Connection duo, WBUR disconnect permanently. The Boston Globe describes the concluding blows in this dispute on which I blinked earlier. While the WBUR management issued a statement describing Lydon and McGrath’s “inform(ing) WBUR that they are leaving their employment to pursue careers in a for-profit, independent production company”, Lydon countered with a statement that WBUR had unilaterally terminated negotiations afteer locking them out for a week. Both Lydon and the station are the losers here, but of course the real losers will be The Connection‘s listeners. WBUR says it will continue the show with a series of guest hosts until they designate a replacement in late spring, but it remains in doubt whether anyone can follow Lydon’s “tough act” of wit, depth, literacy and passion. Lydon and McGrath seem to want to find other outlets to deliver similar content, but an erudite, receptive audience will elude them unless Boston’s other NPR station WGBH hosts them. They’d be blown out of the water by audiences anywhere else in the talk radio universe. These competing statements sound for all the world like the positions the players take in a classical labor-management dispute — essentially, countercharges of greed vs. exploitation — and should be understood in the context of recent struggles between creative personnel and celebrities on the one hand and the producers and media channels that distribute their content on the other hand, for control of the equity value of thier charisma, celebrity or creativity.
Author Bill McKibben recently profiled Lydon and the dispute in Salon, making his biases clear at the outset:
“The
Connection” is the best call-in radio show that anyone’s ever
done; Lydon is America’s best interviewer; and the hours
between 10 a.m. and noon feel lonely as hell without him.Those are large claims, but you can test them out for yourself at
theconnection.org, where a full archive of recent shows can be
accessed via streaming audio…If you think this is easy, listen to “Talk of the Nation,” the main
NPR chat show, some afternoon. Juan Williams currently
presides over the festivities, sounding uncannily like a man
ordering cheeseburgers over a drive-through microphone. He
is no nincompoop; “Eyes on the Prize,” his TV history of the
civil rights movement, was hot stuff. But the radio has clearly
defeated him. With its intimacy and its acres of open time, it
requires a nimbleness that he can’t muster.
