On November 2, 2011, I was riding my bike as close to the barricaded Occupy Oakland’s HQ as possible, listening to live on air coverage of the police brutality from nationally syndicated radio talk show host, Mike Malloy. I felt, again, the revolutionary potential of radio to bring together extrovert activists and introvert idea artists. Experience has taught me that such an alliance is crucial if any grassroots or alternative movement is to have a chance at any kind of sustained success.

My elation soon turned to frustration, however, having to listen to syndicated radio to get more than sound bites of this local event, and once again I missed KUSF. The fact that a city the size of Oakland, able to sustain major league baseball and football teams for over 40 years, does not have even one locally-owned and programmed radio station (whether commercial or non-commercial, music or talk), is itself a direct cause of the corporate control of the US congress, which is the primary grievance filed by Occupy Wall Street.

Since one of OWS’s grievances directly addresses corporate control of the media, John Anderson’s suggestion that the best way to address this situation is “by becoming the media directly” is an idea whose time has come, especially given that the corporate controlled 4^th estate has even more political power than the executive branch of the government. Though it tends to get lost in all the stories of police brutality, Anderson reveals that OWS is at least considering ways to occupy the media. According to an article at DIYmedia.net, OWS has:

established a microradio station at 107.1 FM. The station simulcasts the 24/7 live stream which provides coverage of life inside Zuccotti Park, as well as street-level reportage of daily protest actions in New York City’s financial district. One idea that’s been batted around involves integrating broadcasting into the occupation’s General Assembly, which functions as its governing body. Microradio could be employed to provide a non-amplified public address system – simply plug the speaker’s mic into a transmitter. Radios are cheap, and many smartphones have built-in FM reception capability. Microradio is easily accessible to a large audience and relatively uncomplicated to deploy. Unlike most other tools of protest-media, the critical infrastructure that makes radio work is pretty much self-contained, which adds to its reliability. Microradio is also extremely useful as an outreach tool. The station in Zuccotti Park broadcasts to the occupation and immediate neighbors, which can be useful in the maintenance of good community relations.

In addition, opening up access to the airwaves in such a public manner helps to demystify the act of broadcasting and introduce folks to the notion that the airwaves, too, are a public space…. This leads to the final rationale for incorporating microradio into occupations – it’s an occupation of its own kind.”[1]

Anderson shows one potential way to Occupy Radio, but there are many other possibilities that could help the occupy movement, especially during the cold winter months where many are doing their occupying indoors. We need to continue the discussion on why Occupying Radio needs to be at the forefront of the movement. As Tom Ness puts it:

If we truly want democracy, that means our poorest of neighborhoods must be able to participate. And for our poorest neighborhoods, there are perhaps no better options for expression than radio. We need to provide public access to the airwaves to advance democracy and to promote social stability. We need to defend our legitimate rights to radio as our public property. And the poorest, most vulnerable among us need the unique benefits of radio as a simple survival tool. Community radio is essential to the economic health of our communities, and the right to profit off the public airwaves should not be reserved for the rich. And community radio advances culture, for the fundamental benefit of all.[2]

Radio’s role in the economic health of our communities is crucial; when radio thrived, main-street thrived, but many of us weren’t even born then. The war against the public square is almost identical to the war against locally-owned media outlets like radio. 2011 has been an especially great year for radio if you’re a member of the 1%; their occupation of the public airwaves has lead to the near absolute silencing of any voice (whether talk or music) not sanctioned by the corporate agenda. Don’t let them fool you—they wanted complete control of the radio, and did their best to make you think it wasn’t that important while they were stealing it.

Now, even Mike Malloy’s voice will no longer be heard on Bay Area radio. Why?

Not because he’s being replaced by local Oakland based programming, nor even because his ratings were lower than his conservative talk radio competitors—but Mitt Romney has something to do with it. According to a report by Brad Friedman, over at The Brad Blog:

The only progressive AM radio talk station, Green960-KKGN, in one of the nation’s most liberal cities, San Francisco, is being taken off the AM dial by radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications, Inc. — a media conglomerate now owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital, LLC — at the beginning of the 2012 Presidential election year.

Adding insult to injury for progressives in the Bay Area, the 960 slot on the dial is being replaced by Clear Channel with the likes of Glenn Beck, Fox News Radio’s John Gibson and other radical Rightwing talkers. Clear Channel’s San Francisco Director of Operations Don Parker in a press release cites Clear Channel’s “goal of expanding talk radio in San Francisco. We saw the opportunity to expand our footprint in this crucial arena as we head into an election year and a population increasingly engaged in local, state, and national events and activism,”

The expansion will amount to moving Green960′s current schedule of progressive talk shows off the AM band, and on to FM’s HD2 radio ghetto where it will become a largely automated “robo-station,” according to several radio insiders familiar with the station and Clear Channel’s plans for it. The station which was formerly Green 960 will have the catchy new name “FM Progressive Talk 103.7-2″ at its new home, if listeners can find it.

The new Rightwing format taking its place on 960 will be known as KNEW, which is currently at 910 on the AM dial featuring a number of Fox News Radio programs. The 910 position will then be filled with a new talk format being developed by Clear Channel called “San Francisco’s Talk 910 KKSF,” which will also include some Fox News Radio veterans.”

Such market censorship has nothing to do with Malloy’s popularity. The “conventional” wisdom that popularity determines advertising revenue no longer applies in the post Telecommunications Act (1996) era when 4 conglomerates own all the commercial radio stations.[3] Even the station’s KNEW name suggests that knowledge itself must be past tense. The issue is control of content, as Randi Rhodes, at great risk to her career, points out. Only the large corporations can afford advertisements; the advertisements are often for things most listeners can’t afford, yet it’s worth the corporations money to buy them because it allows them control of content, especially on TV, but even radio ads are virtually prohibitive for small locally owned businesses. They’ve been working on it a long time.

When “Uncle Sam paid the Reagan debt by selling off the broadcast spectrum to the highest contract” with The Telecommunications Act of 1996, it “allowed a bevy of elite media corporations to ravage the airwaves with impunity, sweeping aside the remnants of local radio culture and replacing it with an endless stream of scientifically manufactured drivel to befuddle and distract the American people from their duties as citizens.“[4]

In 1998, FCC Chairman Michael Powell snidely flaunted his disregard for the democratic process when he said, “The night after I was sworn in, I waited for a visit from the angel of public interest. I waited all night, but she did not come. And, in fact, five months into this job, I still have had no divine awakening and no one has issued me my public interest crystal ball.”[5]  In fact, lobbyists for the large corporations stormed into the FCC offices, stole the crystal ball and shattered it, at our expense. As long as such “taxation without representation” is the norm on the corporately owned media, radio becomes, as Anderson puts it, mystified to the point where people forget that it is a public space.

From a corporate perspective, Green 960 and others like it were an experiment.

“Maybe we can allow progressive voices on the radio again as long as they are forced to read advertisements that contradict their ostensible message; they talk about how we need to restore the commons, but have to do advertisements for gold because ‘The dollar’s future’s baked into the cake’ (Hartmann) or stamps.com because ‘going to the post office is a hassle’ (Rhodes).” This way Clear Channel could still make its money, and still seem liberal enough on the surface to keep people’s attention diverted from their grand theft of the public airwaves.

