News

By Janis Fontaine

    Palm Beach accountant Richard Rampell admits he is “not a happy camper.”
    And NPR radio listeners aren’t going to be happy either. It looks like they won’t be hearing popular shows like Morning Edition or Marketplace over Palm Beach County’s airwaves for much longer.
    Rampell has been a member of the board of trustees of Classical South Florida for four years. CFS, which owns WPBI-FM and its broadcast license, is a subsidiary of American Public Media Group, the largest station-based public radio organization in the U.S. WPBI is the only NPR affiliate in our neck of the woods.
    At an executive board meeting on June 25, board members discussed the sale of WPBI-FM to Educational Media Foundation, a religious broadcasting company based in Rockland, Calif.
    Rampell is constrained from saying exactly what happened, but he called APMG’s handling of the sale “unconscionable.”  
    Rampell said APMG’s leaders “agreed to sell the station without our permission, and they concealed it from us. They had no right to do that.”
    Rampell says the execs at the St. Paul, Minn.-based company stacked the “local” board with part-time Florida residents who weren’t invested in keeping NPR programming available in Palm Beach County and they reneged on their promise to relinquish control of the station to the local board. Then, they relegated the NPR broadcast from 90.7 to a weaker signal at 101.9, which has such a limited range it can’t even reach most of the county’s residents.
    Now, “half the board has quit,” he said, and those who remain have been told that if they cause trouble, they could be fired and even sued, and APMG could simply appoint a new board.
    Rampell said he would like to rally public support before it’s too late: “I think people should write to the FCC and say that our local NPR station is being sold to a religious broadcaster and we object to it.”
    Phone calls to AMPG were not returned.