He's news director at a liberal hothouse, but WMNF radio veteran Rob Lorei doesn't lose his cool. In a political job, he keeps his views under wraps.
By CHRISTOPHER GOFFARD
Published June 24, 2004
[Times photo: Joseph Garnett Jr.]
“I don’t scream,” says Rob Lorei, news director and radio host at WMNF-FM 88.5. “I realize that anger is kind of a waste that doesn’t get anywhere.”
TAMPA - Ronald Reagan was not yet buried, and already WMNF's 70,000 watts thundered with his sins.
Even as mainstream obituaries were fitting him for Mount Rushmore, Tampa's scrappy, contrary community radio station was serving up Reagan the Mass Murderer, the man who funded Central American death squads and let millions perish from AIDS.
In Rob Lorei's hands, however, a more textured portrait was emerging. Three days after the 40th president's death, Lorei, the station's longtime news and public affairs director, was exploring Reagan's legacy on his weekday afternoon show, Radioactivity.
"Would you say that it's fair that Ronald Reagan hastened the downfall of the USSR?" Lorei asked professor Stephen Cohen, a New York University Sovietologist.
It was Mikhail Gorbachev who made it possible, the professor replied. But Reagan played a role. His greatness in history, the professor said, was overcoming his own hard-line rhetoric and, to the chagrin of his supporters, meeting the Soviets at the negotiating table.
At 2:02 p.m., Lorei signed off, pleased with his guest. "I think he was kind of measured about Reagan," he said. "Cohen had nuance."
Here in the Tampa Bay area's improbable, enduring little pup tent of the left called WMNF-FM 88.5, where some commentators fight a reputation for shrillness, Lorei has for years been carving a public image as the station's sober, liberal soul.
With thinning salt-and-pepper hair, Lorei (pronounced LOR-eye) has the dignified good looks of a prime time surgeon, plus the calm, unflappable voice of an expert hostage negotiator. If you were suffering through an acid trip, his is the voice you would want to hear.
Lorei, one of the longest-running political voices in Tampa Bay radio, is famously polite, whether interviewing Noam Chomsky, Sen. Bob Graham or Sami Al-Arian, who's facing charges of being a terrorist money man.
"I don't scream," says Lorei, who thanks all of his callers, even the crazies and eccentrics. "I realize that anger is kind of a waste that doesn't get anywhere. If you see someone screaming at you red-faced, that doesn't necessarily convince you that person is right. In fact, it may convince you he's wrong."
At 49, Lorei is the last of the station founders to remain there full time. Because of his phlegmatic demeanor and bourgeois trappings - the 19-year marriage, the two teenage daughters, the Hyde Park bungalow, the golf clubs - it's easy to be fooled into thinking Lorei is a much different guy from the hotblooded 24-year-old who knocked on doors begging for dollars to launch WMNF in 1979.
The truth is, he has evolved slowly into a stealthy, even statesmanlike radical, one who has learned the value of disguise.
"People ask me a lot to tell them what I think about an issue, and I'm very reluctant," Lorei says. "Once Rush Limbaugh is off the air, what will his listeners think? He's telling them what to think. That's not how you empower people to think and learn for themselves."
Lorei's choice of topics - the war in Iraq, the living wage, the treatment of migrants - points to his political concerns, but it's often tough to tell exactly where he stands on them.
"We didn't want to just reach progressives," he says. "We made a conscious effort not to be too hippy-dippy. We didn't want to be fringe. We saw that some stations had so marginalized themselves from their communities."
Cameron Dilley, another station founder, says he thought of himself as a wild-eyed radical until he met the even wilder-eyed Lorei in the 1970s. "If you disagreed with him in the old days, it was kind of like you were an idiot," Dilley says.
But he says Lorei's temper has mellowed, and over the past 10 years, Lorei has learned to keep his views carefully cloaked. "He's the enigma behind the mystery," Dilley says. "He plays it very close to the vest in a lot of ways. His inscrutability has been one of the keys to his success."
* * *
It's easy to be a top-of-your-lungs firebrand when you don't have a lot of different people to please. Lorei presides over what sometimes resembles a left-leaning Tower of Babel, a cacophony of voices and competing agendas.
The current lightning rod for controversy is Straight Talk, the Sunday morning show hosted by activist Connie Burton and Uhuru leader Omali Yeshitela. Some listeners and station insiders fear a show billed as a voice for African-American workers has become a soapbox for antiwhite hatred and apologies for black violence.
"Violence in this world was introduced by white people," a guest remarked on a recent show. Another guest swiped at police: "The African community needs to understand that the pigs are not their friends." Burton, the host, denounced those who "lick the boots of white power."