The problem, from a corporate perspective, was that many of these progressive talk commentators did far better in any head-to-head contest with their conservative counterparts in the ratings war. They also were able to translate their influence into palpable electoral results in the 2006 and 2008 elections, despite being outnumbered roughly 100 to 1 on the national airwaves. Even when Air America went bankrupt (on the same day of the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision), Ed Schultz, Randi Rhodes and even Thom Hartmann were more popular than ever.[6]

Clearly, these progressive radio personalities are being denied access to the cultural means of production because they’re a threat to the one percent, yet the corporations are not entirely heartless. They’ve been stepping up the push for HD Radio as a new “upgrade” for a while. The Best Buy Ads for Insignia HD radio are everywhere now; and yes radio is still much cheaper than the computer. But people aren’t buying, and it’s not just because everybody’s broke and in debt (in part because they’re now hooked to more expensive computers for their news and music)—it’s because nobody sees much of a point; we’ve been given no reason to believe HD radio will provide better programming as long as the ownership is in the same remote-control hands.

None of the corporations are in a hurry to start local underground community music or talk programming on their HD stations.[7] Yet, if they force the most popular national talk show hosts onto this new format, maybe they can actually sell more of these HD Gadgets made with Chinese slave labor, and lure progressives away from the public airwaves that a lot of “swing voters” like to listen to on those long lonely nights on the highways they’re trying to privatize. The corporate conglomerates have had success with this before (for instance, letting “alternative” indie-rock in on the condition it helped people make the transition from LPS to CDs, and once consumers were hooked to the CD, go back to trickle-down pop music like in the 80s)–they win either way, even if HD radio dies a quick 8-track-player death.

The death of Progressive Talk Radio is a fitting end to a disastrous year in Bay Area radio for all but the 1%. At least progressive talk radio has been self-reflective about the buy outs, music radio has not been allowed such ‘luxury.’ The ongoing war against music radio is even more draconian, as formats change without advance warning, so listeners are forced into passive acceptance. January 18, 2011, the same day lobbyist-bought FCC “regulators” permitted Comcast to buy MSNBC, KUSF, the University of San Francisco’s award winning community oriented radio station, was illegally taken off the air by Entercom. Across the country, 2011 saw what remained of the once glorious independent national college music network get mostly sold off to the highest bidder.

The ongoing (if somewhat demoralized) SAVE KUSF and national SAVE COLLEGE RADIO movements need to join forces with the OCCUPY MOVEMENT, and the OCCUPY MOVEMENT needs to understand that these two struggles are the same.

It gets worse. In the Bay Area, 2011 saw the loss of its long-standing oldies station (KFRC, which had already been syndicated out to the True Oldies Station) and 1510 KPIG, the only two music stations on the AM-Commercial dial. Syndicated talk radio has already successfully taken over the AM dial, and is now making inroads into the FM dial, with their shakier, more fragile, signals. Pirate Cat Radio, which broadcast local music and news for a vast underserved demographic at 87.9 FM for most of the last decade was levied with heavy fines and met its demise. Even contemporary country station 95.7 The Wolf, was unceremoniously dumped in favor of The Bay Area’s First FM Sports Talk Station.

Sure, 95.7 was a corporate owned station, and played a well-regulated playlist of “contemporary country,” and thus not as aesthetically pleasing to me as KUSF; at least sometimes it had a rock and roll beat, or a tear-jerker pop ballad; and it was mostly contemporary. It was also very white, but the corporate-run contemporary black targeted stations were now playing the heightened roboticism of Auto-tunes, a device invented by Exxon and now used to “cover up” (like Corexit) any traces of the kind of “bad notes” that characterizes the best r&b or hip hop.

More profoundly, the struggle for the airwaves is not strictly a matter of “taste;” nor is the politics strictly in the content. It affects, directly or indirectly, virtually every aspect of our lives. Given music radio’s auspicious history in the 20^th century as debatably the single most powerful agent of working class racial integration, which the 1% always felt threatened by, it’s not too difficult to see this War Against Music Radio as a form of state-sponsored terror[8] that parallels the corporate war on “progressive talk radio” and locally-owned radio stations, whether commercial or non-profit. Due, however, to the myth of “taste” and “niche marketing” when it comes to music, the plutocrats have been able to effect their occupation of the music industry largely under the radar, with no need to make their Goebbels-like regulations blatant.[9] In a December 2011 article “Farewell Black Radio,” Natalie Hopkinson writes:

for generations, black radio has been a driving force of black culture and politics, the modern day drum for communities of African descent as William Barlow explains in “Voice Over: The Making of Black Radio.”….I learned about the latest public service campaign against infant mortality, which disproportionately affected black people. I heard about anti-violence rallies taking place far from my suburban community. I mastered the art of taping hit singles by artists like Full Force, New Edition and Bell Biv Devoe off the radio…. Paul Porter of the media think tank Industry Ears, recently explained in his essay “Why Black Radio is So Damn Bad” on RapRehab.com that the community connection to black radio slowly began to unravel with the 1996 passage of the Telecommunications Act, which turned formerly black-owned stations into publicly traded commodities. The rise of syndication expanded the reach and influence of personalities such as Tom Joyner, Steve Harvey, but muted local voices and news. Porter further explains:

“Black music has suffered a systematic demise and Black radio is a major compliance. The youth in America, get a steady diet of bitch, hoe and bling. The once undisputed music leader now follows the lead of the powerful recording industry. Commercial hip hop is the format of the lyrically challenged but the youth are too young to notice.”[10]

As Hopkinson, Barlow and Porter make clear, critiques of contemporary commercial hip hop artists like Jay-Z, whether coming from the black community or recent articles like Rapublicans,[11] miss the point. The issue is the illegal and immoral means by which content is seized by the 1% to disenfranchise the working class (and sell it as progress or at least a quick fix). For Hopkinson, the plethora of other choices, such as Pandora, iTunes and satellite radio do not compensate for the local rootedness radio once offered, in addition to still being a much more affordable option. As Brad Friedman puts it, “The Telecom Act was sold by legislators and lobbyists on the premise that it would increase competition in the market place. The net effect has been the exact opposite:” increased disenfranchisement and less diversity.

While some of these stations now broadcast Spanish, Chinese or serve other non English speaking populations, and thus invoke diversity, usually they broadcast as Spanish or Chinese version of Rush Limbaugh[12] as the owners sit in boardrooms contemplating how they can rid us of community stations like KPOO, which still provides almost the perfect balance between music and talk, local and international & entertainment and politics.

You could say I’m over-reacting. After all, “we still got KALX,” as many Bay Area musicians tell me, and KALX has been good to me, but the burden on KALX to represent the field of musical diversity that is excluded from the rest of the FM/AM dial has watered down its effectiveness as a purveyor of music that’s contemporary, independent, and local.[13] It was never intended to stand alone. My interest in mid-century locally owned commercial Top 40, country and R&B stations as well as the heyday of community and college radio stations later in the 20^th century is primarily to look for precedents in considering ways the 99% can re-occupy the public airwaves, but we need to have a meeting (that’s also a kick-ass dance party and pillow fight) to consider other possibilities.

The ongoing SAVE KUSF and national SAVE COMMUNITY RADIO movements need to join forces with the OCCUPY MOVEMENT, and the OCCUPY MOVEMENT needs to understand that these two struggles are the same.

So, what is to be done? What can we do? Alas, like most of my creative friends, I am better at why than how. Of the proposals that have crossed my piano desk in the last year, I am especially intrigued by Tom Ness’s suggestion of a microradio “mass turn on:”

First, we need to convince Congress and the FCC to take this matter seriously. And that task is utterly enormous. We must convince Congress and the FCC that they simply have no choice but create a meaningful community radio service. This will be terribly difficult for them, for example, because ultimately it may require the most powerful interests to actually give up their spot on the dial in some cases. Certainly no one in Washington can imagine that today and that’s why they will only respond to this issue when our elected officials and public servants are convinced they have no other choice.

