Radio Survivor

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Since I wrote my last post on the calamitous state of Pacifica radio, various correspondents have complained that my figures on the network’s subscriber/staff elected board expenses were inaccurate. I roughly estimated them at “close to a million” since the organization has transitioned to an elected board regime.

“When we speak about these matters publicly, we should try to be accurate about the figures,” one Pacifica station KPFA local station board member lectured me.  “Pacifica does have financial stresses, but they are caused by many factors including structural operating deficits at several of the stations. We don’t help when we oversimplify or say things that are simply not true.”

This critic continued her quest for complex truth by blaming me for the chaos at a national board meeting that I didn’t even attend. Whatever. In any event, her post was useful, since it pointed to the network’s updated financial audits page (and Terry Goodman has some helpful annotations to my comments).

Sure enough, my guesstimate was way off the mark. The situation is much worse than I thought. Since the network began its process of democratization in 2002, by my arithmetic, Pacifica has spent $2,424,662 on its boards. And if the organization blows about the same sum that it did in 2007 on these wasteful and internally destructive elections, the figure will edge toward $3 million.

Here are the numbers with their accompanying line item descriptions:

Take a look at some of these numbers. Unbelievable. Nearly 400K in 2007. What on earth did Pacifica spend this on? A free chocolate truffle for every subscriber who voted? Single transferable voting fact finding trips to Australia? That probably would have been money better spent than the actual expenditures, which are not detailed in these audits.

In previous posts I’ve complained that board members spend most of their time on internecine politics and precious little on building up the organization. The 2008 audit says it all. Of that 377,977, the line item says 377,902 was spent on “management and general.”

How much was spent on “Fundraising and development”?

75 bucks.

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Free Press has a provocative new report on the state of public media and how to more adequately fund it. Many of the reform group’s proposals involve siphoning income from commercial station advertising revenue or Federal Communications Commission spectrum auctions. I’ve got an overview of the document up on Ars Technica, which has generated quite a few comments. They largely focus on the question of whether the government should get more involved in media—always a subject for heated debate.

I’m not inclined to hash that out here, but do wonder about one of the report’s smaller recommendations. A section of the piece titled “Restoring Public Media’s Heat Shield” focuses on the very legitimate concern that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting fails to protect public media from external political pressure.

“The current appointment process for leadership at the CPB is overly politicized. Presidential appointments govern the entire process — into which neither the public nor the core constituency of public media producers have any input. It also often leads to appointments as rewards for political support, rather than simple calls to service for qualified people, including those who have broadcasting or media experience.”

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In January of 2000 struggles over the management of the Pacifica Foundation were at a fever pitch. As the owner of five major community radio stations in New York, LA, Berkeley, Houston and Washington DC, as well as the national Pacifica Network, the Pacifica National Board and its executive director were accused of orchestrating a corporate-style consolidation of power and censoring on-air content (for more on that read RadioSurvivor Matthew Lasar’s Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War). It was this latter charge that prompted a strike by the group of freelance reporters who contributed to the daily half-hour syndicated Pacifica Network News (PNN). Shortly thereafter the reporters formed a collective to produce their own daily news program, Free Speech Radio News (FSRN).

The station where I volunteered then, WEFT, picked up the program almost immediately, replacing PNN in its schedule, as did a bevy of other community stations. These decisions were driven as much by conflicts between affiliates and the Pacifica Network as they were by solidarity with the striking reporters.

FSRN is my #1 radio program because I have deep respect for the integrity of the organization and the program itself. I’ve been listening since the very start, and even then it showed itself to be very different from any other radio news program in the US. Operating as a worker-run collective, FSRN features reporters from all over the world, many of them reporting on events in their home towns, states and countries. As a result on any given edition of FSRN you will hear a diversity of voices from people of a wide range of backgrounds that stands in contrast to virtually any other radio news program. You will also gain a perspective that differs from that of an American reporter who parachuted into a crisis zone, may not speak the local language, and is otherwise separated from the local people except for those hours when s/he’s actually on the ground.

