Moments before Teamsters Local 237 president Greg Floyd began taping an interview for his new radio show, Floyd handed a piece of paper to his guest, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, listing the seven questions he was planning to ask.

 

“Okay?” Floyd said. “Good,” Kelly responded, nodding approval.

This is not exactly how they teach people to do it in journalism school. But Floyd, who since December has been hosting Reaching Out With Greg Floyd, a commercial-free, union-funded program on AM 1600 WWRL, makes no bones that his role is to promote his members’ point of view, not to antagonize his laborfriendly guests.

“We just want to get our message out,” he said. “With the economy being so tough, we want to focus on how we can help people.”

Floyd is one of two union leaders whose unions have recently begun paying to broadcast half-hour shows on the station. The other is District Council 37’s executive director, Lillian Roberts, who hosts DC 37 Working For You. Roberts has for years hosted another show on FM 91.5, the public radio station run by New York City, but a program on a widely listened-to commercial talk radio station is new territory.

The genesis of the new programs came in early December, when representatives of 25 of the city’s unions gathered for a breakfast pitch meeting with Adrienne Gaines, the general manager of WWRL.

Gaines told them how the independent, black-owned station had struggled in recent years to produce costly locallyfocused programming, instead relying on nationally syndicated programs.

Unions, meanwhile, had been hit hard by budget cuts and needed to air their grievances beyond their memberships, she argued.

Gaines proposed that unions produce their own half-hour shows as segments in an already-existing three-hour Saturday afternoon program focused on labor hosted by Mark Riley.

“A lot of these unions have messages they want to get out,” Gaines said. “But the opportunities are few and far between, with the mass syndication in radio today.”

Gaines said the shows appear to be doing well, and is expecting to see a spike in listenership in the time slot when new ratings are released. More unions are now expressing interest in doing their own shows, Gaines said, and the existing shows have booked a number of big-name guests: Floyd’s show has featured John Liu, Bill de Blasio and Kirsten Gillibrand, while Roberts has hosted Bill Thompson.

DC 37 leadership, meanwhile, sees the new broadcast as more than a good business proposition: they say it is actually part of a cause known as the “free press movement,” which promotes journalism free of the corporate consolidation that dominates much of the media market.

In recent months, DC 37’s leadership has been meeting with leaders of the movement to figure out how union-funded journalism can serve as a counterbalance to conservative talk radio.

But not everyone is convinced the union-funded shows fit into this model. Traditionally, the “free press movement” has championed truly independent media that offered adversarial viewpoints. Elizabeth Rose, a spokeswoman for Free Press, the leading non-profit advocating for independent media, said union-backed shows could lack objectivity in the same way programming tied to corporate interests does.

Still, those around the country with union-funded shows dismiss these concerns. Charles Showalter, host of  the union-backed Union Edge show broadcast in Pittsburgh, said these programs feature far less partisan bluster that conservative talk radio and are much more thoughtful.

“Union talk show hosts are objective,” Showalter said. “I don’t think there’s a hardcore left or right, or that our ideas are unyielding or unbending. Even hardcore Republicans share some of the same issues we share.”

At the recent taping with Kelly, Floyd straddled the line between journalism and advocacy, more Larry King than Glenn Beck.

At one point, Floyd brought up the subject of school safety agents, a handful of which are being sued by the ACLU for alleged abuses against city students. Both Floyd and Kelly defended the agents and did not go into the specific allegations of the lawsuit. Floyd’s chapter of the Teamsters represents the safety agents, while Kelly is their boss.

Still, Floyd said he believes there is lot of value in having such an in-depth discussion about local issues.

Anyway, Floyd said, he is not gunning to be the next Edward R. Murrow.

“I’m not really looking to make a career out of this,” he said.