The question of how we might convince Washington to take this seriously leads directly to the matter of civil disobedience. I believe in the rule of law. I also believe in a regulated broadcast environment. Much to the dismay of my anarchist and libertarian friends I’m sure, let me say that I respect the authority of the FCC. Because without a regulated broadcast environment, I’m pretty sure that Westinghouse will build a gazillion-watt transmitter and an antenna that reaches to the moon, and when we turn on our radio we will hear nothing else. I believe that without a regulated environment, the poor and working class of this country will never have their turn at the microphone and a spot on the dial. So I respect the authority of the FCC, and believe that our task is that of convincing the agency to put a much higher priority on media democratization. I believe citizens are duty-bound to speak up, and lobby for change. And that’s precisely what we did with community radio between 1996 and 2000. But having exhausted every avenue and finding oneself still burdened with an unjust law, citizens are left with but one honorable option, and that is civil disobedience… Flipping the Switch as Last Resort: This won’t work if it is merely a bluff. So at some point, we may have to decide that this is it, and on a certain day or week, we are all going on the air together.

Ness’s proposal of effective civil disobedience was presented to an audience of disenfranchised radio folks (many who had been professional DJS before the Telecommunication Act, but were now trying to unite in the cause of LPFM community radio stations), but this is not simply “Pirate radio as an end in itself.” The threat of jamming, or occupying, the airwaves is a means to negotiation with the FCC. “Underground” is a legal, not moral status; he would rather be legal. Just as OWS’s main demand is the repeal of corporate personhood, and getting money, big and small, out of politics, Ness has a central demand, from which all else follow: “The presumption of license renewal must go. I’m rather certain of that, regardless of how ridiculous it sounds to some. If the FCC approaches even just one of the corporations in a city, and politely insist they surrender the license of just one of their massive stations which covers our entire region, even just one will make room for dozens of small stations.”[i]

In the meantime, Ness is open to compromise positions:

One possibility is that the FCC might carve out an entirely new portion of the spectrum for community radio. This will be painful because spectrum is already scarce and subject to enormous competition. And then of course, we will all need new radios which can receive that part of the spectrum. All very, very difficult but on the other hand, people happily bought FM radios the last time a major change like this occurred. Another option I’ve heard is for the FCC to mandate that radio manufacturers produce receivers of much more exacting standards, capable of defining many more signals in the same given amount of spectrum. Again, this would mean that listeners would need a new, more modern radio.

Of course, even these proposals will be met with resistance by Big Media, because their power derives from the control of the finite broadcast spectrum. HD Radio, for instance, in theory, does exactly what Ness calls for, but as long as these “adjunct” stations are controlled by the same de-regulated media conglomerates, we still need to come up with strategies and tactics to make our voices heard. So here’s a possible DEMAND for OWS to consider at the July 4, 2012 conference in Philly:

The primary legislative demand of Occupy Radio is immediate reinstatement of the regulations that forbid outside owners from owning more than 2 radio stations in any given market, as well as other anti-trust regulations abolished by the Telecomm Act. Such re-regulation would immediately create more jobs in radio broadcasting, since stations that are largely automated now will be required to hire radio personalities in their communities. It will re-establish radio as two way form of communication, in which local listeners had some say in their programming, and make radio programmers more responsible to their listeners than what Clearchannel HQ demands. It will allow small-businesses an arena in which to advertise currently denied by the anti-democratic and even anti-capitalist plutocrats, and marshal the productive forces of the currently large population of high-quality unemployed and underemployed musicians, entertainers, artists and ‘culture workers’ to the service of the community, boosting morale, lowering crime and recreating the artistic middle class that grew under FDR and Ike and has been abandoned since at least Reagan.

And here’s a possible demand for Occupy Oakland (or insert your city, village, or rural county here):

We demand, at the very least, the reclamation by the City of Oakland of at least 2 radio stations from the monopolistic thieves who have robbed us of jobs, a tax-base, a grass-roots culture, economy and even civic pride. In this decolonization proposal, one of the stations will be more mainstream, reform-oriented, and commercial–highlighting local programming from the wide spectrum of Oakland residents & locally owned businesses. No national outside conglomerates will be allowed to advertise or buy sponsorships on this station. If that sounds draconian, remember they have every other station. Costs of advertising will be adjusted (deflated) to be affordable to the advertising budgets of locally owned businesses.[14]The station can be run as a public/private partnership with full transparency and accountability. The key is for the station to develop what Thurston Moore calls “a great neutrality,” without getting too big. Government will not determine programming, but will only intervene to protect it from corporate predators.

The second station could be much more revolutionary, more like the existing non-commercial 10 watt radio stations, the last vestiges of independent radio that are being gobbled up. Call it KOWS, or WOWS if you want; Laney College could use one that’s not mere podcast. While such stations, as outlined above, have been absolutely crucial for the formation of sustainable local cultures (from musicians, stand-up comics, and even urban planners) since the early 1980s, it’s important to remember that their autonomy came with the price of being non-commercial, which decreased their effectiveness as sustainable forces when the high hospital bills, for instance, came in. So-called “college radio” itself was a compromise position, and while I lament its loss, we must demand more than its return to achieve the ends of democracy.

If the city of Oakland used what little muscle it has left to stand up against Entercom, Clearchannel and the like, and invoke federal regulations still on the book, that long atrophied muscle will grow; the mayor would have the support of the vast majority of the 99%. Let the corporations sue—we have your back. We may not have money, but we got numbers and are willing to work. Lawyer’s fees are less costly and divisive than the teargas taxes you’ve wasted. Many might even feel okay about paying a parking ticket if the city actually gives something back. We need a city at least open to radical possibilities—air the debate out; any transparent good faith proposals are welcome.

Thus far, however, Mayor Jean Quan claiming that she has “been supportive” of the occupy movement is an example of hypocrisy worthy of the lower rungs of Dante’s Inferno. Quan has been as deaf to reasoned proposals to Occupy Radio as she is to Russell Quan, the drummer from the Mummies and other local bands frozen out from the corporate media. Still, at least rhetorically, we can appeal to the city.[15] Some of us are willing to compromise, and understand how reform may be more radical than mere revolution. Radio won’t disturb your curfew…

The Mayor and City Council might do well to remember the origins of Radio itself as a compromise between business and labor. Business benefitted by the increased commodification of music, and labor benefited by the regulated environment in which local ownership created as many jobs as the new format of radio had robbed from pre-electric live entertainment culture on the streets. The city benefitted by radio’s seductive ability to decrease night-life street culture, but as long as radio was locally owned, musicians had more friends in the government than we do today: there was more locale culture and less crime.

So, here’s one final demand to the Mayor and City Council of (insert radio market here) to supplement, not replace, the demand for the locally owned radio stations:

We demand that the City of Oakland explicitly prohibit places of business open to the public, especially retail businesses that are not owned locally (and who have received unfair incentives to undersell and buy out locally owned businesses) to play canned music not made locally without first considering all the options for locally grown live in store performances.[16] This would not only save the businesses money, and boost worker’s morale (the workers would have the choice of what music they’re forced to listen to while working), but also rejuvenate Oakland’s tax base, especially given the city’s notorious lack of viable, legally sanctioned live venues for music. It would establish better relations, and heal wounds, between the city, its citizens and small business by restoring a commons and give Oakland a positive cultural export. I, for one, am less worried about the fairness of the taste of a cashier or clerk than I am of the corporate “music” pushers and their undercompensated focus groups.

