KTRU SALE: NO NEED FOR SNEAKY VISITS AFTER ALL Texas Watchdog has now released all the emails it collected related to the sale of Rice University radio station KTRU’s FM broadcast license and its not-so-shabby transmitter in Humble to the University of Houston. And for the local-radio-obsessed, there are plenty of repetitive conversations to pore through. A couple of the messages, though, bring a little more clarity to what happened after one of the deal’s brokers, Public Radio Capital director of acquisitions Erik Langner, suggested that Rice invent some pretext to allow a consulting engineer to inspect the station (which is run by students they didn’t want to tip off that a sale was likely to take place). It appears no subterfuge was needed, after all. “They brought the station manager and one or two of the key staff into the loop on the sale,” a colleague of Langner’s wrote to KUHF general manager John Proffitt about a month later. As Texas Watchdog reporter Steve Miller notes, Proffitt later identifies the KTRU staff members as the station’s general manager and chief engineer — both of whom are Rice employees. [Texas Watchdog; previously on Swamplot]
Sign up for the Newsletter
I wonder if in fact these are ALL THE EMAILS ?? If someone wants to hide something they can do it unfortunately.
Yes, the two paid Rice staff employees were brought into the loop at some point, and forced to sign nondisclosure agreements. After that time, Rice (assisted by UH) continued to deceive their own students who actually program and operate the station, and of course continued to deceive the Houston public, in part by deliberately obscuring the purpose of the UH Board of Regents meeting, inventing fake call letters to refer to the station, etc. etc. Real classy.