earley.qxd
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Can Name Withheld and I be listening to the same WBEZ? In his/her letter (“Radio for Dummies,” April 17 Letters section), the correspondent rails against an “idiotic” Eight Forty-Eight discussion on forest preserves, and then goes on to claim that the insidious impetus behind WBEZ’s trend toward the “dumbing down” of public radio [Hot Type, February 20] is its politically correct attempt to create (in Eight Forty-Eight?) a “five-day-a-week prime-time program covering, almost exclusively, black cultural institutions and issues.”
I might remind Name Withheld that the one WBEZ show that truly was geared toward black cultural institutions and issues, A Richard Steele Friday, was bumped by ‘BEZ in favor of the monolithic Eight Forty-Eight. Instead of including Steele’s reports–needed in a city with such a huge black population–in its current format, Torey Malatia seems determined to initiate Steele into the new issue-free order through some sort of bizarre radio equivalent of a fraternity hazing: this very morning, Eight Forty-Eight ran a piece wherein Steele interviewed a Chicago woman entrepreneur who runs a business specializing in collecting “dog poop.” Tell me, Name Withheld, would that be classified as a “brown” issue?
