The resolution says that WBAI should keep a paying subscriber base “of around 23,000 to be sustainable.” Based on that figure and the percentage, ‘BAI presumably has a little more than 17,000 subscribers at present (please post below if you have a different number).

The statement also protests what it sees as an excessive amount of fundraising time, asserting WBAI is planning more than 120 days of on-air fundraising “for this coming year.”

WBAI’s on-air fundraising is based on repetitive recorded half-hour and hour-long pitches for premiums. The LSB is concerned that so much valuable air-time is being spent on pitching premiums, such that the station is in danger of becoming another version of the home shopping network. The WBAI LSB requests that management include in its report at the next meeting a timetable for implementing changes to that way of fundraising, and an articulation of its plans for taking us down a different path.

According to Mitchel Cohen, Chair of WBAI’s LSB, the final vote after amendments was 12 in favor of the resolution, and three opposed.

Four areas

Lots of people have expressed concern for some time about what they view as WBAI’s lengthy marathon periods and excessive reliance on premiums. I briefly tuned in today, and, sure enough, heard a pitch for a pre-recorded documentary being sold as a premium. It’s possible that with the plethora of free or nearly free music and public affairs content available on-line, marathon premiums are a far less effective means of bringing in subscribers than they’ve been in years past.

But weaning ‘BAI out of this practice won’t be easy. I asked Cohen how the Local Station Board plans to help.

“Management is requested to present reports on all four areas (and more) directly answering them, at the next meeting,” he replied in e-mail. “Then they will be open for discussion and debate.”

“We are also moving into selecting a pool  of candidates for Program Director. We have quite a few applications that a committee is reviewing. We might ask each of the candidates in addition to the current iPD to report on how they would address these concerns.”

The following resolution submitted by Mitchel Cohen passed the WBAI LSB on Oct. 12, 2011, as amended:

Motion to Limit On-Air Fundraising Drives on WBAI, increasing membership and improving programming

1) The WBAI Local Station Board is very concerned that WBAI management is now planning 120+ days of on-air fundraising for this coming year, to meet the station’s budget. We do not believe that this expansion in on-air fundraising days is the direction we want to go in. WBAI management is requested to present a report of concrete plans to reduce on-air fundraising days by at least 40 percent over the next three years, broken down year by year.

2) Additionally, WBAI must maintain a paying membership of around 23,000 to be sustainable, given our existing expenses and NOT including moving expenses or payment of outstanding debts. This means that WBAI needs to expand membership quickly by 35 percent in accordance with the Pacifica Mission. The LSB requests that management include in its report at the next meeting concrete plans for increasing membership to achieve this minimum goal.

3) WBAI’s on-air fundraising is based on repetitive recorded half-hour and hour-long pitches for premiums. The LSB is concerned that so much valuable air-time is being spent on pitching premiums, such that the station is in danger of becoming another version of the home shopping network. The WBAI LSB requests that management include in its report at the next meeting a timetable for implementing changes to that way of fundraising, and an articulation of its plans for taking us down a different path.

4) The WBAI LSB also requests of management a report articulating its vision with regard to programming that will lead to increased listenership and make WBAI more relevant politically, culturally, and artistically.

Radio Survivor readers—please be civil in your responses to this post. Comments containing insults, expletives, gratuitous accusations, and threats will not be published. Keep it constructive.

Common Frequency Benefit in Davis, California (Photo J. Waits)

On Saturday I headed out to Davis, California for a full day of radio immersion thanks to Common Frequency. I’ve been a fan of Common Frequency for awhile, so it was great to be able to not only learn more about their organization, but also meet some of the radio groups who they are helping.

The non-profit Common Frequency is “dedicated to innovative new community and college radio.” They have been helping grassroots stations get off the ground since 2006 by providing “free and low-cost aid.”

Currently Common Frequency is “supporting the build-out of 25 new FM radio stations over the next three years.” On Saturday they invited a number of the stations who they are working with out to Davis for some educational sessions, a panel discussion about saving college radio, and an evening fundraiser and concert.

At the beginning of the daytime sessions, Common Frequency Program and Technical Director Todd Urick addressed the group and spoke of the need for stations to band together and encouraged people to collaborate on building, running, and programming radio stations. He said that wants stations to “learn how to share content” and also spoke of Common Frequency’s desire to form a “collective community radio network” in California.

We then heard from  WGXC‘s Kaya Weidman. Speaking with us from Hudson, New York via Skype, Kaya talked about what it was like to both build and launch a brand new community radio station. She shared with the group the challenges inherent to raising funds to start a new station. Kaya also talked about the barn raising event that Prometheus Radio Project worked with them on, which allowed them to both build the station’s studio and galvanize the local community around the project. WGXC began its terrestrial broadcasts 6 months after the barn raising, launching on February 26, 2011.