Yet, as one fed up with the city’s lack of support, and even actively undermining any attempt to form a true commercially viable cultural export in the decade I’ve lived here, we should unite in occupying indoor and outdoor public spaces for dance crazes, pick up truck tours (and when we start making money, we’ll give back to the city in taxes, which is more than can be said for Kaiser Permanente). In the spirit of civil disobedience, but also in the spirit of fun:

Musicians & Stand Up Comics Unite! (For Peter Ivers) 

Musicians and other culture workers don’t “unite” like they used to back in the days of the middle class. The 1% did a damn good job of changing the meaning of “indie” to “every band for themselves.” Even the President astutely points out to teenagers, “you’re probably not going to be L’il Wayne,” but instead of enjoining young rappers to unionize, Obama, like Clinton before him, rather tries to usher them into technology, with disastrous results. Because the vast majority of great live local musicians are cut out from the increasingly monopolized corporate channels, and the banks aren’t offering loans to small locally based labels or venues, music has increasingly become an “in the red” proposition for most unless of course you happen to have come from upper-middle class (or upper-upper), or are more left-brained than right-brained.

Coupled with increased gas prices, tours that only a few years ago were at least breaking even are now a losing proposition. No wonder college radio has been so colonized by the corporate labels: a war against music? Nah, it’s just not that important anymore….right? Hell, even many of best musicians accept it, as they play their oldies instead of each other, but we don’t have to like each other’s music to be played on the same station of form a diverse, yet locally grounded small MP3 singles-label.

If we can’t have the radio, we have to take to the streets as unionized laborers and demand our rights. On an unspecified date in 2012 (why should we give it away?) we will be forced to occupy, en mass, these colonizing businesses, such as Wallgreens, Burger King, Safeway, The Gap, Whole Foods, etc. We will take to the streets peacefully like the second line parades of old New Orleans, and the drums of Congo Square that most American musicologists agree was the birthplace of any American music of worth in the last century. We will be organized to accommodate the widest possible range of music taste. A classical pianist may occupy the part of the mall with the piano store for instance.

Each of these musicians should be able to at least get one song finished before being arrested. And if we get arrested, we will peacefully go—but the arrest will be on tape or digital live-stream and the world is watching, and maybe even acting, with us. So, musicians and culture jammers, you better make it good. This is your audition! After all, a revolution is nothing if it can’t also pass for a business plan, and music is activism. As Czech dissident Josef Skvorecky wrote in 1977:

when the lives of individuals and communities are controlled by powers that themselves remain uncontrolled–slavers, czars, fuehrers, first secretaries, marshalls, generals and generalisimos, ideologists of dictatorships of either end of the spectrum–then creative energy becomes a protest.”

We only need add “corporate persons” to that list to update it for America. The goal is to bring back the human, face-to-face, interaction; letting the city be a city again, decriminalizing locally based culture by decolonizing the outside corporate influence that has flattened out local differences in ways at least as destructive as  McDonald’s and kept us separated and not equal, and to foster a trickle up culture and economy that has been systematically destroyed by the 1% in the last 30-40 years.

These are but a few modest proposals that are important to begin debating now.

I don’t think it won’t thin out the resources of Occupy Wall Street, since it can bring new people currently skeptical of the movement in, nor do I think it needlessly “politicizes” the KUSF movement. To conclude, this is why the ongoing SAVE KUSF and national SAVE COMMUNITY RADIO movements need to join forces with the OCCUPY MOVEMENT, and the OCCUPY MOVEMENT needs to understand that these two struggles are the same. As Tom Ness puts it, the quality and authenticity of our democracy might well be measured by how many are allowed to use the microphone, instead of only the headphones.

Chris Stroffolino, Occupy Radio

PS–(In the decade I’ve lived in The Bay Area, I have tried whatever means necessary to make a dent in the colonization of Oakland by the LA based industry, but given Quan’s increasing crackdowns, I know many of the best artists are giving up and even considering to move to LA, where at least they passed a resolution banning corporate personhood. It’s a sad day when The Bay Area becomes more placeless than even LA! As Beme The Rapper says, Fuck Oakland. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpS_1Y6mOME. He has way better tracks than this, give him a chance, Quan! Okay, My piano is saying “me thinks thou dost protest too much” or would be if I could afford one!)

The latest round of the ongoing battle over public broadcasting has concluded, and lo and behold, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting lives. The new budget preserves funding for the CPB at $445 million for 2013, albeit with drastic cuts to smaller public media funds, and the complete elimination of the Department of Commerce’s Public Telecommunications Facilities Program.

This particular chapter of the war was quite colorful, in a nasty sort of way. It included the great Juan Williams firing brouhaha, which ultimately took with it the head of the NPR executive who dumped him. Then there was the Ron Schiller fiasco, in which the development director’s comments on the Tea Party’s alleged Islamophobic xenophobia brought down not only him but NPR’s CEO Vivian [no relation] Schiller.

Yet here we are, and NPR and NPR stations continue to get money from the CPB, which continues to exist. Needless to say, this battle will continue through the decade. The “conservative” case against NPR will thrive. People who call themselves conservatives will continue to insist that NPR has a liberal bias, and that this bias shouldn’t get money from the Federal government.

And NPR backers will counter with statistics that show that most NPR listeners either classify themselves to the center or right.

Which side do you count?

“The facts show that NPR attracts a politically diverse audience of 33.7 million weekly listeners to its member stations on-air,” declared NPR’s Steven Inskeep in a late March op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. “In surveys by GfK MRI, most listeners consistently identify themselves as ‘middle of the road’ or ‘conservative.’ Millions of conservatives choose NPR, even with powerful conservative alternatives on the radio.”

source: NPR

Sure, but you can also read NPR as a network in which most listeners consistently identify themselves as “middle of the road” (25 percent), “somewhat liberal” (19 percent), and “very liberal” (13 percent). Such was the finding of MRI’s survey of NPR listeners in 2007. That majority was the biggest, taking up 57 percent of the audience, as opposed to Inskeep’s array of columns, which in 2007 counted for only 54 percent.

Basically NPR is a liberal entity. Many of its stations broadcast to university town audiences. And in an ironic way, conservatives force the liberal label on NPR by insisting that Federal funding is an inherently liberal concept. But NPR and NPR stations do try to reach out to conservatives, albeit crudely sometimes (see interviewing David Horowitz about Howard Zinn after the latter’s death).

Bottom line: conservatives would lose out if the NPR solar system were defunded.

Core vs everybody

I’ve heard a lot of happy talk about a defunded NPR. The service only gets about two percent of its funding from Uncle Sam, it is noted, and the NPR stations only get ten. There are all sorts of creative, innovative ways these stations could get by without that money, say the pro-defunding experts.

source: NPR

But I know what most of the university town NPR stations will do if defunded—deemphasize or dump conservative programming. Faced with budget shortfalls, they’ll appeal to their liberal base, and their liberal base will demand changes.

Every public radio station struggles with something like the same audience problem, trying to satisfy its core, subscriber listenership, while reaching out to the broader population. The core listenership never likes that. It wants NPR to say liberal things with liberal voices. The staff know that that’s a dead end that results in bubble radio—liberals boringly talking to themselves.

Federal funding allows public radio stations to reach out beyond the core liberal audience with which public media is historically associated. Without it, NPR stations would have no choice but to move their politics to the left.

Rural stations would be the exception to this rule. Ironically, they’re more conservative and more dependent on federal funding. Many of them, especially those with CPB supported TV signals as well, would be forced to retrench beyond recognition.

