JESSICA ROGEN
The station's leadership touted what it sees as progress in a press release Monday afternoon — but a recent post on its website paints a less rosy picture.
The release comes almost a year after the firing of longtime host Tom "Papa" Ray in February 2023, a move that touched off a wave of subsequent firings and resignations among the staff's all-volunteer crew of DJs and led to considerable public outcry. In a recent blog post on the station's website, Executive Director Kelly Wells acknowledges that the station has lost more than a third of its donors over the last year (that's even as a group of more than 150 St. Louis business leaders have also signed a letter critical of the station's leadership).
But to hear management tell it, it's not all bad news. KDHX's release boasts that it has "broadened its listening audience in 2023 as its initiatives began to resonate with new listeners and longtime fans alike." The release cites the following as evidence of that progress:
-Online engagement was up 500 percent for ages 18-24
-Online listenership was up 43 percent
-Market share remained steady at 1.2
-KDHX saw 275 first-time donors come on board
-KDHX completed its switch to Community Centric Fundraising, which values equally all who engage in strengthening the community - volunteers, donors and staff
-KDHX added 26 new DJs
-KDHX relaunched the Community Advisory Board and added several new members
-58 percent of KDHX’s DJs are from historically underrepresented backgrounds compared to 23 percent at the beginning of 2023
“We are seeing so much enthusiasm with our new direction, not just from previously underrepresented communities but from supporters across our listenership,” Wells says in a statement. “We will continue to attract new listeners, donors and volunteers, and we will continue to work to instill confidence in our mission."
Meanwhile, Wells' undated post on the KDHX website also touts the progress made toward the station's goals — but then paints a less than rosy picture about the effects of last year's turmoil. Much of the post is impenetrable nonprofit-speak, but this sentence toward the end of the first section particularly stands out:
"Due to the efforts of a small group who believe KDHX should be their way or no way at all, we’ve gone from an organization with community support for transformative change to an organization that has parted ways with a quarter of our volunteer team, lost over a third of our donors, and currently face a financial struggle that will take a massive effort to overcome."
That's perhaps the first acknowledgement to date that KDHX has taken a hit due to its leadership's actions over the last 12 months, though its talk of a "small group" seems to contradict the rest of the sentence — it doesn't feel like a third of the station's donors and a quarter of its volunteers qualifies as "small."
Unbelievably, the post then segues into 11 paragraphs that essentially rehash the same outrageous argument that Board President Gary Pierson made in the early days of this mess (and which he later walked back): that the group of volunteers calling for change to the station's leadership — and apparently all of the listenership calling for change as well — were motivated by misogyny and racism.
Some highlights (bolding ours):
"The tactics of this group of primarily white and male volunteers were seen as silencing and destructive by other volunteers, many of whom were women and people of color who had come to KDHX to reflect and serve the underrepresented and underserved communities our mission and commitments require."
"[A] community most served by this group of volunteers followed their lead, outraged that a leader, especially a woman leader, could have the power to make decisions out of line with their specific desires."
"That brings us to our current situation. A situation that features mostly older, white people publicly attacking an institution they 'care' about, willing for it to fail rather than 'look' different than they would like. It’s deeply uncomfortable to watch and raises the question of who KDHX has been serving and how that service advanced opportunities for one group that we didn’t advance for everyone. If we weren’t fully awake to these realities before, we certainly are now."
The post, like Monday's press release, wraps up by asking for donations.
The disdain is palpable, and the cynicism undeniable. While it's true that KDHX has seen accusations of racism in the past, and it's true that any progress in that department is welcome change indeed, the ugly truth that Wells keeps tying herself in knots to obfuscate is that those accusations were focused specifically on Wells herself.
In 2019, a group of staffers and volunteers at the station, many who were Black, wrote a letter to KDHX's board that was eventually sent to the media. It detailed complaints of racism and racial insensitivity against Wells and other members of staff, and called specifically for Wells' dismissal.
In response, KDHX hired a lawyer to look into the letter's allegations. After an investigation, said lawyer cleared the station of wrongdoing, saying its claims were unsubstantiated. But the letter's authors noted at the time that only one of them had even been contacted by the lawyer: Darian Wigfall, a Black former staffer who has more recently been nominated to join the station's board by volunteers critical of Wells. (Pierson has fiercely rejected Wigfall's nomination as illegitimate, and it's now the subject of a lawsuit.)
"The allegations in the email are not unsubstantiated when numbers of people are coming out behind it and saying, 'Oh yeah, I've experienced this, oh yeah I've experienced that," Wigfall told the RFT at the time. "You just didn't — the board wouldn't talk to anybody!"
That Wells and Pierson would weaponize credible criticisms of her and the board's behavior in order to fire volunteers who have been critical of her leadership is galling. That in so doing they would besmirch the reputations of those former volunteers, many who were instrumental in making the station a dominant force in St. Louis' cultural landscape, is outrageous. That they are now sticking their hands out and begging the listening public for money is unsurprising.
It's hard to see a way forward for KDHX. The station has fully dug in to its own narrative by this point, taking a bunker mentality and refusing to engage with criticism of leadership, no matter how well-founded. Tossing out an Uno reverse card on allegations of racism isn't going to bring those lost donors back, isn't going to silence the station's former volunteers (quite the contrary, in fact) and isn't going to placate an outraged community of listeners — no matter how many "results of note" leadership touts.
At a certain point it's time to admit that those now years-long criticisms of station leadership just may have been warranted all along, and the best path back to the community's good graces would be to make a change.
Or, as Wigfall put it back in 2019:
"The only reason this is happening is so we can save KDHX. Because I feel like if Kelly stays there, it'll crumble in on itself on its own. She's the common denominator. And I didn't want it to be like that, but that's it.
"Kelly is going to kill that organization if left to her devices."
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