WFMT Watch: Another Sudden Departure
This much is documented. On April 30 Voegeli attended a Friends of WFMT forum in Hyde Park. He sounded enthusiastic and permanent. “I’m spending every waking hour on a long-range strategic plan to move this station,” he declared.
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The Friends were intrigued by the idea Voegeli floated last month to turn WFMT into “a bold new hybrid” whose revenues came not just from commercials and syndication, but also from subscriptions and foundation grants. What now? Has WFMT’s once and future splendor lost its best friend at court?
Instability is rife. A year ago Jay Andres was brought over from WNIB to handle the afternoon show, and radio consultant Peter Dominowski came on as program director. Now both are gone. That’s fine with the Friends, who helped run them off. But what about Voegeli?
New York Times bent itself into a pretzel trying to practice situation ethics. The Times, you’ll recall, brought censure and scorn–much of it coming from within–down on its head when it published the name of the woman in Palm Beach, Florida, who’d accused Ted Kennedy’s nephew of raping her.
But millions of Americans would have been furious if the media had hushed up Ted Kennedy’s night on the town with his nephew and its aftermath. Given Chappaquiddick, silence would have been interpreted (when word of the night inevitably leaked out) as one more instance of Kennedy influence buying the family out of trouble.
The Times compounded its problems by particularizing the woman in a profile that mentioned her out-of-wedlock child and quoted someone as saying she’d had “a little wild streak” back in high school and someone else as observing that “she liked to drink and have fun with the ne’er-do-wells in cafe society.” A horrified Anna Quindlen, writing in the Times, wished an editor had asked, “How does all this advance the story?”