"I'm surprised you let (that) program continually stay on the air," one caller complains angrily to Lorei's voice mail, condemning Burton's show for "racism and innuendo" and saying it is dragging the station "down into the mud."
"I can't stomach the woman," the caller says.
Lorei plays most listener calls on the air, but not this one, as it contains an attack on a host who isn't there to defend herself.
Straight Talk is a thorny subject at WMNF, as it pits the station's cardinal values against each other: a commitment to free speech and grass roots voices on the one hand, and peaceful change and racial harmony on the other.
"That's definitely the current hot potato," says Dilley, who hosts a Friday morning show. "I think Rob's wading in courageously."
Burton, who characterizes recent civil violence in St. Petersburg as a form of self-defense against an oppressive white power structure, makes no apologies.
"I'm always surrounded by great pacifists," Burton says. "I would like pacifists to come to our community when we have 14- and 15-year-olds being gunned down by the police."
Asked for his views, Lorei answers obliquely, saying that community radio was, after all, founded by California pacifists, and many at the station, like himself, hail from pacifist roots.
"Connie reflects a view from her community as a woman who lives in public housing, and that view's important," Lorei says. But "there are lines we ask people not to cross."
He declines to talk about it further, calling it internal station business. There have been meetings and there will be more meetings, he says, "to clarify what we think about our mission."
At a station that prides itself on its egalitarian structure, veterans joke wearily about the glacial pace of decisionmaking.
Burton knows what will happen when her quotes appear in print.
"They're going to have me in a meeting," she says.
* * *
As a college student, Lorei worked for the Black Lung Project in Dayton, Ohio, representing miners against coal companies. He saw how easily the miners got winded, walking just the 10 steps from the street to his office. And most of the time, the coal companies won.
But he saw something surprisingly beautiful there, something that still visibly moves him to talk about: The poor whites, who looked at first glance like carbon copy rednecks, got along like brothers with the blacks they accompanied every day into the mines.
That's where Lorei is coming from, deep down. He's still the guy who studied Gandhi's theories of nonviolent resistance, who thinks almost all wars are stupid and immoral, who planned to be a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, save for a low draft number.
He's still the Antioch College student who bristled at injustice, pressured his Ohio school to divest from South Africa and dreamed of being Clarence Darrow. He's still the Catholic school kid from Erie, Pa., who flouted ruler-wielding nuns by growing his hair long and slicking it back during school hours.
The idealist is still there, too, the one who saw an ad in Mother Jones in 1978 asking for help starting a radio station in Tampa. Who packed his Charlie Parker and bluegrass records in his stick-shift Volvo, drove down from Pennsylvania and went door to door asking for donations.
The station pioneers made $65 a week back then and lived in a big crash pad in Hyde Park, and by the time the station went live, in September 1979, most of them had jumped ship.
Half a lifetime later, Lorei is still onboard. For $42,000 a year, he pulls up in a dirt parking lot in southeast Seminole Heights at 5:30 most weekday mornings and enters the cramped, cluttered, dumpy-looking little home that serves as WMNF's studio. Communist newspapers are available in the lobby.
"They send us a free stack," Lorei says.
With an annual budget of $1.1-million, most of it from listener donations, the little outpost of the left boasts about 100,000 listeners in Pinellas, Hillsborough, Pasco, Polk, Manatee and Sarasota counties.
This year, in time for the station's 25th anniversary, WMNF's 15 paid staffers and 200 volunteers will move into a new 10,000-square-foot, $2.2-million studio next door to the old one.
WMNF is one of only a handful of independent, noncollegiate community stations in the nation. Beyond politics, the station is also a legendary haven of eclectic music: jazz and salsa, bluegrass and polka, reggae and gospel.
For years, Lorei was the news department. As news and public affairs director, he has weathered threats, station infighting and regular explosions of controversy. To some angry listeners, he's the Man Who Got George W. Bush Elected President, by boosting Naderites who leached precious votes from Al Gore.
To another furious camp, he allowed hosts to run amok in the aftermath of 9/11, blaming U.S. policy for the terrorist attacks. Lorei responded that there was nothing unpatriotic about exploring why people were angry with the United States.
But the talk galled even some longtime listeners, who withheld their money during pledge time. They didn't want to listen to an America-deserved-it station.
* * *
Lorei is the oldest of 10 siblings from a tight-knit, conservative family. His father was a World War II veteran. They used to have bitter shouting matches about Nixon, the draft, Vietnam. His dad's dead now, and Lorei winces a little at the tone he took back then. These days, when Lorei gets together with his siblings, they avoid politics.