Conservatives would lose out in this scenario. Maybe defunding NPR has become such a sweet goal that they don’t care. Maybe Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly and CBS AM radio are enough for them.

I hope not. It all reminds me of the old joke about a Russian farmer to whom God appears.

“I am here to grant you any wish of your desire,” God says. “But keep one thing in mind. Whatever I give you, I will give your neighbor twice.”

The Russian farmer thinks for a minute, then answers.

“Make me blind in one eye,” he says.

On Tuesday, the outfit put out an action alert calling on its supporters to let the Berkeley, California listener supported station know that they like the signal’s new volunteer “Morning Mix” lineup, which replaced recently purged hosts Aimee Allison and Brian Edwards-Tiekert:

“[a] new show, ‘Morning Mix’, hosted by several volunteers, including Project Censored’s own, Mickey Huff, is in place at 8:00am. Mickey is a supporter of all things truth and will undoubtedly have us on as a guest if the show is continued. AE911Truth is highlighted in the last 3 Project Censored books. However the new radio show’s tenure is in jeopardy. We need your help.”

So calling all 9/11Truthers, continues the message—tell KPFA’s new General Manager and Program Director that you dig the new show! But, well, maybe leave a few details out of your e-mail:

“For this particular show of support,” the missive concludes, “we should refrain from mentioning 9/11—a very contentious issue at KPFA. Discussion of it in this circumstance will only complicate and thwart our efforts to keep the ‘Morning Mix’ on the air.”

Yeah, the whole truth always complicates things. Better just to omit minor deets like the real actual reason you support the new program out of your message of support.

I wonder if there are other truths that 9/11Truthers around KPFA think that it’s best to keep on a low profile.

Brian Edwards-Tiekert assuming a typically optimistic pose.

About a year ago I was driving to work along the 17 freeway, which winds through the mountains of Santa Cruz, California, and listening to Brian Edwards-Tiekert on listener supported KPFA-FM in Berkeley’s Morning Show. He was interviewing someone about the political situation in Turkey, and how politics in that country affects women. It was just after seven AM.

The interview was so absorbing—serving up intricate and very personal details on how religious, ethnic, and gender issues inform Turkey’s tense political present. As a consequence, I forgot that I was navigating a very tricky section of the road, just after a rainstorm. The car lost control, and did a 360 degree spin over the lane.

Fortunately it was very early and there were no other vehicles around. I avoided the concrete dividers to my right and left. As Edwards-Tiekert’s guest offered an assessment of the latest Turkish election, I backed the car into the proper lane, and continued along my way, still listening.

On Tuesday I tuned into the Morning Show, and Brian’s co-host Aimee Allison was having an extended conversation with sports writer Dave Ziron on the World Series. The author of Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love, Ziron explained why the “Red State/Blue State” metaphor for the San Francisco/Texas showdown glosses over less obvious dynamics of race and class.

I was heading west on the 85 freeway, which feeds into the 17. So wrapped up did I become in the discussion that I forgot where I was going and missed my exit. I didn’t realize this until my surroundings were completely unrecognizable.

These aren’t the worst Morning Show “freeway effect” stories. Back when KPFA was running its Winter Soldier investigation hearings on the Iraq war, my partner Sharon Wood was driving towards to the Golden Gate bridge to get to work. Allison and famed Iraq war reporter Aaron Glantz hosted the program.

Listening to the testimony by Iraq GIs, Sharon began to cry, then rear ended the SUV in front of her, wrecking her car.

Compassionate, youthful, always on top of their game, and equipped with bel canto interview voices—Aimee Allison and Brian Edwards-Tiekert are the best Morning Show that KPFA has ever had, and one of the best in public radio. Edwards-Tiekert is scary smart, yet a diplomat, even when he thinks he’s hearing something a bit dodgy. “You’ve sure done your homework, haven’t you,” a self-appointed expert on cellphone radiation conceded after a single question.

Allison is just a treasure. A former Army medic, she’s an anti-war activist and passionate advocate for her beloved city: Oakland, California. She exudes optimism and joy for life. She makes what she does sound easy, even though it is anything but.

On Tuesday, Aimee and Brian interviewed the two bureaucrats who could throw them off KPFA’s airwaves, and push the station into a long downward spiral.

Meet the new boss

Their names are Arlene Engelhardt, Executive Director of KPFA’s owner, the Pacifica Foundation, and LaVarn Williams, Pacifica’s Chief Financial Officer.

In her opening remarks, Engelhardt could not spare a single good word for KPFA’s current efforts, and instead got right into crux of her agenda. The operation is running on a deficit, and that’s bad. Staff cuts are coming. Big ones.

“[KPFA] was founded on the premise of listener donations, that listener donations would support a radio station, and also on the premise of volunteerism,” Engelhardt explained.

“And I think that’s one of the places where I think we’ve lost sight of our way, particularly at KPFA more so than at the other stations in the Pacifica network. We use less volunteers and pay more staff for functions that in some cases could be done by volunteers, than is happening at other stations in the network.

That’s one of the foundations of community radio, and I think that when times were, shall we say, fat, there was plenty of money, it was great to pay everyone for almost every function within the station. Now that we’re hitting some lean times, it’s time to remember what our foundation was, that was in volunteerism.”

I’ll say this for Pacifica’s new boss—through the ensuing chaotic argument over Pacifica’s budget, she held her ground (as opposed to the nervous Williams, who I thought quickly came undone).

That was a piece of it

Not that the discussion went that well for Engelhardt either. Allison asked how big staff reductions would lead to a healthier KPFA.

Engelhardt: Well, a healthier network means that we survive. And last year this station spent more than 900,000 more than it took in. That effectively ate up every penny of reserves that this station had. If this station had spent 300,000 more than it had, it could have spread those reserves over three years, and perhaps continued operating at the same level.

Edwards-Tiekert: To clarify that figure, almost 400,000.

Engelhardt: 900,000.

Edwards-Tiekert: Almost 400,000 of that 900,000 was an auditors adjustment.

Engelhardt: [pause] There was a piece of it that was an auditors adjustment because of a check that had never been deposited. So yes, that was a piece of it.

Edwards-Tiekert: So you’re not actually describing a 900,000 operating deficit.

Engelhardt: But there was a great deal of money that went into the operating deficit. This year that is looking to be over 400,000 dollars. And that’s no auditors adjustment, that’s just in plain real dollars.

900k, 400k, whatever—no doubt Engelhardt will get back to us on the right numbers. But when it comes to Pacifica history, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

KPFA wasn’t founded on the “premise of volunteerism.” In fact, it will probably amuse some readers to know that, by 1956, Pacifica founder Lewis Hill was accused by his rivals of hiring too many paid staff. Hill’s successor, Elsa Knight Thompson, was a stickler for professionalism, having cut her broadcasting teeth at the British Broadcasting Corporation during the Second World War.

It wasn’t until the 1970s and the rise of the concept of “community radio” that the premise of KPFA as a “volunteer” station gained traction, and not everybody looks back on that era with nostalgia.

“Volunteerism barely worked in the 1970s,” warns KPFA literature host Richard Wolinsky, “and it won’t work today.”

The big chance

Kirsten Thomas at a demonstration for Democracy Now in 1999

Morning Show Exec Producer Laura Prives

But plenty of those who do look back at the 1970s with nostalgia are still around, and they despise the KPFA Morning Show. They don’t like it because it has an executive producer named Laura Prives, who knows the difference between thinking and axe grinding,  an ace board-op named Kirsten Thomas, who is nobody’s fool, and skilled news reporter Aileen Alfandary, who has been standing them down for years.