Showing its roots in the Pacifica Network, FSRN carries forward with a social justice mission, focusing on stories about people and issues that are largely left out of the mainstream news–whether its CNN, FOX or NPR. When reporting on national or global events that are also covered in the mainstream news, FSRN makes an effort to seek out unheard perspectives. For instance, this past week the program featured reports about residents living outside Port Au Prince in Haiti who are receiving less aid than those in the capital, and about activists’ expectations for the president’s State of the Union address.

The strike that created FSRN ended in March 2002 when the program joined the Pacifica Network, gaining both funding and better distribution via Pacifica’s satellite network. That happened shortly after Pacifica pulled the plug on its own PNN. Since then FSRN has continued to bring well-reported truly alternative radio news to 104 noncommercial community and college radio stations.

In 2008 the financially strapped Pacifica drastically reduced its financial support of FSRN, forcing FSRN to rely more heavily on listener donations. That the program has been able to survive is a testament to the resolve of the reporters and the great value its listeners place on this one-of-a-kind enterprise.

If you’ve never heard Free Speech Radio News I strongly encourage you to find it on a local station or listen online.

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s radio/TV program Democracy Now! is, without question, the most successful media vehicle in the history of the United States Left. Launched at Pacifica station WBAI-FM in New York City in the mid-1990s, it is now an independent venture, subscribed to by over 800 radio, TV, and Internet stations around the world. From the perspective of this media historian, Democracy Now! exceeds all previous attempts to spread an explicitly social justice oriented message via broadcast and/or print. No prior effort, starting with the The Masses at the beginning of the  20th century,  has ever come so far in terms of influence and reach.

I listen to Democracy Now!’s one hour broadcast on a regular basis because it is fast paced and timely, racing to wherever the action is—Haiti, Copenhagen, Washington, D.C, or Honduras. I don’t always agree with the program’s perspective, but I appreciate the effort DN makes to host debates and discussions within the Left about how to move forward, such as its recent debate about how to respond to the Obama adminstration’s health care initiative. The vast majority of community radio style public affairs programs, within and beyond Pacifica, simply ignore these disagreements and tout one line or another, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist. DN has far outpaced those efforts in part because of its willingness to embrace a broader perspective.

Here is some of what I wrote about Democracy Now! in my second book on Pacifica, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War.

When she chanced upon WBAI in New York, Amy Goodman had just graduated from Harvard College and returned to the city. She had been raised in Bay Shore, Long Island, by a family of activists; her mother had spent much of the 1980s working for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze. Her father, an ophthalmologist, had been a civil rights advocate in the 1960s, taking a stand for school integration in a predominantly white suburb.

“I would go to the night meetings,” Goodman later recalled. “A thousand people would be screaming, and I would watch him stand his ground. There were death threats, but he just went on. I think that very much shaped my feeling about what was just in the world.” Now out of school and on her own, she had just finished a series of articles for Ralph Nader and Alan Nairn’s Multinational Monitor on Depo-Provera, the controversial birth-control shot. Goodman was about to enroll in Hunter College for graduate classes in biochemistry when a course on radio production caught her eye. WBAI’s Andrew Phillips taught the class. At the time Phillips hosted a show called “Investigations,” a program dedicated to what radio producers call “actuality” – the sounds of people talking and doing things on tape, speeches, demonstrations, street interviews. Goodman sat in on the first lecture, then talked with Phillips afterwards. The latter knew a true believer when he saw one. He asked her if she wanted to apprentice for him at WBAI. She protested that she had no radio experience. “That’s fine,” Phillips replied. That evening the two walked the mile from Hunter on the East Side to WBAI’s West Side headquarters. Phillips put his new student to work editing tapes for an upcoming program on the fortieth anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. “And I never left,” Goodman later explained. (more…)

#14 in our series on radio trends of the decade

One fine day in March of 1999, the Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation’s five license network fired the general manager of its flagship listener supported radio station: KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. When staff and subscribers revolted against the move, Pacifica shut the station down, triggering a march of 10,000 furious supporters through the city. Powered by the Internet and tired of top down decision making in public broadcasting, listener subscribers at Pacifica’s non-commercial outlets in New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Houston, and Washington, D.C. demanded the right to elect their local station boards.