In 1985, Lorei married his boss, then-station manager Janine Farver (she now works at the Florida Humanities Council). On weekends, the young couple went to antinuke speeches and farm worker rallies. She recalls his wardrobe: two T-shirts, two pairs of flip-flops, two pairs of jeans.
Lorei and Farver now have two teenage daughters at Plant High School. With a smile, he confesses that he has voted for Republicans, though he won't say which ones.
"He's probably a lot straighter than people think," says Dilley, confounding those "who suspect everybody who works at MNF are wild-eyed, Che Guevara-T-shirt-wearing pot smokers."
For the past three years, as host of TV's Tampa Bay Week on WEDU-Ch. 3, Lorei has even been seen in a suit and tie. "I think a lot of people around here would say I'm too conservative. I'm not here to represent the left so much. I'm here to help the powerless," Lorei says. "I don't think the country has met its promise yet."
When he says he lives in Hyde Park, Tampa's yuppie enclave, he seems almost apologetic. It's just a little bungalow, he says, and not in the ritzy part. And they bought it in the 1980s, when it was cheap.
Sheepishly, Lorei admits that he plays golf, the most traditional of pastimes, though he stresses that he plays at Rogers Park, a public course ("Just average people"), with hand-me-down, 20-year-old clubs.
"It's so against type," Lorei says. "I haven't really told many people."
* * *
How ironic that Reagan should die, like a bookend, just as the station's 25th anniversary looms and its rangy, ragtag youth recedes. Lorei remembers the night Reagan won the presidency, how many despondent listeners called the infant station to commiserate.
In a funny way, the late president played a key role in Lorei's political education and, as it turns out, in shaping WMNF's identity.
The Reagan revolution, launched soon after the station was born, fed the thirst for alternative radio. WMNF aired the Iran-Contra hearings gavel-to-gavel, the only station in Tampa Bay that did, which Lorei considers one of its golden moments.
Reagan's Secret Service sent agents to WMNF in the 1980s to grill a staffer about a presidential assassination plot that turned out to be baseless. Lorei interpreted the move as intimidation meant to silence the station.
In Nicaragua, during the Reagan years, Lorei saw a teenage girl who was crippled by what a villager told him was a Contra mine. He says it underscored, for him, how the mainstream media couldn't be trusted to convey an accurate account of global affairs.
But here he is, on a recent day, allowing a representative of the mainstream press to shadow him through a shift. It promises to be a big day. At 4 p.m., the stalwart peacenik is scheduled to interview retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf for WEDU-Ch. 3.
To a good slice of the left, the commander of U.S. forces in the 1991 Persian Gulf War remains the ultimate establishment figure, the quintessential emblem of U.S. militarism. For years, at his public appearances, demonstrators have denounced Schwarzkopf as a war criminal who bombed Iraqi schools and hospitals.
Lorei is itching to talk to him, but not to pillory him. Last year, during the buildup to the current Iraq war, Schwarzkopf expressed misgivings about U.S. invasion plans. Lorei is burning to know what he thinks now. With luck, some genuine news will be made.
But there's a snag. Lorei doesn't know whether the retired general is open to a talk about current events, rather than just a breezy walk through his career.
"We still have a sticking point on whether he wants to answer topical questions," says Lorei, waiting anxiously to hear from WEDU.
Less than an hour before he is scheduled to meet Schwarzkopf, Lorei's cell phone goes off. Word is back from the general's people: It would violate his contract with MSNBC to answer topical questions.
Lorei is critical of interviewers who lob softballs and once told Dan Rather that network guys had fallen a long way from Edward R. Murrow. So this puts him in an awful bind.
"I'm prepared to talk about news and some personal issues," Lorei tells a WEDU executive, calmly. "I don't have a whole half-hour worth of questions to ask him about personal issues."
Plus, he says, how would it look if he failed to ask the questions on everyone's mind? "I'd lose credibility with people," Lorei explains. "Here's a guy who knows exactly what's up with the Iraq war, and I don't want to pull my punches."
Reluctantly, apologetically, Lorei bows out. He feels terrible about disappointing WEDU, which worked hard to set up the interview.
He still hopes to interview Schwarzkopf someday. The peacenik and the famous warrior will shake hands, sit down together and talk like gentlemen. They may even like each other.
Lorei asks the WEDU executive to tell Schwarzkopf about his reputation.
"Jack, tell him I'm a nice guy," Lorei says. "Does he like Bob Dylan? Tell him we have that in common."
Christopher Goffard can be reached at 813 226-3337 or goffard@sptimes.com Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.
Listen up
Rob Lorei's show, Radioactivity, airs from 1 to 2 p.m. Monday through Thursday on WMNF-FM 88.5. For a complete programming schedule, see www.wmnf.org
