[PAA-Discuss] Crisis at Pacifica

[Ron and Kris Graham]

Can someone please give me some insight as to what is going on within
Pacifica? Are there problems related to governance within KPFT? Please
inform. Thanks.

 

Kris

 

http://www.counterpunch.org/boal11042010.html

 

November 4, 2010


The Two-Percent Putsch 


Crisis at Pacifica


By IAIN A. BOAL 

Capital's most severe crisis in seventy years ought to be a moment of
significant opportunity for the left. But as the right mobilizes disgruntled
Americans via its vast radio, television, web, and print empires, the one
mass medium available to the left-Pacifica Radio-is driving out its best and
brightest. A network that has the potential to reach a quarter of the US
public is opting for irrelevant and unlistenable programming at a time when
competent and genuinely radical journalism is urgently needed, and
justifying its warped choice with the Thatcherite mantra: there is no
alternative.

In two previous dispatches to CounterPunch here
<http://www.counterpunch.org/boal10062009.html>  and here
<http://www.counterpunch.org/boal10272009.html>   I described the
pathological state of Pacifica's byzantine governance structure - a national
board containing 122 members, baroque bylaws, and vastly expensive and
corrupt local board elections. The chief result has been the ascendancy of a
kind of Tea Party of the left, featuring ex-Scientologists, miracle cure
hucksters, and conspiracists who believe that Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!,
Pacifica's premier program, is taking CIA money to suppress "the truth about
9/11". Add to that an austerity plan to stick it to the workers, right out
of the Thatcher/Sarkozy playbook, and you have Pacifica Radio in 2010.

Under cover of budget cuts, the Mad Hats who control the Pacifica National
Board are seeking to dispense with those who oppose their conspiracy-driven
agenda-or simply strive for well-produced, quality radio. The axe has fallen
first on WBAI's acclaimed 'Behind the News', an island of lucid analysis in
the mass media swamp, hosted by the economic journalist Doug Henwood, author
of Wall Street and publisher of Left Business Observer. In the midst of a
gathering emergency, the brains trust at WBAI decided that Henwood's
program, which provides some of the best economic analysis anywhere, should
be cut to twice a month. Henwood tendered his resignation, blasting the
swerve towards "chem-trails and footpads and 9/11 nuttery". A day later the
vitamin supplements mogul Gary Null, notorious for his claim that HIV does
not cause AIDS, announced that he would be returning to the airwaves of WBAI
on November 15th. (ACT UP wrote to Pacifica that "returning Gary Null to the
air for financial reasons would be unethical profiteering, because he gives
out information that can cause people to become infected with HIV or fail to
treat the infection properly.")

The Mad Hats are now focusing on the flagship station of the Pacifica
network, KPFA in the San Francisco Bay Area, which thus far has been mainly
free of such conspiracism and snake oil. Three members of the Pacifica
National Board have drawn up a list of their staff enemies to be fired,
which includes the majority of the workers at some of the most successful
programs, in terms of listenership and fundraising, on KPFA's air: the
Morning Show, the noon program of radical ideas Against the Grain, and the
Evening News. Against the Grain host Sasha Lilley's fate was apparently
sealed when she interviewed me about my CounterPunch article on why the
Pacifica board system had cost more than $2.4 million dollars since 2002 and
why it needed to be replaced. Those at the top of Pacifica were incensed and
demanded her firing.

Laying off these workers would not only violate KPFA's contract with the
Communications Workers of America. It would seriously compromise the
solvency of what has been the most financially successful station in the
network. KPFA has historically subsidized the other four Pacifica stations,
and has financed and executed some of the most groundbreaking reportage,
from the McCarthy era to the Free Speech Movement to the Iran-Contra
investigations to, recently, the latter-day Winter Soldier hearings.

At KPFA, the union and local management have come up with an alternative
menu of cuts, so that the station can balance its budget while preserving
the ability to produce high quality programming. The cuts focus on KPFA's
parent organization Pacifica itself, whose bureaucracy has become an
enormous financial drain on the five stations. In spite of the tough
economic times, KPFA raises enough money to pay for itself-it just doesn't
raise enough money to pay for Pacifica as well. Pacifica is demanding the
station hand over $800,000 of KPFA listeners' money in the coming fiscal
year and has flatly refused to make any of the recommended cuts. The
Pacifica National Board refuses to reduce the number of its famously
expensive-and dysfunctional, as a search of YouTube can attest-quarterly
board meetings. KPFA's union has asked Pacifica's executive director, Arlene
Engelhardt, to disclose her own salary (which should be a matter of public
record) but she has refused. Austerity is just for the workers, after all.

