Talking With Marc Steiner PART II by Emil Volcheck

Marc Steiner spoke about his removal from WYPR on Feb. 1, 2008 as part of a fundraiser titled “The Rest of the Story” at the Village Learning Place. Emil Volcheck was there and took notes, and the first part of the talk already has appeared on this blog.

“On the matter of WYPR, I’ve moved beyond it,” says Marc Steiner, who works full-time at his Center for Emerging Media in Baltimore, and who is developing a show at public radio station WEAA. Currently the show airs on Wednesdays from 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. each week.

“I’m reluctant to discuss the matter because I feel like I’m being dragged into the muck again. I spent seven years at WYPR. When WJHU went on the market, there were many trying to buy it from Hopkins, including a Christian broadcaster and WAMU. I believed the station should belong to the community and worked to keep it there.”

“From the beginning, there was war inside the station. At the first Board meeting, some came to me and said thank you for all your work, but we are the guarantors of the loan, and we’ll take it from here. I said that I was the guarantor of the community’s contributions, and that I was not going anywhere. You could feel a line being drawn in the room.”

Steiner says that he recently advised a public radio station in Salisbury, Maryland not to sell their station to WYPR because of the loss of community-focused programming that would entail. Steiner seems to feel WYPR under its current management is not a community-focused radio station.

Steiner says that public radio, historically speaking, was established with the model of a central, national public radio that would create programs for local stations to use. The local stations would in turn feed news to the national.

“Public radio should not be afraid to talk about and discuss controversial issues. It should be adventuresome, edgy,” says Steiner.

“For many years, CBS was the model of establishment media. You could rely on CBS to report the mainstream news. Public radio should push the envelope.”

Steiner spoke about why the membership of public radio is important. Membership has fallen off in public radio broadly across the public radio spectrum, and corporate and non-profit underwriting of public radio stations and specific programming is the rising trend. In fact NPR’s national Marketplace business news show published a special report on the rise of underwriting in public radio. Click here for to listen to that three-part series.

“The makeup of the WYPR Board is very white, wealthy, protestant,” said Steiner. “The Board needs more than that.” Steiner says that when WYPR was first being organized, there was a proposal to have the WYPR station members elect a certain number of members to the Board. This suggestion was never implemented.

In terms of the future, Marc Steiner is focusing on the Center for Emerging Media (CEM).

“When I founded the Center for Emerging Media in 2001, I intended to have a certain number of members on the CEM Board chosen from members who joined over the Internet,” he says.

When he left WYPR, WEAA came to me immediately, says Steiner. “Fortunately two of my producers, Jessica and Justin, came along with me. We are fortunate to have help from Claire Gilman and Lea Gilmore.”

“Public radio is the most segregated medium in America” claims
Steiner about the lack of ethnic diversity on public radio. “Tavis Smiley, host of News and Notes, and Michelle Martin,
always seem to be able to find experts to interview on any topic,
experts who are people of color.”

Steiner noted that the popular news Web site “Slate” had a special African-American news Web site called “The Root.” Still, why is this needed, wonders Steiner. “Why can’t African-American news be integrated into mainstream news?”

Nevertheless, he added, “There is a place for media that serves distinctive communities, for instance, the Jewish Times, or the Afro-American.” Overall he believes there is a lack of commitment in the media towards making it inclusive. “There is a difference between carrying out affirmative action and consciously building a multiracial staff.”

Steiner advocates a cooperative model of media.

He ended his talk by speaking about some of his recent projects with the Center for Emerging Media. They are preparing a program on the controversial mining practice of mountaintop removal. He stated that Governor Martin O’Malley has been supportive of his work. Steiner quoted O’Malley saying “Marc, you always give me a hard time, but I’m behind you.”

Steiner says he is optimistic about the future, but also worried about the lack of common purpose in America today. “There is conflict over different visions for the country.”