WBAI-FM has accused the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of having “blown up out of all proportion” the listener-sponsored station’s dismissal of a broadcaster who criticized Black basketball players on the Rochester University team who boycotted a game with the Israeli basketball team. Peter Heller, who worked for the station as an unpaid sportscaster was fired Feb. 8 and his broadcast on the game was scrapped several hours after it was taped. Heller, sports producer for ABC-TV, had contended on the taped broadcast that the Black athletes had bowed to Arab pressure.
Larry Cox, WBAI news director, said then that Heller was dismissed because “we did not like his work generally” and that the broadcast was cancelled because it had injected politics and was “a personal commentary.” Cox, in his rebuttal to the JTA report Feb. 13, said he was giving the facts about Heller’s relationship to the WBAI news department, “reports from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to the contrary.”
He asserted that Heller had been asked to contribute on a trial basis a series of sports reports and that the series was discontinued “because of the generally unsatisfactory quality of his work.” Cox said the series were “a rather superficial presentation of material which was often a rehash of items used on the ABC network news show where Heller is employed.”
Cox insisted that “the decision to end the series had absolutely nothing to do with any commentary that Heller did concerning Israel. The decision was based on his two previous broadcasts and a discussion I had personally with Heller concerning an item which we considered sexist and which he did not.” Cox added that the commentary on Israel, which he said he had not heard, “was simply one of a number of items in his last program. The entire program was dropped when it was decided to discontinue the series.”
Cox declared that it was “nothing short of disgraceful” for anyone “to use people’s genuine fears of anti-Semitism or their very real concern over the crucial events now occurring in the Middle East to comfort one’s ego.” He added that WBAI was “proud to be giving what we consider to be the very best coverage of Israel in the New York area.” He said the station intended to remain “progressive,” despite either political attacks or “attacks from those who are not capable of accepting critical judgement of their work.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