And that last point is the bottom line. Mostly they hate the Morning Show  because it is not theirs—something that they can regularly get their soap box routines on, a program that I generically call the 911Truth-Vitamins-Cure-AIDS-Zionists-Control-the-World-Who-Really-Built-The-Pyramids Show.

These folks never really had a shot at bringing the Morning Show down until Pacifica radio started running governing board elections. Now they’ve got their own little political party, power on Pacifica’s National Board, and, I greatly fear, an Executive Director who is willing to do their bidding.

The fact that they lost the last election at KPFA doesn’t seem to have discouraged them. On the pretext of budgetary concerns, the Morning Show and everything that resembles it at KPFA must die die die.

The big question for me is what you do next. Are you going to let Pacifica flush Brian and Aimee and Mitch Jeserich and the rest of their generation of hope down the toilet? This isn’t 1956 or 1976—this is the Age of Broadband, the most competitive media environment that Pacifica radio has ever faced, and one that it can’t possibly stay afloat in with volunteers.

The next move is up to you. “Whose station? Our station!” you chanted eleven years ago when KPFA was shut down and almost sold. I wonder whether you’ll think it’s yours after Aimee and Brian are gone.

I sure won’t. For more information, go to KPFAworker.

Update (November 9)

Since I wrote this piece the whole staff of the Morning Show has been tanked. I regret not mentioning that Esther Manilla was also a producer for the program. Her accounting of recent events below:

source: wikimedia commons

The rivals in KPFA’s governance election are in full combat mode these days. Up for grabs are a bunch of seats for delegates on the Pacifica listener-supported signal’s Local Station Board. Two slates are pushing for a majority on the board: Save KPFA and Independents for Community Radio. My favorite outbursts come from Independents most vocal candidate Tracy Rosenberg, a frequent commentator on this site as well, who characterizes Save KPFA as thus on the Huffington Post (without mentioning she’s a candidate herself).

“Save KPFA turned out to be a bunch of folks in their sixties and seventies (and maybe eighties, too). Their call to arms? The cause to donate my money? More professionalism and more hierarchical structure. Run the famously radical radio station like a proper corporation and get rid of all this community empowerment mumbo-jumbo.”

She then compares these (inappropriately aged?) individuals to Google, which I presume she doesn’t like because of its watered-down stance on net neutrality.

“I guess if you can’t beat the Googlezon, the only thing left is to impersonate the Googlezon.”

I think this prose confirms Rosenberg’s attitude towards professionalism. But interestingly, here on Radio Survivor, she assumes an entirely different personae. Taking exception to KPFA staffer Richard Wolinsky’s warning that the station going all volunteer won’t work, and calling for staff layoffs, Rosenberg sounds to me like a cross between Meg Whitman and various Tea Party candidates.

“KPFA ran a deficit of $652,000 from 10/08 to 9/09 and has run one of $424,000 between 10/09 and 7/10. No philosophy, just numbers. And now there are no savings left in the bank to draw upon, so continuing to run at a deficit is impossible,” she insists. “You can’t spend money you don’t have.”

The problem is that in this same commentary, Rosenberg also leaves me with the impression that even she doesn’t think that last claim is true.

“Remove Democracy Now from the schedule and the associated donations it brings in and you have less revenue to work with, not more,” she adds.

So there’s ‘no money’ at KPFA for KPFA’s local staff (who, it should be noted, also bring in listener donations), but funds to send to the Pacifica National Office for Democracy Now!?

And apparently, there’s always going to be money for these expensive, wasteful elected boards (five for all five of Pacifica’s stations), which have cost the organization almost $2.5 million since 2002. I refer RS readers to my debate with Rosenberg about Pacifica’s absurdly overdemocratized board system, which she defended.

To sum up thus far—there’s cash for governance and Democracy Now! but, oops, gosh darn it, you can’t spend money you don’t have (oh well) for much of KPFA’s local paid staff, whose politics, coincidentally, are hated by not a few of ICRs’ endorsers.

Look—I’ve been around Pacifica radio for longer than I care to admit, and I’m just going to call it as I see it here. If ICR gets a bigger majority on KPFA’s Local Station Board, I’m expecting a paid staff bloodbath, followed by replacement programming on the mysteries of Building Number 7, the Truth About HIV, and God knows what else.

Sure, ICR’s more reasonable sounding backers will tell you that I’m just being an alarmist. But I doubt that they’ll be able to stem the flood of demands for air time coming from forces rapidly slouching towards this particular Bethlehem. How will they be able to when Rosenberg publicly insists that Pacifica founder Lewis Hill created KPFA “specifically to broadcast wildly unpopular perspectives that could never get on the air anywhere else.”

Sounds wild. The problem is that while ICR won’t acknowledge what’s really on the table, neither will Save KPFA, most of whose capable and committed principals I’ve endorsed in past elections. Their backers are insisting that this is a “moment of truth” election, and the most important in years.

But the reality, as they know, is that these elected boards have always been a disaster for Pacifica. That means that every race from now on is going to be the most important in years, because these elections are nothing but beachheads to launch assaults on KPFA’s tradition of professionalism and meaningful local coverage. KPFA and Pacifica’s road to health begins where they end.

source: wikimedia commons

As a regular listener to commercial radio stations, I often hear radio ads that I really wish weren’t broadcast, especially later at night. With this post I begin an ongoing series on these spots, my least favorite being the Prolixus “male thickening” product.

The radio script runs as follows:

Hey guys, does size really matter? Take it from a woman, it does. But you need to know once and for all what kind of size. What really want and what really hits the spot. All the women listening right now are either smiling or nodding their head in agreement. Now introducting [sic] Prolixus, the male widening secret the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t want you know about. This ground breaking male-enhancement formula increases your thickness to an astonishing width safely and permanently. And right now, we’re giving away a helpful free tool with every order because we want to prove Prolixus works. Call . . .

As far as I’m concerned, men who actually buy this nostrum already have the thickness they’re looking for—in their head. Note that the ad never actually says the following: “Prolixus will expand the physical diameter of your penis.”

I followed the links to the Prolixus web site. Where’s the line that explicitly pledges the bottom line if you take the product—a noticeably wider you-know-what? You decide.

The JustAnswer health advice web site recently responded to a question about Prolixus. Here was the commentary of a London based Internal medicine specialist:

I would say that first of all prolixus is not approved by FDA being a herbal product. There is not any medication at present in the market which can increase size of penis, in fact you will waste your time and money for using these products. The only effective way to increase the size is to go for penile enlargement surgery which is effective and can give good results in a real sense. The safety after using prolixus is not known because of lack of studies.

The product runs at over $75 for a single bottle. In my opinion, the management of any radio station that runs ads like this ought to be ashamed of itself.

What do you think? Got a least favorite radio ad? Let Radio Survivor know about it.

It’s election season again at Pacifica radio, the five station listener supported radio network, and that means another season of mud slinging, dishonesty, lawsuits, and wasted money. This time I’m not participating—that means I’m not endorsing any slate and I’m not voting in the election at my local station: KPFA-FM in Berkeley.

For the uninitiated, here’s Pacifica radio’s internal democracy in a nutshell. Periodically the network’s bona fide listener subscribers and staff (paid and volunteer) vote for local boards of 24 members each. These boards have some authority over budgets and key management hirings. They also appoint delegates to the network’s ultimate authority: the Pacifica Governing Board, which appoints a new Executive Committee every year. The Governing Board oversees the Pacifica Foundation, which owns all Pacifica property, including the network’s five FM licenses in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York City, Washington, D.C. and Houston.

