root of our social and political discussion. Race is at the root of our national persona. It is complex, very complex. Our generation, our race, our region, our gender, and our exposure other races define our feelings and sense of race as a nation. Barak Obama clearly understands the complexity of race in America. My own sense of him is that growing up as a Black child raised by a socially and politically open white mother, with conservative white grandparents in a white world, with an African father whom he did know, defined his own search for racial identity in America. He lived in other cultures and saw race not just through the lens of Black and White but through Asian worlds that most non-Asian-Americans ever touch. This is a life journey that took him, and continues to take him, wrestling with race through all its American complexities.
America needs to have this conversation with itself. Maybe Barak Obama is the only one, at the moment, who is able to create this conversation among ourselves.
And here's Obama's speech itself for good measure:
The Baltimore City Paper tries to uncover the details behind WYPR's controversial firing of Marc Steiner back in February, but without much success:
Though little known even now, the CEM [A production company founded by Steiner] appears to be a part of the dispute that caused Steiner's abrupt exit from Baltimore's National Public Radio affiliate on Feb. 1. But the CEM's finances are murky, and Steiner's own financial arrangements with WYPR (88.1 FM) are more complex than many realize. Steiner can't explain how CEM spent thousands of dollars, and he says any focus on his WYPR contract misses the real issues surrounding his dismissal, which center on the direction and character of the station's programming, and on the outsized ego of WYPR President Anthony Brandon.
And these, too, appear to have been factors.
Nevertheless, the article gives a good read of where things stand vis-à-vis Steiner, WYPR management, and the many WYPR listeners outraged by the firing. Check it out.
Brian Morton uses the firing of Marc Steiner from WYPR as a jumping off point for a discussion of the rarity of having an actual bona fide liberal in the media:
Conservatives have built their towering media machine, starting with the message mavens on K Street and the $25 million-plus budget of the Heritage Foundation, onto the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal, through the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Michael Savage (the top six talk radio hosts in America are right wingers, according to Talkers magazine), and with the help of Fox News and Bill O'Reilly. They know there's no shortage of places to find their particular brand of political ideology. So what's with the rancor that liberals have a place on their airwaves?
It was only in 2006 when the powers-that-be at MSNBC started seeing the rise in popularity of host Keith Olbermann--not someone you could classically call a liberal, but someone who insisted on using his platform to hold the Bush administration to account for all of the excuses and shifting rationales behind the Iraq War, the fired U.S. attorney scandal, the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, among others. But in 2003, when the Dixie Chicks were made persona non grata in the world of country music (and the larger world of pop radio) and questioning the administration was considered tantamount to treason, Olbermann said that his superiors at the network were angry with him when he featured two liberals on their air back-to-back.
It's now 2008, and we have both a Democratic House and Senate--but unlike five years ago when Olbermann pissed off the network brass by having Janeane Garofalo and Al Franken on one after the other, you don't see that kind of programming happening on the air.
Despite the sea change in public opinion after what Republicans have done to the country over eight years, the media is still living in the frightened grip of pro-business conservatives and right-wingers who do not see liberal points of view as legitimate ones. In some places, and predominantly in the media, "liberal" is a word to be avoided as much as it was back in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan first made it a dirty word.
I know alot of Baltimore progressive activists have recently been up in arms about the firing of Marc Steiner from WYPR. There have been petitions and protests and talks about storming the community advisory board meeting this month. To be honest, I could care less that Steiner lost his job..
WYPR announced today that Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks will replace Marc Steiner, the talk-show host the station fired just days ago.
"I think he does great radio," said Andy Bienstock, WYPR's programming director and vice president. "He was my first choice."
Rodricks will start in Steiner's noon to 2 p.m. time slot on Feb. 25.
Odd, given that Rodricks objected to Steiner's firing when it happened. Odder still, given that one of the knocks against Steiner was that he was too focused on Baltimore (according to this article) at a time when WYPR was trying to broaden its scope to include all of Maryland. Rodricks will no doubt make a good radio host, but he's definitely a journalist with a Baltimore focus, just like Steiner. I imagine more details about the selection will emerge soon.
This is unbelievable. Marc Steiner is not just a Baltimore institution, but -- since the expansion of WYPR to Frederick and Ocean City -- a Maryland one as well. It's shocking that he would be let go so unceremoniously. Dan Rodricks captures my thoughts on this quite well:
The dumping of Marc Steiner as host of the midday show at WYPR-FM -- a public-radio station that very likely would not exist were it not for him -- is sad and infuriating. Steiner was blessed with the brains, heart, pipes and civic interest for a great talk-show host, and he had a long run of good work. Instead of fixing whatever ailed the show, the station management decided to dump the host.
[...]
We have the station's board president, a PR woman, saying Steiner's "ratings" had dropped. I can't be the only person who read about Steiner's dumping in The Sun and got confused over the words "ratings" and "public radio" in the same sentence. Public radio is supposed to be immune from the pressures that influence commercial broadcasting.
No doubt there are a number of complicating factors involved here, as Rodrick acknowledges, but the way in which WYPR management is handling the matter is rather ham-fisted, I think.
