While leading the main pubradio news station in St. Louis, Wente has suffered outbreaks of intense criticism from present and former employees. Last fall her booking mugshot from a DUI arrest in Florida (right), appeared on blogs in St. Louis. (Photos: KWMU; Sheriff’s Office, Saratoga County, Fla.)
Critics target g.m. amid probe at KWMU
University backs Wente, employees allege mismanagement, unethical practices
The decision by the University of Missouri-St. Louis to review the finances and management of its public radio station, KWMU-FM, has brought to the public eye concerns about the station’s controversial longtime general manager, Patricia Wente.
UMSL Chancellor Thomas George announced in a letter to KWMU staffers and the station’s fundraising board April 14 that“some issues have been raised concerning KWMU that need to be explored.” In the following weeks, the general counsel for the University of Missouri system and consultants from PricewaterhouseCoopers have been interviewing current and former station employees, according to officials and staffers familiar with the process.
Meanwhile, an extensive article published May 7 [2008] in the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’s alt-weekly newspaper, detailed some KWMU employees’ longstanding concerns about how Wente has run the station since taking its helm in 1989.
Staffers say Wente has mistreated employees, signed off on deceptive fundraising practices and used station staff members and resources for personal purposes. They say university administrators who oversee KWMU ignored their complaints for years.
People are terribly afraid to speak up because they don’t know who to trust,” says Karen Anderson, who worked at KWMU from 2002 to 2006 as a traffic director, assistant p.d. and fundraising producer. “It appears as though many people at the university are very supportive of Patty.”
A KWMU spokesman did not respond to Current’s request for comments on employees’ allegations. No present station employees have commented publicly on the university review or on the Riverfront Times article, and Wente has declined requests for comment from other media.
When asked to assess Wente’s leadership of KWMU, Bob Samples, a UMSL spokesman, said, “We’ll wait until the review is over to render judgment on her abilities as a manager. It is a very fine radio station, and it’s a great product.”
The university’s chancellor spoke highly of the station in his letter last month. “KWMU is a wonderful campus and community asset,” he wrote. “It has quality programming, talented staff, dedicated board members and a loyal, growing audience. I’m an enthusiastic supporter of KWMU.”
Challenge grants raise flags
The university’s review of KWMU follows an audit that found deficiencies in the station’s financial reporting procedures. Auditors told the university that a KWMU employee — unnamed in their report — was allowed to pay for personal expenses on a credit card held by the Friends of KWMU, a freestanding nonprofit that handles the station’s fundraising income.
Expense reporting for charges on the Friends credit card lacked adequate information on business purposes of the spending and supervisory approval, said auditors, commenting that the station needs stronger financial oversight. The Friends of KWMU responded that it would improve its expense documentation and bar employees from using the card for personal expenses.
UMSL officials declined to define the exact scope of the review of KWMU, but Samples says it is not limited to issues raised by the audit and will extend to operational issues. He did not know when the review would be complete.
Several KWMU employees said they believed the university should have suspended Wente during the review, but “the university did not feel that that was a necessary step,” Samples said.
This is not the first wave of controversy to engulf KWMU during almost two decades of Wente’s leadership. In 1992, a former parttime KWMU staffer accused Wente of racial discrimination in a federal lawsuit that was later dismissed. Fran Leve, then president of the Friends of KWMU board, had criticized Wente in a letter to UMSL’s chancellor, likening her to Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny.
In 1998, several employees left the station after Wente fired News Director Lester Graham, hinting that their departures pointed at bigger problems within the station. But some employees also spoke positively at the time of the station’s work environment.
Among more recent complaints, the most persistent involve its past practice of offering challenges to spur donations during on-air drives. Until KWMU ended the practice several years ago, announcers would describe corporate donations that would be made only if listeners matched the amounts. But KWMU underwriting reps knew the businesses had already committed the funds as underwriting, independent of the on-air drives.
“There was no money on the table,” says Laurie Swartz, an underwriting rep at the station from 2004 to 2006. “The money had already been spent on underwriting.”
Kathleen Unwin, now a public broadcasting consultant, says changing the practice was her “No. 1 concern and priority” when she served as KWMU’s corporate accounts manager, before Swartz’s time. Unwin voiced her concerns to Wente and other senior staffers, but to no avail, and later resigned over the matter.
Swartz, also uncomfortable with the practice, approached Wente and other senior managers, whom she says brushed off the issue. After university officials also played down the matter, Swartz asked attorney Matt Ghio, now her husband, to look into the matter.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that what they were doing was deceptive,” Ghio told Current. Specifically, Ghio says, the challenge grants violated the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act. After Swartz sent a copy of the law to the university, she said, officials told KWMU managers to end the challenge grants.
Complaints fail to spark changes
Former employees, some of whom requested anonymity for fear of reprisal or their future in pubcasting, also allege that Wente has:
- often asked the stations’ underwriting sales team to arrange trade contracts to secure merchandise including concert tickets for her. “It was clearly for her personal benefit,” says Anderson.
- hired her boyfriend’s daughters and her daughter’s boyfriend to work at KWMU, says Laura Theimer, Wente’s administrative assistant from 1998 to 2007, and other employees. They were hired even though the station reportedly had a salary and hiring freeze at the time.
- recruited station staffers on company time to create a multimedia display for a mission led by her boyfriend’s church and to plan a celebration for her father’s 80th birthday, according to Theimer, Anderson and others. Several employees left the station to attend the party, including the chief engineer, which left no one on hand to fix a technical problem that arose over the weekend.
- used vulgar language and embarrassed staffers with personal and sexual comments, telling one employee in a meeting to “shut the fuck up” and divulging that an employee’s engagement to marry had been broken off, among other incidents.
In addition, Mark Vogelzang, president of Vermont Public Radio and an NPR Board member, said Wente appeared to be inebriated at NPR Board meetings.
Wente was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol while visiting Florida in November 2007. She later told the St. Louis Journalism Review that she had had two glasses of wine and“was fiddling with a GPS system near the windshield” of her car when she was pulled over. The patrol sergeant said he pulled her over due to her “driving pattern.”
A KWMU employee’s lengthy letter sent anonymously to university administrators in 2006 also documented numerous cases in which Wente appeared to be under the influence, as well as many other concerns.
The employee told Current that the letter was submitted anonymously because UMSL’s human resources department said the confidentiality of earlier HR complaints about Wente had been breached. Several KWMU employees told Current that they feared KWMU management would learn if they reported concerns to the university.
The letter’s author also expressed concerns that Deputy Chancellor Don Driemeier, who oversaw KWMU at the time, was responsible for breaches in confidentiality. Regardless, UMSL’s chancellor passed the letter on Driemeier, according to Samples.
The chancellor felt that Driemeier reviewed the issues raised in the letter “and he was comfortable with the information that he received from Don Driemeier at the time,” Samples said. Samples did not know what Driemeier did in his review of the letter’s complaints. Driemeier could not be reached for comment.
KWMU’s current and former staffers now hope that the university review could end with a more objective verdict on Wente and the station’s future. For the first time, employees think “that we could finally see some real change,” says a current staff member who requested anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Web page posted May 27, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
