WFMT’s Uneasy Truce
Terkel stopped there. A lot more troubled water will have to flow under the bridge before the amity extends to the board of the Chicago Educational Television Association, which owns WTTW and also WFMT, and in particular to William McCarter, who’s president of CETA’s board and general manager of WTTW.
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“The music you don’t like has got to be on there, too,” a musicologist decreed. “Stockhausen and Bartok have to have their day, even if you hate their guts.”
As the room rang with denunciations, forms circulated seeking volunteers to be “station monitors” and to man a “telephone tree.”
(The newcomers to the Radio Committee, which oversees WFMT without actually running it, are Susan Lipman, who’s president of the Friends and executive director of Chamber Music Chicago; Joan Harris, Chicago’s former commissioner of Cultural Affairs; lawyer Gary Johnson; and Bruce Sagan, publisher of the Hyde Park Herald. They’ve transformed the once indolent committee. It now meets once a month and it meets at WFMT, so the station’s staff can attend.)
A few days later we called Antlitz and asked him to elaborate. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “if we were to program only to those people who really care about recorded commercials, there wouldn’t be a large enough audience to support us. But I think that in the future this will be our target audience more than it has been in the past. I think it would be a tragic mistake if WFMT tried to be a popular radio station. Our problem, however, is to keep the audience large enough and supportive enough that we can support ourselves.”
“The way I look at it, WFMT is like an upscale restaurant that has a dress code. And we say we have a certain environment that we want this commercial to convey–an environment of Brahms and Beethoven. And then there’s this god-awful commercial sitting there.”
