on the cover / By Bob Doran

Station Identification

With the controversial termination of KHSU’s general manager, listeners and underwriters wonder if their radio is about to be sanitized

(July 31, 2008)  Lance Hardie, a volunteer at public radio station KHSU, was upset. None of the people calling the shots at KHSU had any true love for the station, its mission, its service to the community of listeners. Humboldt State University, owner of KHSU’s broadcast license, was calling the shots from above, and without consulting the people who made the station what it was.

Hardie decided to speak his mind. In a letter to the station’s internal e-mail list, he put it like this:

GALLERY >

“Many in the volunteer staff have contributed programming, administration, ideas and money to KHSU over the years,” he wrote. “We create, produce, engineer and host programs 24 hours a day. We are part of KHSU’s community. We not only represent the community, we are the community. We are the people KHSU claims to serve.”

Hardie went on to complain about a lack of forthcoming communication from the HSU administration regarding what he described as “a major change in the management of KHSU.”

He could have been complaining about the recent forced retirement of KHSU General Manager Elizabeth Hans McCrone, but he wasn’t. His letter was written five years ago — back when the administration first appointed her to the position.

The general inside view of Hans McCrone’s leadership hasn’t changed much in the five years since she was first appointed. If anything, it has deteriorated. She was a controversial leader, one who was imposed on the station from above. Her salary was obscenely high, and she worked laughably short hours. She inflamed passions by firing a long-term staff member who was himself controversial inside the station — this is public radio, after all — and showed little concern, at least publicly, about the simmering anger and division that the firing produced. The university administration stood by her throughout.

Until a few weeks ago, at which point it abruptly offered her the choice of quitting or being fired. It’s not really known why the turn took place, except to say that Humboldt State wanted more control over the station than Hans McCrone was willing to give. But since Hans McCrone released a public letter detailing past battles with the administration over left-leaning programs on the station, the listenership — which perhaps skews even further left than generally left-leaning Humboldt County — has mobilized to protect KHSU from overthrow by the neocon Christian conservative disciples of Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch who are imagined to be taking charge. And the university rushes to mollify them.

This, of course, involves the expenditure of a lot of hot air, and on both sides. Look at it this way: The battle currently raging between Elizabeth Hans McCrone and the person who showed her the door — Rob Gunsalus, Humboldt State’s Vice President for Advancement — is a battle between two seasoned public relations professionals, both of whom have years or decades of experience in managing opinion. It’s a simple fact that truth, in this profession, is not a primary consideration. And such has been the case in the present instance. None of the parties in the brouhaha has a corner on the truth, nor on the bullshit.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT PAGE >SHARE