b Congratulated
by Rosemary Klein, BES President
The December 28, 2011 issue of the ubiquitous b, the once-a-week freebie Tribune news offering, published an enlightening article in which David Zurawik identified ten local media stories from the passing year and plumbed them for their deeper meaning. His take on two local media personalities in particular resonated in regard to the values often posited within Ethical Culture.
Zurawik marveled at the “power and imagination” of Ron Smith, host since 1984 of a WBAL talk show, who in October 2011 announced that he’d received a diagnosis of stage four pancreatic cancer to his on-air audience and then remained on-air for more than a month openly sharing his situation before dying in mid-December.
Zurawik paid homage not only to Smith’s outgoing courage but also to the “one-market, one-station career” that Smith had been able to retain and shape for more than a quarter of a century at 1090 AM Baltimore. Zurawik conjectured that sadly that type of “career…is probably a thing of the past.” And if that is the case, he predicted it “will make for media that are less personal and accountable.”
October 2011 also brought the troubling news that Baltimore-based radio voice Lisa Simeone had been fired from the freelance job she held for fifteen years with Sandprint Media Center Inc., whose documentary series SOUNDPRINT is the oldest of that type on public radio. According to online sources, Simeone had over the years produced three documentaries and had penned and voiced program intros for the series.
Even at this point, teasing what’s factual and what’s not regarding the Simeone firing (on the “ethical” grounds that “partisan involvement” undertaken by an employee is out of bounds) is, however, hugely difficult to ferret from the blizzard of information that swirls chaotically about the Internet. A 10/20/11 Huff Post blog cites Simeone as saying that she has been one of an October 2011 Movement steering committee of approximately 50 persons. Go to the october2011.org website, however, and Simeone is one of 15 people (along with Maria Allwine, past co-chair of the Maryland Green Party, and Margaret Flowers, M.D., ardent advocate for single payer health care) identified as “the people who are helping to organize the October 2011 Movement.”
Simeone’s current bio on october2011.org is cloaked in clever banality remarkably lacking in the specificity attached to the other organizers. She is identified simply as living in Baltimore and being “a proud loudmouthed feminist and rabble-rouser [whose] husband wonders whether her love of natty dressing might interfere with her participation in the revolution.” (Reflect that many might construe the words “loudmouthed feminist and rabble-rouser” and “the revolution” grounds for severance no matter whom they were attached to.)
While the Simeone firing begs for a more in-depth explication than it appears thus far to have received anywhere, it is important that Zurawik calls attention to it as a simple but profound “reminder that ethics, free speech and protest are not abstractions or stuff for the history books only. Some people are putting their jobs and careers on the line today for what they believe.”
The best takeaway from Zurawik’s article, however, was the point he made in his opening sentence about the general worthlessness of lists such as he’s putting forth “unless there are larger points to be made about each of the items.” That he then stepped out on to what appears to be an increasingly wobbly limb to make those “larger points” whetted my appetite for the debates and contradictions that contribute to the universalities – beginning with those locally bred – of ethics content. b congratulated David Zurawik for having done so.