Worse by any standard

But by any metric, democracy at Pacifica has been a disaster. Has it alleviated Pacifica’s famously contentious atmosphere? No. In fact, the internal life of Pacifica has arguably become much worse on a day-to-day level. Has it helped to improve the network’s air sound? To the extent that there have been improvements, they have taken place in spite of Pacifica governance, not because of it.

Are Pacifica’s finances in better shape because of its democratic structure? Hardly. According to its latest audit, Pacifica Radio earned $12,594,835 in revenue in 2009, a calamitous drop of $4.2 million from 2008, which saw revenue of $16,768,908. In other words, Pacifica lost the equivalent of a third of its earnings for last year. Most of that decline was in listener support and donations, which tanked by 27 percent.

Two more years of decline like this, and I fear that for all practical purposes, Pacifica will cease to exist. But that doesn’t stop the organization from spending a queen’s ransom on what seems to be the most important activity to its leadership: governance and the network’s failed system of listener-subscriber elections, in which only slightly more than a tenth of the subscribers actually participate.

A “gross exaggeration”

How much do these elections cost? Who knows? According to this financial document, in 2009 Pacifica spent over a quarter of a million on “board expense”— $265,687 to be exact. Another $323,074 was spent on “communications expense,” and $331,640 went to “community events and development.” I’m guessing that somewhere in that cool 900K is the actual sum spent to keep that scary circus otherwise known as Pacifica governance in the manner to which it has grown accustomed.

I’ve got the numbers from earlier years (documents folder here). In 2004 the network spent $206,571 in “board election expenses.” In 2005 it was $183,941. Pacifica’s finances web site doesn’t include the audits for 2006 through 2008. And for some reason this latest audit doesn’t break that figure down.

But maybe some recent correspondence can help. Media scholar and Counterpunch author Ian Boal put the last election’s cost at $700,000. “This is a gross exaggeration,” a former National Board Chair protested in a response.  ”The election cost less than half that amount, including lawsuits.”

Maybe or maybe not. But for the sake of argument, I’m presuming that the last round cost Pacifica around a third of a million dollars, “including lawsuits,” which have become a normal part of Pacifica’s internal life. So if we speculate that in 2006 through 2008 election expenditures stayed at the lowest figure available (2005: $183,941), Pacifica has spent close to a million on its politicians over the last six years. That’s the equivalent of salaries and benefits for two dozen reporters, on-air hosts, and producers.

So how did we get into this mess? That requires an analysis of how we got in. Here’s mine.

No Left

When this new system was initiated, Pacifica had just recovered from the awful management coups at KPFA and WBAI-FM in New York City from 1999 through 2001. The crude philosophy behind these actions backfired, of course, especially after 10,000 KPFA subscribers demonstrated on behalf of their closed station and reacted with alarm to Pacifica National Board deliberations to sell the license.

Thus came ever louder calls to reclaim the organization, which lunged Pacifica in the opposite direction: the excruciatingly democratic by-laws of 2002, partially summarized above. This reform had its heart in the right place, but the conditions for its success were never met. Making democracy at Pacifica radio work would have required an enormous commitment from progressives across the country. The task needed an influx of skilled people and money. But none of that materialized in 2002 and 2003. Quite the contrary, the national celebrities who very actively supported the democratization of Pacifica from 1999 through 2001 walked away from the project.

To be fair, they had bigger fish to fry by 2002: Web 2.0 and its possibilities beckoned, the Bush regime was in full swing, the war in Iraq was impending.

But there were less noble reasons for the abandonment of the cause. Various luminaries in media and the academy (Zinn; Ellsberg; Chomsky) offered rhetorical support to Pacifica democracy on behalf of individual Pacifica programmers and staff who were, in fact, just trying to save their jobs or shows at the stations. Not a few individuals who cheered the process on read the Pacifica fight less as a institution building project, and more as a metaphor for the larger corporatization of media. And the losers in the struggle—those who supported the old regime—certainly weren’t going to lend a hand to Pacifica’s reconstruction.

Bottom line: the American Left was willing to fight the Pacifica war, but it wasn’t willing to stick around for the peace. And democracies don’t just magically work by themselves. They need resources and stability to flourish. Instead, democratized Pacifica radio found itself starved for support during a period of declining radio listenership and revenue.

Bottoms up

Into this void stepped elements who until then had been excluded from Pacifica governance. In my opinion, no one will ever describe them better than Boal, also horrified by the present situation—”the esperantists, propeller heads, world government paranoiacs, and stranded Maoists who are regularly elected with as few as two hundred votes out of the many tens of thousands of listeners at each station.”

Apparently the chair to WBAI’s Local Station Board as of January thought he was being reasonable when he assured a New York Times reporter that, while he embraces various 9/11 conspiracy theories, “He draws a line at those who believe that the planes that hit the World Trade Center towers were holograms.”

Earlier the Pacifica National Board’s governance committee considered a funding disclosure motion “the objective” of which was “to have [Democracy Now's] Amy Goodman tell us where she’s getting money and what the money is buying.” The reason for the motion, its advocate explained, “is because there has been a lot of debate about whether Amy Goodman has received CIA conduit foundation funding from the Ford Foundation and other places known long time suspected conduits for CIA funding.”

Boal correctly identifies the problem as stemming in large part from Pacifica’s single transferable voting system, which picks winners who have received very few votes. But it’s also what the by-laws don’t require that has contributed to the problem. First, almost all LSB seats go to elected listener delegates. A smaller portion go to station staff elected by the staff. That excludes a huge constituency on the Left—talented people who have something to contribute, but don’t want to run in elections.

Second, Pacifica’s by-laws don’t establish a clear firewall between governance and programming. So most individuals elected to Pacifica’s boards see their job as in some capacity acting as the program director for their respective Pacifica station. At one Berkeley LSB meeting that I attended, the discussion was ostensibly about approving the station budget. But several board members launched into rants about how the problem with the budget was that they experienced KPFA’s programming as too dull; that was the real issue.

In the last election, a Bay Area newspaper endorsed candidates who promised to try to get the paper’s editors air time on KPFA.

In short, most of Pacifica’s “board members” don’t actually see themselves as board members, preoccupied with the unglamorous but necessary work of such folk—budgets, recruitment, capital campaigning, strategic planning, and such. They really want to be their station’s general manager or program director, or spend their days telling those people what to do. Their campaign statements are inevitably about “taking back” their station because it isn’t radical, diverse, militant, conspiracy focused or what-have-you enough. And once they get their board seat, they find themselves confronted by other self-appointed saviors with contrasting agendas, and paralyze their board’s potential usefulness with their disagreements.

Some folks have offered services in contrast to the above, it should be noted. Here in the Bay Area, the Concerned Listeners slate has fought the good fight to bring skills and sanity to the governance table. But they’ve been consistently bludgeoned by the propeller heads. Anyone would be. Pacifica governance as it is currently constructed is a losing game for the reasonable person.

The (hopefully) future

What should replace this mess? Assuming that Pacifica survives the next few years, I’d like to see governance go back to something like what it was around 1998—smaller, self appointed local station boards that elect delegates to the national board; some kind of mechanism of recall for lousy board members; some kind of clear proviso that board members have nothing to do with programming. That’s it in the summary version.

Doubtless those of you who have always found me annoying and reactionary are cheering this post (Lasar withdraws! Hooray!). Those of you at least somewhat sympathetic to my viewpoint may forward it to one or more of the slates running in this election cycle. You will probably be told that now is not the time to leave the field of battle. The situation is dire (it always is). The very future of your respective station is at stake, and your absence (being what a wonderful, indispensable person you are) would literally represent the death blow to Pacifica radio, or some significant portion of it.

