A Weak Signal at WBAI

WBAI is still on the air, but recent layoffs have badly shaken the alternative radio station and the community that supports it.

For years, it was an important platform for New York’s radicals, artists, and minority communities. Its counter-cultural credentials include important interviews with Malcolm X, early recording sessions with Bob Dylan, and a landmark Supreme Court case against the FCC over broadcasting “obscene” and offensive materials.

But in recent years, WBAI’s adversarial politics seem to have turned inward. There were frequent reports of chaos on the local board, fundraising difficulties, tragic deaths (including the double suicide of two hosts of a “positive thinking” program), and even Hurricane Sandy, which forced the station out of its home in the Financial District and into temporary studios at City College in Harlem. Then, earlier this month, nineteen staffers were laid off, including the entire news department, some of whom had worked at the station for decades.

There have been many last-ditch attempts to save the station, or to at least nudge it back from catastrophe. But the most recent effort, having already cut some of WBAI’s most beloved on-air personalities, looks particularly unlikely to succeed. There’s only twenty-three thousand dollars in the bank, and it’s not clear how the station will pay the fifty-thousand-dollar-a-month transmitter fee, build a new studio space, and meet payroll for the remaining staff.