The Electron Pencil

More On The War

A little more than a hundred years ago, the Hearst and Pulitzer newspapers did their best to make sure a war between the USA and Spain could proceed as scheduled. The final casus belli was the the sinking of a battleship in Havana harbor. William Randolph Hearst — the Charles Foster Kane of his day, tehee — splashed the incendiary slogan Remember the Maine; To Hell with Spain on his front pages.

War Is Swell!

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Next thing you know, this holy land was stomping the bejesus out of the Spaniards.

Flash forward to November, 2013. A battle has been brewing in the teapot that is the Bloomington community radio community (redundancy intended). So this bastion of yellow e-journalism did its best to pour gasoline on that glowing ember. (Are you digging my orgy of metaphor so far?) The apparent cas. bel. in this contretemps was Friday’s second posting (here’s the first) wherein the Pencil helped one respected and very active WFHB volunteer lay out an indictment whose list of particulars seemed to damn the new Firehouse Broadcasting general manager, Kevin Culbertson, to the eternal flames of hell.

Pencillistas responded en masse and the battle was met. By midnight, the Facebook Theater of Operations was littered with corpses.

The Enemy Advances

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Allow me to clear up one important point here. Many anti-Kevin-ists have expressed concern that he’s going to come in here, stack the Board with acolytes of his choosing, and transform WFHB into a beacon for Jesus.

Jesus.

Try to chill, folks. Look, I’m not throwing a party to celebrate the anointing of Culbertson. I would have preferred the board to have selected a new big boss from, well, the community.

But Culbertson cannot alter the composition of the Board. Period. According to Firehouse Broadcasting’s by-laws, the general manager serves at the pleasure of the Board. They are, in effect, his bosses.

Not only that, there are only two ways for any poor sucker who actually wants to get on the Board (a desire, BTW, that should be ample evidence the applicant is short on sanity) to do so.

1. The applicant must present her/himself to the Board and make a case that s/he is a swell human being, at which point the Board will either approve or deny the request, and then pass the applicant on to a vote of the general membership
2. If there is a sudden Board vacancy, the board can listen to those lunatic asylum patients who want to fill said vacancy, and then pick the least deranged (or most qualified) applicant and appoint her/him to serve the remainder of open Board member’s term.

That’s it, peeps.

The GM has nothing to do with the process. Can a mole/spy/saboteur whisper into the ears of enough Board members to sway a vote? Sure. But that can happen whether Kevin Culbertson, Pat Robertson, or the Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei occupies the claustrophobic general manager’s office.

Not Just Yet

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It’s a good bet WFHB will not soon become an outlet for Bryan Fischer‘s fundamentalist rantings.

That said, Hondo Thompson’s piece on Culbertson’s past is compelling and worth keeping in mind while we watch the Kevin Era unfold.

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I Lied

Chatting with a WFHB-er who played a key role in the GM search Friday night, I promised not to write about the station and Culbertson again in these precincts for a long time to come. I was, I admitted, tired of the strife.

Hah! the person said.

Well, I got a bit huffy. What do you mean? I demanded.

The person told me I’d be writing another post on it all before I knew it.

Hah! I echoed, hoping to sting the rotter. You just watch. I’m finished with this thing. I’ve got plenty more to write about.

And, of course, the person said Hah! again, as did I, which caused the person to do the same, and so on until we Hah!ed ourselves offline.

I’m proud to say I kept my promise for an entire day and a half. That’s pretty good for a hot air balloon like me.

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Lie To Me

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