WRFR - station manager orders staff listserve shut down

WRFR's feisty 'google group' list serve, which let more than three dozen programmers and staff pass information between themselves and freely discuss station policies, has been ordered shut down by the new station mgr, who declared that programmers were using it to "vent their hostilities"

But, VENTING is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. Rather than bottle up issues with station policies , with other programmers, staff or anything else , the google group's private internet forum let's the programmers exchange their differences of opinion in the semi-privacy that characterizes present day e-speech.

Besides, intermingled with these occasoinal purgative interpersonal staff encounters are more general concerns about station policies and their implementation, its finances, website, publications, equipment maintenance and all the other critical information flows and infrastructure. It can include goring of the station's sacred cows) and criticism of the station manager's style of executing her position

Regrettably Manager McGuiness seems to take fright at such evidence of genuine discourse among equals and has had the group shut down. While she may not even be aware of it, her latest action is one more in a series of essentially anti-democracy initiatives since her taking on the job. Reminiscent of the US foreign policy of dividing occupiedIraq into separate camps, the station's debating sides are to be protected from each others ideas and opinions.

But quashing collective discussion of or disagreement with her management schema, ending weekly decisionmaking staff meetings, replacing them with a host of committees whose every decision is subject to her veto; continuing a pocket veto of efforts by programmers to review station's finances; a seeming disinclination to notify certain "loose cannon" (her phrase) programmers when meeting times and agendas change; and the assumption of final authority to grant or deny new programmers slots on the "community radio" station's schedule--which is nearly bare of local community-related programming--none of these are appropriate for a community radio station.

McGuiness once explained her fundamental governance philosophy to me. WRFR's programmers are, inthe main, "sheep", I was informed, incapable of competent collective action, and must needs be herded about by the "strong" personalities among the station crew. There's something positively Ayn Rand-ish, Jack London-ish about that point of view, something I find to be ...incongruent with my notion of Community.

What I am encountering of course, is simply a radically different weltbild , or world view, in action. A hierarchic one, vertically integrating the station, its staff and programmers into a Quite a valid way of being, it is nevertheless nearly the opposite of my own more horizontally integrated metaphysic of give and take and innovation.

Coupled with her perception of the station's former use of weekly staff meetings to consider issues and make decisions, as a "quagmire", Ms McGuiness appears to have a bit of a fa_c_st tendency, perhaps appropriate in this "Lost Age" that the residents of planet earth are stumbling through at present

Vertical and horizontal organization are both perfectly legitimate ways of being in the world, but the former is, alas, turning out at WRFR to be very unforgiving of dissent or disputation with the established order, no matter how recently that order has been established. While this might be useful, necessary even, in the armed services, our community radio station is not a platoon; our community is not a war zone.

In fact, the sole host whose shows focus on local community issues (Penobscot Bay and Maine State Prison) may himself be at risk of being booted out for publicly criticizing the pace and priorities the manager has chosen, and for promoting shows apparently not consistent with her wishes. Uh oh...that 'sole host' is me! Here! Now!

Sigh. Watch this space.