Sonali Kolhatkar from Pacifica Radio (Photo: J. Waits)

The next speaker was Sonali Kolhatkar from Pacifica radio station KPFK. She also joined the conversation over Skype and talked to all of us about how she produces her daily morning show “Uprising” and her weekly syndicated show. She started at KPFK in 2002 without a background in journalism, although her show is heavy on interviews and news. Sonali pointed out that it’s not necessary to have a degree in journalism in order to do journalism and argued that even though community radio is one of the oldest forms of radio, it can be “at the forefront” of journalism and new media. In describing her work process, Sonali said that she researches her stories using a variety of sources and then writes an introductory “lead” to every story or interview so that listeners can get a quick overview of the story before the interview begins. She also suggested that being the host of a talk radio show is less about knowing the answers and more about “knowing the right questions to ask.”

Following Sonali, we heard from Rick Ele from the University of California, Davis college radio station KDVS. Rick has been on the air for years as a DJ and is also responsible for training new KDVS DJs. He shared with the group a bit about the format of student-run KDVS (it’s a freeform station) and explained the way that they introduce new DJs to musical exploration. Rick runs an 8-week seminar for new DJs that not only outlines station policies and FCC rules, but also incorporates a “musicology crash course.” In the seminar students are given an overview of the history of music from the plantation south during Reconstruction, to American roots traditions, to the history of rock and roll, to the last 30 years of pop, rock, electronic, and hip hop. Rick said that in the seminar they are asking DJs to “start thinking about why the music you like sounds cool to you.” He argued that they are asking DJs to become music educators, so they want to make sure they have “tools to become an authority.” He also said that it’s important for DJs to “take the time to listen to things critically.”

After the sessions we were able to head over to KDVS for a visit and tour. I’ll outline that trip in a separate post, but suffice it to say I was amazed by the station’s massive record library and am looking forward to a return visit.

The day wrapped up with a fundraising event/panel discussion/dinner/fundraiser/concert on the campus of University of California, Davis. The panel, “Whose Stations? Our Stations! Community Voices, Educational Radio, and KUSF in Exile,” largely focused on the situation at KUSF, but also included an account from David Martin about the launch of Ozcat Radio in Vallejo. KUSF DJ and Music Director Irwin Swirnoff shared his sad, first-person account of the day that KUSF was shut-down by the administration. He said that he was sad and outraged, but felt that he had to act in order to spread the word about what had happened. He explained some of the political support that Save KUSF has garnered and discussed their goal of creating “mounting pressure on the parties involved” in order to hopefully overturn the pending sale of KUSF to Classical Public Radio Network.

Attorney (and former college radio DJ) Alan Korn talked about how the shutdown of KUSF “was a tragic loss.” He mentioned that three “Petition to Deny” documents have been filed with the FCC, as well as several informal objections to the sale and said that Friends of KUSF is hoping to be granted a hearing with the FCC in order to investigate the sale further. Dorothy Kidd, a professor of Media Studies at University of San Francisco, also spoke about the broader implications of the situation at KUSF. She said that as a culture “we need something different than commercial media” and explained the value of KUSF to both students and listeners.  She said she has been heartened by the protests, saying that there is “something poetic” about the campaign to save the station and about faculty, students, and listeners “fighting for what they believe in.”

Thanks to Common Frequency for organizing a fun day of radio in Davis and particular thanks to Gavin Dahl for his hard work on the event and for extending the invitation to me.

source: Wikimedia commons

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.

Out of control

And please, don’t tell me that these numbers only represent a small portion of Pacifica expenses. We’re talking about $2.4 million to an organization that lost over $4 million in revenue last year. We’re talking about a network that suffers from something far more severe than “financial stresses” and “structural operating deficits.”

I refer you to the comments of Pacifica’s financial auditor, offering his perspective to the Pacifica National Board’s audit committee via teleconference on March 22 of this year. Forward to the middle of the clip and note the tone of alarm in his voice:

“Quite frankly, we believe that your internal controls are atrocious. And I’m not mincing my words. You’ve got stations that act completely on their own,” he warned the PNB. “This organization is out of control.”

Stations don’t properly collect pledges, he noted. They don’t even keep adequate records of their subscribers. They don’t know how to use the organization’s computerized accounting programs. They don’t know how to keep track of station inventory, such as computers and pledge reward items. “You don’t count the inventory. You don’t control it. You don’t count it.”

