WBAI FM 99.5

Its programming is a mixture of political news, talk and opinion from a left-leaning, liberal or progressive viewpoint, and eclectic music. The station is owned by the Pacifica Foundation with studios located in Brooklyn and transmitter located at 4 Times Square. The station began as WABF, which first went on the air in 1941 as W75NY, of Metropolitan Television, Inc. In 1955, after two years off the air, it was reborn as (after then-owners Broadcast Associates, Inc. was purchased by philanthropist Louis Schweitzer, who donated it to the Pacifica Foundation in 1960. The station, which had been a commercial enterprise, became non-commercial and listener-supported under Pacifica ownership. The history of during this period is iconoclastic and contentious. Referred to in a York Times Magazine piece as "an anarchist's circus," one station manager was jailed in protest. The staff, in protest at sweeping proposed changes of another station manager, seized the studio facilities, then located in a deconsecrated church, as well as the transmitter, located at the Empire State Building. During the 1960s, the station hosted numerous anti-establishment causes, including anti-Vietnam war activists, feminists (and live coverage of purported bra-burning demonstrations), kids lib, early Firesig