I, on the contrary, think that your non-cooperation with this farce could actually help Pacifica radio. The organization’s current by-laws stipulate that these elections must receive ballots equal to 10% to claim legitimacy. Let’s send a message to Pacifica’s bloated political class that it is anything but legit.

And next time you pledge money to your local Pacifica station (as do I), include a note stipulating that you want your donation to be used for programming, not elections or board related administrative costs.

It’s your call. As for me, I’m out. I supported this experiment, but it has failed.

Here’s an excerpt from the August 2007 exchange:

“Mr. Ithier: Juliana, oh, oh I’m so sorry he just died right now.
Call Recipient: (crying)
Mr. Ithier: I will, Juliana I want to ask you something. Just two or three questions
please. I can’t hear you.
Call Recipient: What?
Mr. Ithier: So this is for when you come here you don’t have to ask too many
questions when you identify him.
Call Recipient: No, no, I’m going over there right now.”

“Although we exercise discretion in this instance in not imposing a higher forfeiture, we warn the Licensee that future violations of this nature may result in harsher enforcement action, including license revocation proceedings,” the FCC told station WSKQ-FM in New York City (“La Mega 97.9″) on Friday.

As far as I’m concerned, the FCC should revoke WSKQ’s license now.  People have heart attacks on hearing news like this. What if she  had been on a mobile phone and had a car accident?

But WSKQ got dinged on a technicality, allegedly violating “the telephone broadcast rule.”  Section 73.1206 of the agency’s rules stipulate that, “before broadcasting or recording a telephone conversation for later broadcast, a licensee must inform any party to the call of its intention to broadcast the conversation.”

It gets even weirder:  the third party vendor (“Rubin Ithier”) who pulled this stunt in August of 2007 for the Spanish Broadcasting System owned station apparently did this at the husband’s request. No comment on that aspect of the story. The prank was broadcast on WSKQ twice, according to the FCC. Here’s a full transcript of the exchange.

Mr. Ithier: Can I speak with Ms. Juliana please?
Call Recipient: Who is this?
Mr. Ithier: The Doctor Raymond Martinez, I’m just calling from [bleeped out]
Hospital
Call Recipient: Aha? Yes Juliana
Mr. Ithier: Do you know anybody with the name Luis, Luis Miguel?
Call Recipient: Yes
* * * * *
Mr. Ithier: OK, this person had an accident in mid afternoon.
Call Recipient: OK
Mr. Ithier: on a motorcycle.
Call Recipient: How is he? How is he?
Mr. Ithier: He cannot move his hands, he can’t move his arms, he suffered because
he was not wearing his helmet. He suffered, a, a on his neck.
Call Recipient: Aha
Mr. Ithier: And, he can’t yet but the problem is that we need a blood transfusion.
Call Recipient: A blood transfusion?
Mr. Ithier: Yes, he needs blood because it is possible that he might even loose his
sight, he is not a complete vegetable but we need a blood transfusion.
Call Recipient: Oh my God! OK, OK. Uhmm! Who am I speaking to?
Mr. Ithier: Raymond Martinez.
* * * * *
[The Call Recipient hands over the phone to a friend who proceeds to ask Mr. Ithier additional
questions.]
Mr. Ithier: Right now he is on the operation table, because, on his neck he suffered a
fracture, very serious.
Call Recipient’s Friend: OK, but he is stable?
Mr. Ithier: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think he’ll make it. I don’t think he’ll make
it. Can I speak with Julian, Juliana please? I feel like you, you are
interrogating me or something like that.
Call Recipient’s Friend: No, it’s that she is not well and doesn’t know how to explain what they
told her about Luis. That’s why I wanted to call.

Mr. Ithier: Give me a second, give me a second, here comes the doctor, one minute,
hold on one second. Yeah doctor, what happened? On no, do I have to
say that? No, no, no, ay.
Call Recipient’s Friend: Yeah?
Mr. Ithier: Oh my God! He died. I’m so sorry. Too late!
Call Recipient’s Friend: Excuse me?
Mr. Ithier: He died, he died already. That’s what the doctor just told me now. So if
you want to stop by here to pick up or identify the body or something.
Hello?
Call Recipient: (can be heard crying in the background)
* * * * *
[Call Recipient’s Friend then hands over the phone to the Call Recipient]
Call Recipient: Hello?
Mr. Ithier: Juliana, oh, oh I’m so sorry he just died right now.
Call Recipient: (crying)
Mr. Ithier: I will, Juliana I want to ask you something. Just two or three questions
please. I can’t hear you.
Call Recipient: What?
Mr. Ithier: So this is for when you come here you don’t have to ask too many
questions when you identify him.
Call Recipient: No, no, I’m going over there right now.
Mr. Ithier: OK, ah, Juliana?
Call Recipient: Yes
Mr. Ithier: OK, you listen to El Vacilon de la Manana?
(Ithier’s cohort): Ayh No!
Call Recipient: Yes
Mr. Ithier: Well this was a joke mami. He is alive and kicking.
Call Recipient: Your [bleeped out] kidding me! (and then hangs up)
Mr. Ithier: Hello? Why are people always hanging up on me?

I apologize to anyone who was offended by my phone call to Ed Stolz.

The Board of Supervisors of San Francisco has passed a resolution urging radio station owner Ed Stolz to “rehire the talented staff” of Energy 92.7, a station that “was adored and appreciated by so many fans throughout San Francisco and the Bay Area.”

Stolz should “reconsider his choice to abandon the successful format,” the Supes resolved.

As we’ve reported, KNGY’s Gay oriented dance music format disappeared from the airwaves early last week following the sale of the station to Stolz. Radio Survivor readers know that I called Mr. Stolz the other day just to get his reaction to all this, and he was not happy to hear from me, to put it mildly. But he did make what I thought was a reasonable point, that the previous station owner had abandoned the format, not him.

Pressure campaigns

Nonetheless, Fox News camp follower Brian Maloney has accused me of being part of a “pressure campaign” against Stolz, because I had the nerve to call him on the contact number that he or his staff gave to the Federal Communications Commission, and which is part of his public file. Plus I started “peppering” him with “questions about the operation.” Eeek!

“Since there is little doubt ‘progressives’ will back Obama’s coming crackdown on talk radio, how could they possibly walk away from the chance to strong arm KNGY’s forced return to the airwaves?” Maloney warns.

Ah, it’s all coming together now.

Never mind that I asked Stolz questions that I think any journalist would have asked. Never mind that I noted that he had a reasonable response to one of my queries. Never mind that KNGY wasn’t a talk radio station and neither is Stolz’s replacement, KREV. Never mind that the SF Supes’ resolution does little more than ask Stolz to consider returning Energy 92.7 (something I suspect they know is unlikely). Never mind that there are thousands of people out there who could give a crap about the politics; they just want their dance station back.

Everything in Maloney-land gets read through the paranoid fear that somehow if people have even the slightest say over what happens over the public airwaves, it will hurt conservative talk radio (which, judging from Maloney’s web site, he seems to have just a slight career investment in).

While I’m pissing people off, here’s something else I’ve been wondering about. It would be interesting to know whether when Stolz bought the station, the transfer agreement required the previous owner to dismiss Fernando and Greg and the rest of the old Energy 92.7 team before Stolz got there. Not that I’m saying that happened, but it is sometimes part of such deals. Anyway, I’ll probably never find out, and it’s all water under the bridge now anyway.