The following missive comes from an email blast distributed by an unidentified “whistle blower” at Virginia Public Media unhappy about public radio’s priorities. I have not vetted this story, and readers should be sensitive to the fact VPM might offer a very different spin, but the allegations seem plausible enough to examine more closely. — JAB

VPM, central Virginia’s PBS and NPR member, is spending $80 million of the public’s (FCC spectrum auction) money on a shiny new downtown campus when most of downtown Richmond, including the vacated Richmond Times-Dispatch newsroom, is available for cheap. We already have too much unused square footage here in No. Chesterfield. As an insider, I know you will hear no shortage of PR this year about investing in downtown and the public, etc. I remind you still that this is as much as $80 million blown, without a second thought, during the worst funding crisis in PBS+NPR history.

VPM is laying off reporters and starving journalism. Ben Paviour, Focal Point VA, forcing out Craig Carper, EP Roberta Oster and others who call bullshit on management. Docking unused vacation days. Reducing full-time-equivalents, to fund management spending and ridiculous overhead.

As you will see in its 990 public filings, VPM is paying its top two executives, J. Swain and S. Humble, a half a million dollars each. They live big, town and country. On the public’s money.

This same management is asking Richmond to help it plug a $1.8 million funding gap from the CPB endgame. This is a supposed gap; VPM spends a tiny bit of the $9 or $10 million a year it can afford to on news. The real estate, debt and salary numbers are all there for anyone to see in VPM’s public financial statements.

What you won’t find in those statements is financial mismanagement, including writing down at least $600,000 on the postponed 2020 Menuhin international music festival. We didn’t buy insurance. We also paid exorbitant kill fees to documentaries by Katie Couric and Nick Kristof and wife. And other insider projects. Millions just down the drain. You have more than enough money to make polished video. But the stuff you put out there, including the commercial in front of the new building, looks made by high schoolers. 

Where is our board? Where is the community? The donors? Philanthropic malpractice all around.

— A whistleblower