To the editors:
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As Bryan Miller notes and McCarter acknowledges, many of us did feel betrayed by a fund-raising effort that promised to maintain the station’s standards, only to quickly resort to “canned” commercial messages of questionable taste. A further sense of alienation was created when subscribers to Chicago discovered that the WFMT listings which they believed they had already paid for had been removed from the magazine, and would now cost them an additional $40 per year. To my knowledge, no public apology for either of these acts has ever been offered.
With respect to programming, WFMT still is wonderful in many respects. But the loss of programs devoted to old orchestral, instrumental, vocal music, and festival broadcasts from Salzburg and Vienna are unfortunate. The replacement of Marty Robinson’s First Fifty Years by a program hosted by Peter Schickele is not an advance for the state of broadcast culture in Chicago.
