WBAI producer Kamau Khalfani of "Under the Learning Tree" made his transition in February. We've learned that his mother, Mrs. Alma Lawrence of Paterson, NJ, passed away last Wednesday, August 10th.

Expressions of Condolence may be addressed to the family via:
WBAI Justice & Unity Campaign
P.O. Box 2690
New York, NY 10027

May 12, 2011 - It is necessary to respond to at least some of the gross distortions and false claims by WBAI Local Station Board member Steve Brown, and to the accusations leveled by WBAI General Manager Berthold Reimers concerning my reporting of public information about grants to Pacifica from an arm of a major corporation.

Mr. Brown claims, "Clearly, Lederer, as an experienced news reporter, knew better than to spread a story - especially such a damaging one - without first subjecting it to elementary fact-checking."

But the source of my "story" (i.e., my recounting of what was revealed at a public meeting of the LSB Finance Committee) was Mr. Reimers himself. It was he, as General Manager, who told us, at a public meeting, about two recent grants given to WBAI.  On April 21, during a tardy quarterly (Fall 2010) review by the Committee of the station's budget adherence, Mr. Reimers explained that the income listed under "grants" was more than expected due to two grants totaling $10,000 from "Merrill Lynch" and said that the money was for "a News Department mini-series on hydro-fracking." When several of us expressed shock at this apparent breach in Pacifica's longstanding prohibition on corporate underwriting of programming, he again repeated that the station was given a grant and repeated the source of the funding as Merrill Lynch.  He also said that both he and national Pacifica had approved the grants, and seemed disdainful of the concern. The Committee unanimously adopted a multi-part motion urging detailed written information from him and the Executive Director, Arlene Engelhardt, on these grants.

We would later learn that Goldman Sachs Gives had given Pacifica two grants totaling $15,000, one of which was specifically designated for the hydro-fracking news series. Does this mean that Mr. Reimers was mistaken about the name of the funding source, or did Merrill Lynch give the station money as well?