The undoing of WRNI (continued)

THE OVERWHELMING REACTION among WRNI supporters and listeners is one of outrage and disbelief. "Rhode Island should feel insulted," says Rick Schwartz, spokesman for the Rhode Island Foundation, which has given hundred thousands of dollars to WRNI. He says donors plan to contact state officials because of concerns about the prospect of the nonprofit station, strengthened with considerable community donations, being sold to a for-profit entity.

(On Monday afternoon, after his staff met with contributors, the office of Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch announced that Lynch wrote that day to Christo, asking her to halt the sale of WRNI until the concerns of his office and the station’s major contributors "have been properly addressed." A statement said Lynch "is especially troubled by the secrecy surrounding WBUR’s decision to sell WRNI as well as by the lack of timely notice given to the attorney general’s office, and to WRNI’s contributors.")

Christo, emerging from a meeting with WRNI staff last Friday, declined to answer questions from the Phoenix.

During the meeting with donors, Schwartz says, "She kept repeating, ‘We just decided it’s really time for the station to be taken over by community concerns and community interests. We’ve built this wonderful thing and it’s now the community’s turn.’ "

If WBUR truly wants community groups to maintain public radio in Rhode Island, boosters say, they should have been given more lead time before the station was offered for sale. At this point, Schwartz says, "It’s unlikely we would have the same advantage as someone with a commercial incentive."

Stephan Sloan, an associate at the Media Services Group, which is handling the sale, says he expects there to be "substantial interest" among potential buyers for WRNI — ranging from industry giants like Citadel and Clear Channel to niche-oriented religious and foreign-language broadcasters. He declined to estimate a selling price for WRNI and WXNI (AM 1230 in Westerly). It’s more likely the station will go to a commercial buyer "just for the reason that there are more commercial broadcasters," Sloan says, adding, "I’d be pleased to work with anyone locally that would want to keep the non-commercial station."

Although it’s somewhat difficult not to believe that financial concerns at WBUR (the licenses for WBUR-FM (90.9) and WRNI are held by Boston University) are driving the situation, Christo would not answer questions on the topic, Schwartz says. "We were getting such short answers that they would make the presidential candidates proud — in other words, she said nothing," he says.

A new spokesman for the WBUR Group, Will Keyser, of the Boston public relations firm Hill, Holliday, Connors, Cosmopulos, denied in a subsequent telephone interview that financial considerations are driving the decision to offer WRNI for sale. "I know there are concerns about the process, and those that feel that the process is not fair, but the reality is that the community will be given [a chance] through this process to make a serious and viable offer for the station, if that’s what they would like do," Keyser says.

"WBUR formed a partnership with the community and invested in WRNI six years ago for the purpose of building a viable public radio station in Rhode Island," Keyser adds, "and the WBUR now feels that the station is viable, and that it’s time for the community to decide what the future is going to be. Placing the station up for sale, informing those in the community of this, they feel, is the fairest way to handle giving the community the opportunity to decide the future."

Gene Mihaly of Barrington, one of four core members of the Foundation for Ocean State Radio, which helped to pave the way for WRNI’s arrival, says the foundation partnered with WBUR, rather than Boston’s WGBH, because of a preference for WBUR’s far more extensive news-and-information programming. "There was an explicit — unfortunately unwritten — commitment not to sell the license to us or anybody else for the indefinite future," he says. "At the very beginning, we were quite conscious that Boston University would own this license, and we were nervous about it."

"On two or more occasions, we said to Jane Christo, ‘We’re nervous.’ Jane just flatly said, it [the sale of the station] won’t happen. She said they were in it for good. We would have never been able to raise $3 million-plus if the message to donors, to [retired industrialist] Hank Sharpe, the ProJo, and so on, if we had to go to people and say, this is for a six-year run or whatever until the people in Boston decide the station should be sold."

Now, Mihaly says, "Essentially, we’re being invited to buy back that which we already paid for." He says WRNI backers are considering their options. "I think there’s a fair prospect of widespread chagrin and perhaps anger in the state," Mihaly says, "and it would not be a very attractive environment for a commercial operator to come in here, depending on advertisers, and that’s not a threat. That’s an assessment. We’re going to look at this Rubik’s Cube from every angle, and I hope we can come up with a really good solution."

Mihaly asserts, "The money people at Boston University concluded they had to raise some money, and the sacrificial lamb is Rhode Island."

Keyser says WRNI will maintain its current broadcast operations until the station is sold, and that the four remaining staffers will be offered jobs at WBUR when that happens. The sale would encompass the license for the station and its physical infrastructure. (Mihaly, though, says a preliminary opinion by the Rhode Island Foundation holds that the studio, minus removable equipment, is not part of what can be sold.)

In the late ’90s, WBUR shelled out about $2.4 million to acquire WRCP, a 5000-watt commercial station with Spanish-language programming, and WERI in Westerly. At the time, Rhode Island and Delaware were the only two states without their own public radio stations, and WBUR attracted financial support with pledges of robust local programming.

From all outward signs, the station enjoyed a strong amount of community support. A list of more than 80 underwriters in 2002-2003 ranged from corporate giants like FleetBoston, the Providence Journal, and Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island to community groups like New Urban Arts and the Fund for Community Progress.

One lingering question among WRNI supporters is whether their donations wound up in the right place. The size of WBUR’s budget was not immediately available at deadline, but an educated guess puts it between $21 million and $24 million.

Speaking before the news of WRNI being put up for sale, Nondas Hurst Voll, the executive director of the Fund for Community Progress, expressed her disappointment about the winnowing of WRNI’s journalistic resources, and the weakening of its ability to tell complex local stories. Voll says she felt so strongly about the value of WRNI’s reporting that, even though she didn’t usually give during the regular on-air fund drives, she felt compelled to offer $50 the last time around. She was shocked, she says, when "the thank you came from Boston, saying, ‘Thank you for contributing to WBUR.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, that’s for WRNI.’ "

It’s possible that WRNI was included in WBUR’s fundraising operation, but even before word of the sale, the apparently northern flow of her donation left Voll wondering whether "betrayed" was too strong a word to describe the situation.

EVEN WITH its AM frequency, WRNI has been an oasis in a local broadcasting industry dominated by information often lacking in depth and context. In an age of media deregulation — when giants like Clear Channel and Citadel grow by leaps and bounds — Rhode Island’s public radio station has become a vital news source for many listeners.

"What you’ve described to me is the worst-case scenario," H. Philip West Jr., executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island, said last Friday when I told him of WBUR’s plans to sell WRNI. After the most recent cuts, "My assumption of the worst-case prior to what you told me was that they would just cut back and do national NPR programming."

"I find that almost whenever I’m in the car, I have WRNI on, and the in-depth reporting from Iraq, and the in-depth discussion about Iraq, and those vital issues that have almost entirely been shut out of the broadcast TV news is priceless to me," West adds. "But I’ve also appreciated that pretty regularly they had Martha Bebinger in the State House — two, three, four times a week she would be there. Most of the commercial stations send someone when there’s a big event, but they’re not there for the routine stories. I think that’s a statement both of how good public broadcasting can be and how superficial the recent commercial broadcasting has been." (West says his critique isn’t geared to local talk show hosts, who help to stimulate discussion of political issues.)

Already marginalized, public radio in Rhode Island faces an uncertain future. The sad thing — aside from the disabling of a much-needed news and information source — is how WBUR has moved from hero to villain.

Portions of this story originally appeared on www.providencephoenix.com and www.bostonphoenix.com. Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.