OOPS… WFCR 88.5 Radio Did It Again!

By Dr. Manuel Frau-Ramos

On a cold January morning, the Latino community woke up to the news that the public radio station WFCR 88.5 FM was going to cancel Tertulia.

The news not only caught us by surprise; it opened old wounds. On February 1980, Robert Goldfarb, then general manager of WFCR decided to cancel ¿Qué Tal, Amigos?, the station's only program in Spanish. The show was co-produced by Sonia Vives and Julio Torres and had been on the air for 10 years.

Goldfarb made the decision due to the fact that he wanted the station's programming to include “high art” music and considered ¿Qué Tal, Amigos? “too popular.” He went further by saying that the station was not going to invest too many resources on a radio program that “unjustly discriminates against people who don't speak Spanish.”

The crisis ended after a sit-in and demonstrations in Chancellor Henry Koffer's office. The agreement reached by both all parties included the re-establishment of the program 4 days a week in its regular prime-time slot. Originally, the program aired 6 days a week.

Another agreement was to include minorities on the stations' board and to create an advisory committee that would serve as liaison between Goldfarb and minorities and the Spanish-speaking communities. WFCR further agreed to make public its budget and the way it was distributed.

Two and a half decades after the ¿Qué Tal, Amigos? fiasco, WFCR once again makes decisions that reflect cultural insensibility and ignorance.

This time, even though non-Latino newspapers wrote about the changes in WFCR'S programming, they only interviewed English-speaking listeners for their articles.

Martin Miller, the station's general manager, indicates that the low audience numbers, lack of money, and a “better distribution of their limited resources are the main reasons for the cuts. Tertulia is identified as the program with the lowest audience numbers.

It would be interesting to find out how the station came to the conclusion that Tertulia has low audience numbers, when we all know that within the Latino community it has always been a hit.

In addition, Helen Barrington, of WFCR, indicated that Tertulia was the program that also received the least amount of listener support when the news broke out that it was going to be cancelled. This is not surprising to us due to the fact that the news was only published in English-speaking newspapers. Therefore, it is understandable that a large sector of the Spanish-speaking population was oblivious to these changes.

The decision to eliminate Tertulia was made based on a “strategy business plan, and the recommendations of the “advisory board, the “diversity committee, and the staff. In addition, they pointed out that a national study conducted with Latinos shows that they prefer “talk shows rather than music programs.

The role of Hispanics in this decision-making process appears to have been minimum or non-existent. As it happened in the controversy with the program, ¿Qué Tal Amigos, the tastes and preferences of the Latino community once again are ignored. Once again WFCR tries to impose radio programming that is foreign to the reality of the Hispanic communities of the Pioneer Valley.

WFCR 88.5 … ¡Otra Vez con la Misma Vaina! (They did it again, with the same attitude!)