Almost four years of lawsuits, demonstrations, sit-ins, shut-downs, and walk-outs later, they won, creating the most small-d democratic radio network in the United States. Every year thousands of KPFA, WBAI, KPFK, WPFW, and KPFT subscribers receive ballots in the mail for listener board delegates. Some of them even vote.

What was striking about the conflict was the extent to which it spread far beyond the frog pond atmosphere of community radio. The New York City Council and California’s state assembly held hearings on the battle. California’s Attorney General even endorsed a class action lawsuit against the Pacifica board, which was chaired by Mary Frances Berry, then head of the United States Civil Rights Commission. Hundreds of prominent activists, intellectuals, politicians, and artists signed statements on behalf of the rebellion, including Danny Glover, Ed Asner, Ralph Nader, Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, and Joan Baez. And dozens of newspapers covered the conflict, among them the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times.

Not everybody is crazy about the results of this democratic revolution, which has done nothing to alleviate Pacifica’s famously contentious internal atmosphere. But it has redefined the possibilities for how to structure broadcasting in the U.S., and so it deserves a place in our list of significant radio trends of the decade.

Further reading: Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War

While we’re on the subject of public radio station fundraiser marathons, there’s a related event in progress: board elections at the Pacifica radio network. Subscribers and staff at all five Pacifica stations in New York City, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Houston are voting for members of their respective local station boards. There are a slew of candidates for each of these listener-supported non-commercial signals. If you regularly subscribe to one of these stations, you’ve probably gotten or will get your ballot in the mail soon. Make sure it’s in the hands of the election team by October 14 via that enclosed, addressed envelope you’ll receive.

It should be noted that, unlike the local advisory boards at many public radio stations, the boards at Pacifica really matter. They have a host of responsibilities, including reviewing the station’s budget and screening and selecting the pool of candidates for the station’s Program Director and General Manager. They also choose from among themselves delegates to the governing board of the Pacifica Foundation, which owns the network’s five broadcast licenses.

Not a whole lot of news about this event so far, at least not at KPFA, the station to which I subscribe. But an interesting endorsement caught my eye. It came from the San Francisco Bay View newspaper, and I’ve got to say that its editors, Willie and Mary Ratcliff, deserve credit for their openness. The two disclose that they’re supporting various contenders on the following criterion: (more…)

Ten years ago this Friday, one of the most remarkable events in the annals of United States broadcasting took place. Looking back on it now, I can hardly believe that it happened, even though I was there and saw it myself. On a very sunny Saturday July 31, 1999, about ten thousand people gathered in a park to demand the reopening of listener-supported radio station KPFA-FM in Berkeley, California. Ten thousand was the police estimate. It looked like more to me at the time.

The front of the demo as it marched past KPFA on July 31, 1999; photo: Susan Druding

Why would anyone want to silence that nice little station, you ask? You know, the non-commercial one that was started by pacifists after World War II, and plays folk music, Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now!, and operates almost entirely on subscriber donations? Surely this must have been the nefarious work of the FBI, you say, or the CIA, or some local rogue police operation working in cahoots with state government reactionaries.

Nope, the clampdown came from the station’s owner, the Pacifica Foundation, via its Executive Director, Lynn Chadwick, with support from its National Board and its Chair, the celebrated historian Mary Frances Berry, she also then head of the United States Civil Rights Commission. In fact, I think this little failed putsch came from the American Left.
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