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Lovell Dyett fans want him back at a decent hour
By adamg on Sun, 02/08/2009 - 9:39am
Lovell Dyett supporters don't think much of the way WBZ brought him back - via a taped 30-minute show airing at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday. The Rev. Bruce Wall reports the Friends of Lovell Dyett are planning a protest march on Friday, Feb. 27 at 6 p.m. around the 'BZ studios at 1170 Soldiers Field Rd.
[WBZ Program Director] Peter Casey is saying, by his actions, that he does not care what we have to say and that he will do what he wants to do. It is time that we take a stand and fight for a man who has fought for us.
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Comments
ooh a protest march!
how very retro!
how very useless!
srsly, kids, listen:
take all the nervous energy, and all the money you were going to spend on poster paints and cardboard for the signs, and do something constructive.
buy the guy a website and whatever he needs to make a podcast, and find him 10x the audience he would have had on the Marconi machine. What? That's actual work and you have to keep at it for a little while til it sticks rather than just bitching and waiting for someone else to take care of it for you? Yeah. Life is like that. Sorry.
Oh, and FYI to the reverend (my reverends never acted like this):
Threatening to "jam" the WBZ phone lines and to bring other economic harm to the company is a sort of extortion. Doesn't look good on the record. And no, you can't force your way in to "negotiate his return." You don't own the station. If you want to negotiate the return of an employee, you have to actually employ that person first.
And if, as you write, the guy was "a magnificent host who happened to be black," then wtf with the race card being played now? That's tacky and cheap.
It worked for Steve Leveille, why not for Lovell Dyett?
Lovell's fans have as much right as Steve Leveille's to do whatever they can to get their guy back on the air. Jamming phone lines and threatening 'economic harm' to the station are time-honored, standard methods of protest, and sometimes they work. I hope they work this time.
CBS is an insanely rich and profitable corporation that can afford to do the right thing.
They have every right to stomp around in the mud
but the time of protest marches is passed.
marches are now, and for a while have been, squarely, firmly, absolutely in the category of "opiate of the masses" activities... they shunt off massive amounts of energy and thought, and typically yield nothing at all except participants who feel all righteous and think they have accomplished something... but they have not. Meanwhile, the wheels of (whatever) roll merrily along, the opposition having been sated by its day in the sun.
How many people does CBS reach for how many hours per day through that station? Millions of listener-hours per week?
How many people will the marchers reach for how many hours for how long through their march? Maybe a few thousands of reader-minutes in the Globe.
By comparison, the public reach of the proposed march will be approximately zero, given the magnitude of the disproportion at play here.
The LeVeille protest worked because it was online, persistent, and pointed. It also didn't fall back to threats of attack. afaik the listeners said "We listen to this guy. We buy the stuff his sponsors sell. If he's gone, we're gone. We weren't listening to the station. We were listening to him."
Again: Constructive, persistent, tightly focused.
The present protest just also smells like another of these common activities that exist mostly to glorify the preacher (or other leader-person), rather than getting something changed via effective activities. Preacherman will be in the paper, all full of righteous indignation. They groove on that. Me? Former and sometimes journalist? I'm suspicious of the motives of anyone who wants too badly to be in the paper.
And there is nothing at all "time honored" about extortion. Also, preachers proclaiming that they are going to "negotiate" something in which they have no standing, just sound stupid. It works, mostly when the race card is played, but there's nothing noble in it.
PS. CBS is not so insanely rich these days. Look again.
Difference between LeVeille and Dyett
The point that gets lost is that Dyett's show has long ago gone stale while LeVeille is at the top of his game. Hate to say this because he has lots of fans, but Dyett stumbles and bumbles and stammers and just is not sharp at all. He's boring and sometimes confused. Boston *should* have a good black talk host and the Saturday night spot on BZ is a good one. It just should be someone who can do a better show than Lovell can do at this point. BZ really screwed it up and it is insulting to put Dyett in that asinine time slot that hardly anybody can listen to. Here's what they should have done: left LeVeille unchanged, let Dyett go and within a month or two, name a new local black host for that time slot. Dyett's done.