Radio talk show host Marc Steiner stepped down this month from his position as executive vice president for broadcast and production at WYPR (88.1 FM), the Baltimore public radio station he helped acquire from Johns Hopkins University in 2002.
Though no longer an employee of the station, Steiner says he has negotiated a two-year renewable contract with WYPR to continue hosting The Marc Steiner Show, the public-affairs program that airs Monday through Thursday, from noon to 2:00 p.m. He will remain a board member of the nonprofit Your Public Radio Corporation that owns the station but will no longer have a hand in programming, personnel, or day-to-day management decisions.
“I am very happy with where things are,” Steiner says. “We have a contract. My show is going to explode over the next year. I will retain my seat on the board, be recognized as a founder of the station, and be vice president emeritus. This is no bullshit. I’m totally excited about the future. I feel like Marc Steiner in 1993.”
WYPR president and general manager Tony Brandon puts a similarly positive spin on the management shakeup. “We’re very excited about this,” Brandon says. “I think [Steiner] saw a number of great opportunities for [additional] programs that he wanted to pursue, and he needed to be outside the day-to-day to focus on these things.”
The impetus for the change, according to Brandon, is Steiner’s development of a radio documentary about the Vietnam War for which Steiner received a $175,000 grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) earlier this year. The planned six-hour series, Shared Weight, The Fall of Saigon, 30 Years Later, is being produced by the Center for Emerging Media, a nonprofit radio production company Steiner created in 2000.
“When [Steiner] came forward with the grant from CPB, he was very clear that he would like to do these kinds of things [which] are outside our regular programming,” says Barbara Bozzuto, chairwoman of Your Public Radio. “We can’t afford to have this kind of programming all the time within the context of our daily programming. So we thought this is a creative way to let Marc focus on his incredible creative talent.”
Program director Andy Bienstock says the changes will benefit Steiner’s listeners. “Marc’s really happy with the way it’s worked out for him,” says Bienstock. “Which makes me happy, because it’s important to me as program director to have Marc happy and engaged.”
Other sources at WYPR, speaking on condition of anonymity, paint a rather less rosy picture of the situation, describing longstanding tensions between Steiner and Brandon that reached a boiling point this summer, and resulted in Steiner’s being essentially ousted from station management.
“The truth is, the board wanted Marc to go,” says one source familiar with the situation. “It was very well known throughout the station that Marc was involved in these very intense contract negotiations with both the board and Tony.”
“There’s always been friction between Marc and Tony,” says another WYPR source. “Always, from the very beginning. The honeymoon lasted a very short time. But I think it really heated up over the summer.”
Steiner acknowledges that the decision to step down from management “was not my idea.”
Among the reasons given by sources for the discord between the two WYPR principals is Brandon’s supposed resentment of widespread media and community perceptions that it was Steiner who personally rescued the station from outside ownership when he—as former Sun media reporter David Folkenflilk put it in 2003—“was the moving force behind the successful effort to take over WJHU-FM . . . and keep it locally based.”
After Your Public Radio successfully acquired WJTM-FM in Frederick in 2004, Baltimore magazine heralded Steiner as an “Unlikely Media Mogul” in its 2004 “Best of Baltimore” issue, writing, “we smell a burgeoning radio empire.”
“That didn’t play well with Tony,” says the second WYPR source. Steiner sent a letter to Baltimore downplaying his sole credit for the station’s success (he began the letter with the words, “Greetings from your Most Unlikely Media Mogul”).
If there’s a media mogul in Lower Charles Village it’s Brandon, who is also president of American General Media, a company that owns and operates 25 commercial radio stations across the country. According to a 2003 profile of Steiner and Brandon’s partnership in SmartCEO magazine, it was Brandon who stepped in with the reported $5 million of legitimate financing needed to buy WJHU after Steiner’s initial “angel” investor fell through.
Sources also agree that Steiner has a reputation for being a difficult manager. “His producers have a tough job,” says one source. “What makes him good on the air is what makes him bad [in the office]. He’s got a lot of personality.”
Steiner downplays any friction between him and Brandon. “I don’t have enmity toward Tony at all,” he says. “There are always issues between people. Radio stations are places where creative conflict is what happens. Any radio station you talk to, the business side is always going to be in conflict with the programming side.”
Brandon says reports of bad feelings between him and Steiner “don’t sound particularly accurate,” though he declined to either deny or clarify them.
While Marc Steiner will likely remain the most recognizable local voice on WYPR, he may soon be joined by another daily talk-show host at 88.1 FM. “We hope to launch early next year a daily newsmagazine program,” says Bienstock. The one-hour show will air daily at 9:00 a.m., replacing the third repeat of the first hour of National Public Radio’s Morning Edition news program. Bienstock says he is presently in contract negotiations with a prospective host, but declined to identify the person.
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