Veteran bay area radio, TV journalist Rob Lorei dies

Journalist Rob Lorei, a co-founder of the community radio station WMNF, and the station’s Director of News and Public Affairs for 43 years, died Sunday morning. He was 70.

Lorei announced in March that he had been diagnosed with cancer, at the same time he resigned from the WEDU TV public affairs program Florida This Week, which he had hosted since 2001. He was also the show’s managing editor. Lorei continued at WEDU with the interview series Perspectives.

He moved to Tampa in 1978 from his native Pennsylvania to be part of the grassroots campaign to launch the community-driven, commercial-free WMNF.

“It was really hard, because we did everything by hand,” Lorei reminisced during his final appearance on Florida This Week. “So we built some of the control boards by hand, we built did all the soundproofing by hand – we found old carpeting and used it on the walls. And people thought it would never work. People thought it would never get on the air. But sure enough, we were able to do it in about 15 months or so.

“It was a labor of love, and a lot of people supported us back then.”

After a disagreement about programming, WMNF Station Manager Craig Kopp fired the veteran news director in 2019, but re-instated him after a public outcry. Kopp himself then resigned.

In 2021, Station Manager Rick Fernandes fired Lorei a second time, citing a heated email exchange with a listener, in which Lorei allegedly used “an ethnic slur.”

Lorei offered an explanation in a 2021 Catalyst interview. The listener, he said, had written him regarding the right-wing neo-fascist Proud Boys organization, “who said ‘The Proud Boys don’t really present much of a threat to American democracy,’ and the person wrote something to the effect that there were only six Proud Boys, or a few Proud Boys, in Washington, D.C., and that they weren’t going to harm our democracy.”

After several emails were traded, “Finally I got kind of exasperated and I said, essentially, ‘Well, you’re siding with the fascists.’ I said it in slightly stronger words, but that’s what I said to him.”

The word he used, Lorei told the Catalyst, was kapo.

“It’s a term that people in concentration camps used to describe people who sided with their captors. After I was fired I went to the U.S. Holocaust Museum website and looked it up. And it’s not listed there as an ethnic smear. If the board says it’s an ethnic slur, OK, but I used it in a political context. I was having a political discussion with a person. We were talking about people who defend the Proud Boys.”

He had decided not to sue station management, Lorei explained. For one thing, he felt immense pride that he’d been there since the beginning. He’d literally helped to build WMNF.

“I was fired once, and because of the good wishes of thousands of people I was re-hired,” Lorei said. “I think a lot of people would say ‘Well, if the guy’s fired twice, there must be something wrong with the guy.’ And so I’ve decided not to fight it. Because I don’t want to be that cranky person that tries to get his job back …”

“He was really a champion for public broadcasting,” said WEDU President and CEO Paul Grove, “but also a very cherished friend on my part. I’ve known him for more than 35 years. I consider him one of the bellwether journalists in the West Central Florida region.”

Lorei had been brought in, in 2001, to moderate what was then called Tampa Bay Week. “He said he wasn’t expecting to get his own program,” Grove recalled, “but he was just one of those moderators that everyone felt treated them absolutely fairly and gave them a voice. And there was never anyone that left that panel, and that discussion, thinking it was not an opportunity to share their opinion on that program.

“I thought he was the type of journalist that could easily have had a national program, on radio across the country. He was somebody that you trusted; he did his research. And if he didn’t know it immediately, he’d look it up. He’d find out. He was like a human Snopes.”

On a personal note, Grove said, “I am devastated. He was a great, great friend. He’s gone way too soon.”