In the place of programs of journalistic integrity and serious intellectual
inquiry, KPFA listeners only have to look to WBAI to imagine what the sound
of their radio station will soon be: programs about the Illuminati,
microchips used for mind-control, and neo-populist goldbuggery. And all
because "there is no alternative" but to cut experienced journalists and
union jobs.

If I've invoked Lewis Carroll more than Lewis Hill (the syndicalist founder
and guiding spirit of Pacifica) in this dispatch - it's because there is
truly a Mad Hatter's Tea Party feel about some of the current proceedings.
But it is at the same time terribly serious, and not simply for the station
workers whose livelihoods are threatened. Let's remind ourselves of what is
at stake. The network has the signal power to reach one fourth of the
population of the United States - that's an extraordinary earprint. Don't
believe those who glibly assert that terrestrial radio is old school and a
dying medium. The money men don't believe it - that's why the WBAI license,
in the wake of the great privatizing grab of Clinton's 1996
Telecommunications Act, was being appraised at a staggering $250 million.
And the same goes for KPFA, which pumps out more than 50,000 watts over
Northern California. 

Make no mistake, Pacifica remains a vital space for dissenting and
antinomian voices in the United States. If this network is lost, it is
inconceivable that the Left could ever get such a chance again. It was,
after all, only an accident that the conscientious objectors and poets who
instigated the network were given a license to broadcast at all. Following
the catastrophe of a global war, the founding Pacificans in 1946 recognized
that the hand letter-press and the Gestetner duplicating machine were not
adequate to the task of communicating beyond the confines of a small coterie
of war resisters, anarcho-pacifists and bohemians in Berkeley and San
Francisco. They dreamed of what Dwight Macdonald called "big effects". They
hoped to broadcast, for example, to the communities around the naval base of
Oakland and the dockyards of Richmond, using AM radio. The state refused
them access to the powerful and dominant medium of AM, but they were granted
an FM license, mainly because frequency modulation was a novel technology
then in its infancy. Virtually nobody had a receiver in those pioneering
post-war years; Lewis Hill even gave away sets to the first subscribers. Few
foresaw how extraordinarily valuable public access to the FM spectrum would
eventually become. This precious resource, held in trust by the foundation,
is not only being squandered, but is now mortally endangered.   

To those who would say there is no alternative to cuts or to the dominance
of the mainstream media, I would answer, yes, there is indeed an
alternative. Radio must be put first over a delusional, power-hungry
bureaucracy and a governance system run amok. Crackpot electoralism has
allowed the will of ten of thousands of listeners and subscribers to be
thwarted by candidates whose mandate rests upon as few as two hundred votes.
A plurality of 2 per cent! How did this absurd situation come to pass?
Abstractly committed to democracy but too bored to vote in a relentless
train of mind-numbing elections, thousands of dedicated supporters of
Pacifica will wake up this month to find their favorite programs
inexplicably decimated, while their putative representatives, parading the
mantle of "community", continue to spend millions of dollars of listener
pledges on yet more board meetings and ballotry.

The only hope for the long term health of Pacifica is to scrap as soon as
possible the fatally flawed governance structure and start over. This means
collecting approximately 800 signatures of current subscribers, that is, one
percent of the membership, to begin the process of revising the bylaws. A
national "Salvage Pacifica" campaign must be initiated as the immediate
priority. So once again I invite concerned readers and the silent majority
of actual listeners to contact
<http://us.mc541.mail.yahoo.com/mc/compose?to=salvagepacifica@gmail.com>
salvagepacifica at gmail.com, and the business of reconstitution can begin.

"The crisis", Antonio Gramsci wrote from Mussolini's prisons, "consists
precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in
this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear." We've seen the
morbid symptoms on display. It's time to move ahead to rescue-and
revitalize-this invaluable resource for the left.

Iain Boal is a social historian of science and technics, and co-author of
Retort's Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War
(Verso). He can be reached at boal at sonic.net. 

 

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