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Miami-Dade Public School District Proposes More Control Over WLRN

The WLRN Newsroom at the Miami Herald.
The WLRN Newsroom at the Miami Herald.

Editor's Note:

WLRN News hired freelance reporter Susannah Nesmith to report the following story. WLRN News did not direct any of her reporting and the story was edited by NPR. That's because WLRN News itself is a subject of the reporting. 

The Miami-Dade School District has proposed taking over operations of WLRN, South Florida’s public radio and television stations.

The school district owns WLRN’s broadcast license but the station’s employees actually work for a subsidiary of Friends of WLRN, the private nonprofit that raises money for the station. The proposal would force all 19 reporters and editors to apply to become school district employees, or lose their jobs.

It would also allow the district to make programming and editorial decisions.

Dwight Hill, chairman of the volunteer board of Friends of WLRN, questions the timing of the proposal, which suddenly became a priority in early December.

“If you listen to our reporting staff they would say that the real compelling thing at that time were some rather less than favorable news articles that were broadcast,” he said.

The district denies that the proposal has anything to do with WLRN’s reporting and released records showing the issue of an operating agreement has been discussed since at least 2010. Nothing in the records explains the timing of the current proposal, however. The district’s communications director declined to be interviewed for this report and instead released a brief statement.

It said the district has serious concerns about Friends’ financial disclosures and personnel matters.

The statement didn’t give any details about personnel issues, but internal emails show district officials wanted WLRN employees to undergo the same background checks required of school district employees because the station hosts student interns and works out of a school district owned building downtown.

Friends of WLRN offered to have station employees undergo those checks, but the district’s communications director, Daisy Gonzalez-Diego told The Miami Herald that didn’t go far enough.

Hill says that was telling.

“If this is truly an issue of student safety, you would not put that at risk to delegitimize an operation,” he said.

About the accounting irregularities, Hill says they involve the way money was reported between the television and radio stations. No money was taken, but the chief financial officer was forced to resign from Friends, which may have to refund as much as $900,000 to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting because of the reporting problems, according to Hill.

“I do believe that this is a canard,” Hill said. “We identified the problem, we researched the problem, we’ve been transparent with what the issue is and we will resolve and make good if any issue does come out of it.”

While the district provides WLRN with studio and office space, it does not contribute to the station’s bottom line, Hill said. In fact, the district receives money from the station’s private lease of excess frequency.

The district says it doesn’t want to meddle in editorial decisions. An editorial integrity policy, passed by the School Board in 2002, prevents that. But the new proposal does allow the board to amend that policy.

“Miami-Dade County Public Schools fiercely believes in protecting the integrity of broadcast journalism at WLRN, as it has for decades,” the district statement said. “The Board’s own Editorial Integrity Policy, unanimously approved in 2002, establishes a firewall of protection between management and WLRN’s content and programming decision-making.”

The district’s proposal is being closely watched in South Florida and nationally. Hill says he’s heard from donors who are unwilling to continue supporting WLRN if the district takes over. Aminda Marques, executive editor of the Miami Herald, says a partnership between the newspaper and the station could also be in jeopardy.

“Our relationship is built on the fact that we are both independent news organizations,” Marques said. “If they were to fall under the auspices of a government entity, I think we’d really have to examine our relationship and figure out how we would move forward. We would never share our reporting or our projects with any outside entity, period. “

Michael Oreskes, the vice president for news for National Public Radio, says he’s keeping an eye on negotiations in Miami because NPR values the independence of their member stations.

Ethics expert Kelly McBride, of the Poynter Institute, says the proposal conflicts with the public service mission of the award-winning stations.

“I think that that would not serve the public at all and the reason you should have a public media radio license is to serve the public,” she said. “If the employees were employees of the school district, they would essentially have divided loyalties. They would not be able to serve both their boss, the school district, and the public’s need for independent journalism, around a lot of issues, but particularly around issues of public education.”

School Board chairman Larry Feldman said in an emailed statement that the board supports WLRN. “We are committed to WLRN’s uninterrupted service, quality programming and fiercely independent reporting,” he said.

He noted that the district is still negotiating with Friends.

Board member Steve Gallon says he shares the district’s concerns about student safety and fiscal responsibility, but he is also concerned about how a district take-over would impact press freedom and WLRN’s independence. He says his constituents have reached out to him about the press freedom issue.

“The perceived notion of compromising the independence of the media, that is really the pervasive concern to the extent that the school board is perceived as intruding on that,” he said.

The District initially gave Friends of WLRN until March 2 to sign the operating agreement and said the organization would face consequences if it did not. Hill says Friends will not sign the current proposal. The district has since said it will continue to negotiate with Friends.

Susannah Nesmith is a freelance journalist based in Miami. You can reach her at writeme@susannahnesmith.com

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Susannah Nesmith