While driving on the highway recently, I saw a billboard that I really, really wanted to trash. It read as follows:
"music + faith Joy-FM 99.1"
If you live in the area (or if you remember 2 past SNLC's here and here), you'll recognize that FM frequency as formerly belonging to the only full-time local classical music station, KFUO-FM, which switched over to the fundie bigot muzak junk of Joy-FM a little over a year ago, through a corrupt and slimy deal involving Joy-FM and the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The slow-bleed consequences of that act of radio murder have started to be felt, as recently reported in the Post-Dispatch, much not good, some mildly poetic, but not really hurting deeply the perpetrators of this vile act. More below the flip.....
The local classical critic, Sarah Bryan Miller, has done yeoman's (or yeowoman's) work in covering this story for the past 2 years or so. Her reporting on the aftermath of this deal regarding local music and arts organizations is here. Several arts group leaders commented, after the loss of KFUO:
"It's not easy at all," says Scott Schoonover, artistic director at Union Avenue Opera, "We don't have any method to get to our audience directly every day, which we were able to do with KFUO: 'Hey, we're out here!'"
"It's been a tough, tough year for us," says Scott Kennebeck, acting head of the Cathedral Concerts series during its 2010-2011 season. "It's been more of an impact on our marketing than I thought it would be. KFUO was a direct pipeline to people interested in the arts, and there's no other media outlet that's so focused on that."
"With the loss of KFUO, we have lost, in every sense of the word, our voice to convey our message," says Linda Ryder, executive director of the St. Louis Chamber Chorus.
Obviously in a situation like this, those groups have to scramble, and have done, for getting the word out. Given the general demographic of the audience for such organizations, Facebook, Twitter and other social media aren't the most optimal choices now.
If any "good" came out of this slimeball deal, it was at the 2010 Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod convention, where, as Miller noted from the synod's 3rd-VP Paul Maier:
"....every member of the (board of directors) up for re-election who voted to sell KFUO-FM was defeated at the Houston Convention last July."
However, that's small beer compared to what happened to the old station employees, as Miller reported on here. When the KFUO staff were fired, the salt in the wounds included this (emphasis mine):
"Under the terms of their severance agreements with the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, owner of KFUO, they'd lose their buyouts if they took other jobs — any jobs, not just in broadcasting — within six months, or if they spoke to reporters."
It's behavior like that which puts me in mind of the quote attributed to Luis Bunuel:
"Thank God I am an atheist."
Making ex-employees sign confidentiality agreements about not disclosing proprietary information about the employer you're about to leave is fine. Preventing them from getting any sort of job is inhumane, cruel, sleazy, and just plain wrong. But then we expect no less from an ethically-challenged scumbag like Kermit Brashear (anyone from Nebraska reading this?), who was the synod board thug who slapped the rules on the employees, in cahoots with synod treasurer Thomas Kuchta and Gerald B. Kieschnick, synod president at the time. Someone once told me about the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod that their attitude is that they don't feel that they ever have to explain anything to you, and the only time they'll talk to you is to try to convert you. That is, when they're not treating radio station people like dirt.
In fairness, one has to differentiate between the thugs at the top like Brashear, Kieschnick and Kuchta and the synod's rank and file ordinary folks, as Connett noted:
"Connett has nothing but praise for the human resources department of the synod, as well as for the many supportive employees of the denomination's headquarters and the folks in the pews who were "highly incensed" by the deal.
He has nothing but scorn for the architects of the deal, which he says brought the synod very little cash and a great deal of ill-will."
It also brought about bumper stickers that say "joy-fm 99.1" and that billboard sign, where I want to do to that billboard what the synod did to the KFUO people.
To recap from past SNLC's the reasons for my anger, you also have to remember that Joy-FM also cheated their way to getting that new signal. When they claimed to have the money in the "winning bid" (another story in itself) for the station last fall, they actually didn't. As I noted in the one earlier SNLC, Joy-FM had to do a fund raiser later in the year, headlined by Albert Pujols, Andy Benes and their wives, to raise the money after the fact that Joy-FM claimed that they had earlier. In short, to change the names in a quip that you all know:
"Joy-FM lied, and KFUO-FM died."
However, life goes on, as it tends to, and we in the area have to live with the wreckage of this example of fundie bigot thuggery. There's even a tinge of Republican douchebaggery to it, as Brashear is a Republican former member of the Nebraska legislature. It's not that KFUO was the best classical music station ever; far from it. But it was the only game in town. What we got with its demise was something infinitely worse. FWIW, take that lesson for standing behind President Obama next year against his tea-bagger bigot Republican opponent, no matter what.
Not very happy reading, is it? With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol below, namely your loser stories of the week.....