In New York, where this column has resided for the past week, there's hardly a word to be heard about foot-and-mouth disease, praise the Lord. Nonetheless, the management of my favourite Big Apple radio station has been working on a human variant, bringing that extremity and that orifice into dangerously close proximity.
WBAI is probably the world's biggest little community station, surviving on a shoestring at the primest of prime locations: 99.5 FM, the centre of New York's dial. And for years, it has been home to the sort of internal strife that makes RTE's domestic shenanigans look like a quiet day at a Quaker meeting house.
And you think all those RTE listeners figure they know a thing or two about how a radio station should be run, just because they send off an e-mail to Making Waves? Maybe they could take a leaf from the WBAI book: before Christmas, its listeners were gathering in their hundreds in and around the WBAI studios in midtown Manhattan, to protest the firing of a popular station manager and to try to safeguard the station against further worrying changes in programming and management. In what station dissidents label a "lockout" and a "coup", management changed the locks and reasserted control.
No, I don't think all the excitement is just because WBAI is one of the last places where you can still hear a weekly old-time radio-drama show, happy as I was on Sunday to hear Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O'Sullivan hamming it up. WBAI, in a real sense, belongs to a distinct community of New York listeners, who reckon they have a stake in WBAI partly because they pay for it - not the way we grudgingly pay for RTE, by coughing up the licence fee and putting up with ads, but by direct voluntary subscription. (Technically, the station is owned by something else entirely, the Pacifica Foundation, of which more later.)
WBAI and its four sister stations in the Pacifica network were the first listener-sponsored stations in the world, and they still survive on these monies, not on the government grants and corporate arrangements that have led National Public Radio into dull irrelevance and PBS television to be labelled the Petroleum Broadcasting System.
The result in WBAI is a station that serves a variety of "minority" concerns - musical, ethnic, political - with an extraordinary sense of involvement with subjects and audience.
Sure, listener-sponsored and supported radio always runs the risk of chasing after audiences with money. But in this vastly differentiated marketplace, such public radio has the desirable effect of keeping programming with insufficient commercial appeal - be it music or speech - right there on the air.
LATELY, this column has been tracking the travails and travels of Vin Scelsa, a great and eclectic DJ and "personality" for 30-something years. Earlier this year he finished with commercial radio, losing his last weekly slot. Then, at the end of March, his Internet-only programme bit the dust because the company that hosts it on the Web, ArtistEnt.com, took a dive in the great Internet bellyflop that's still going on.
On public, listener-supported radio, however - in this case the Fordham University-based WFUV, traditionally home to copious amounts of Irish music - Scelsa can do Idiot's Delight, his weekly free-form show. And earlier this month, this man, whose shows were too commercial-unfriendly for the profit-driven stations, and went bust for lack of funds on the Internet, raised about $10,000 from his loving listeners in just one Saturday evening by milking them for money during WFUV's "pledge drive".
The loving listeners of WBAI and other Pacifica stations may be less inclined to pledge their money in light of the "coup". The national board of Pacifica, which has stations in several US cities, is under attack from listeners, not only on the streets and in the studios but also in the courts: Californian judges have so far given the green light to listeners who are challenging its legitimacy.
This is important partly because Pacifica is occasionally home to the sort of hard-hitting and investigative journalism that's rarely heard or seen on US airwaves. Its most honoured journalist, Amy Goodman, has been among those scrapping with management, whom she accuses of trying to control and tone down Democracy Now!, her networked programme.
Then, recently, her co-host Juan Gonzalez, another distinguished journalist, resigned live on air from the network, telling listeners: "The current management situation at Pacifica has become intolerable . . . the last straw being the Christmas coup at this station, WBAI. I've come to the conclusion that the Pacifica board has been hijacked by a small clique that has more in common with modern-day corporate vultures than with workingclass America."
I bet the bosses didn't like that. But it was rank flattery compared to what he did next. Gonzalez announced a "national corporate campaign" to oust the Pacifica Foundation's board leadership, which he accused of "illegally [changing] the foundation's bylaws". He said the campaign would call on listeners not to donate to Pacifica but to contribute money to groups challenging the board's legitimacy and working to democratise the network.
Gonzalez said the leadership group "does not respect free speech; it does not respect labour or civil rights; it doesn't even practice due process for its own managers". Pacifica's Washington DC station, WPFW, cut away to taped programming during this extraordinary intervention.
At WBAI, there's now a rule against discussing the station's business on air. So last month, Ken Nash knew he was courting trouble when he addressed the subject on Building Bridges, his labour-movement show. He probably thought he was safe, however, because his telephone guest was Major Owens, a highly respected African-American congressman.
OWENS'S stature didn't stop the interim station manager, Utrice Leid, from charging down to the studio to interrupt him - and, he alleged on the floor of the House of Representatives, censor his intervention.
He compared her action to those of dictators. She says he just hung up. Needless to say, there's no longer any Ken Nash or Building Bridges on WBAI.
Last week, Leid relaxed the rules a bit and hosted a special Feedback programme for an afternoon to take listeners' calls on the WBAI controversy. The show's format and her style probably worked against her, however: she allowed no follow-up questions, so a typical encounter involved a 30-second point or question from a listener, then five or 10 minutes of diatribe from the rather touchy Leid.
Ironically, the board of Pacifica claims to be pushing out the boat for "more-diverse programming, especially to serve listeners in languages other than English".
In the meantime, low-power FM stations - local, community services - that had been hoping for licences are being shut down. Owens pointed out in Congress that in New York city five French-language stations, serving the enormous Haitian community, have had to close. And who pushed for that? Commercial broadcasters, joined by the public-radio stations of NPR (though not by Pacifica).
The situation for most radio in the US is lousy and getting lousier.
The Federal Communications Commission, now chaired by Colin Powell's son Michael, is cracking down on pirates and allowing ever more corporate control of stations. One company, Clear Channel, owns more than 800 stations. A local market might have 20 stations in it, but they are likely to be owned by only two or three companies.
At least they've mastered using the AM dial to absorb some of the market's appetite for crap. New York city is plastered with ads for business radio on AM from Bloomberg, a well-known company that offers various financial services; the station has also distributed thousands of free radios - which pick up only Bloomberg. It seems like overkill for a company with a limited, though elite, listener and customer base.
It would be an amusing take on monopolisation and name saturation, except it's not so funny: the city is gearing up for a mayoral election, and Michael Bloomberg, the man behind the station, is going to be the Republican nominee.
The other candidates have to observe a spending ceiling. Bloomberg does, too, but what does that matter when a radio station and its publicity are screaming his name all over town?
hbrowne@irish-times.ie