Your subscriber pledge cards at WBAI, he lamented, “they’re kept in boxes. They’re kept around the place. They’re not maintained by program or by the time the pledges were made. . . . ” Personnel are allowed too much access to pledge cards. “Once a pledge card is made out . . . it should be locked up. This is an asset. It represents somebody’s name, telephone, address, credit card number. Those need to be controlled. That’s just like cash.” The fulfilled pledges aren’t even inputted into the network’s financial database system.

Feel free to listen to the rest of the horror show at your leisure. By the way, in 1999, prior to the democratization of Pacifica, the audit didn’t even have a “national board” category. It listed “conferences and meetings” at a little over $77,000, and the dissidents who constantly complained about Pacifica’s “corporatized” bureaucracy and finances called that a bloated figure.

Sorry

‘Whose fault is this?’ the auditor was eventually asked. “The finger has to be pointed at the Board of Directors,” he replied. “The Board of Directors need to make its employees accountable.”

Now I know what’s coming next. You’re all going to post comments blaming different factions for the mess. It’s all Justice and Unity’s fault. It’s all ListProg’s fault. It’s all Independents for Community Radio’s fault. It’s all People’s Radio’s fault. It’s all Concerned Listeners fault (sorry if I left your slate out; I can’t keep track of them any more).

You know what—just say it’s all Matthew Lasar’s fault, ok? I take full responsibility for everything bad that has happened so far. And I apologize. I’m truly sorry. In fact, I’m doing the Airplane Position as you read this post. Happy now?

But here’s the bottom line. How can a board system that has spent over a million bucks on itself just since 2007 (in an organization that collected a little over $12 million in revenue last year) possibly make anybody accountable for anything? Of course it can’t. There’s no chance that these elections are going to bring in a critical mass of people who can save this network from slipping down the drain.

That’s why, as a listener subscriber to KPFA in Berkeley, I’m not going to endorse any slate or even vote this year. There’s an old saying from the 1960s: “Don’t vote. It only encourages them.” In this case, I’m afraid that’s true. Pacifica urgently needs a board with the skills to can handle this mess. And it’s not going to get it through this process.

Voices of reason, resources, and influence beyond the organization, where are you? Speak now, before all is lost.

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.”

Part of the Free Press cure for this problem is restructuring the CPB—curtailing the President’s power to just make appointments out of his (and hopefully someday her) hat. Here’s another section, concerning governance at community or school/college public radio stations:

“These stations often lack a community advisory board. Of course, even at the community-licensed stations where these boards are required by law, they can be largely symbolic and have little power to weigh in on programming or station decision-making. Though community advisory boards should serve as a mechanism to increase community oversight and public participation in public broadcasting, this is unfortunately not always the case. The legal framework that established the boards is vague and lacks specific definitions for the precise role and responsibility for them. This means that while some boards are very active, others meet rarely. The successful examples could serve as a model for stations to be more engaged in their communities.”

My concern with this complaint is that it assumes that there is an almost Rousseauean entity out there called “the public” or “the community” that, when consulted, will always serve up selfless suggestions about how to make a community or public radio station better.

Admittedly, my experiences around this issue stem from my involvement with the Pacifica radio stations, but I don’t think I’m alone in my skepticism. Lots of people who attend public media board meetings go there for self-interested reasons. They want some portion of the stations resources. They want a show on the station. Or they want access to the station’s air time. Or they’re a programmer who has some dispute with station management. Or they’re friends or allies with that programmer. Or they’re partisans in some local political dispute, and want to pressure the station to change its coverage of that issue.

I agree with Kathy Merritt that

“At their best, community advisory boards can play an invaluable role for stations by acting as a conduit for information, bringing it from corners of the community staff members don’t normally access and taking it back to a network of friends, colleagues and co-workers who might not hear about public radio otherwise. By providing input on programming, CABs can enhance stations’ efforts to connect with listeners.”

But pumping up the programming-related authority of CABs also comes with risks. These sort of boards can pressure stations to disconnect from their listeners by capitulating to small factions who have little interest in anything besides their own narrow agenda.

Free Press’s recommendation assumes that unhealthy “heat” can only come from top down. But it can also come from the bottom up. Let’s keep that in mind as we ponder giving community boards the “power to weigh in on programming or station decision-making.” How much power and weigh-in are we talking about here?

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.

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.

[I]n the late 1980s, WBAI experienced a significant ethnographic shift. Many of its older white programmers moved on, some lured away by jobs at National Public Radio or WNYC, the city’s then municipally owned station. Into the gap stepped producers determined to reach beyond the frequency’s predominantly white air sound. Prominent among them was Samori Marksman. Born in St. Vincent in 1948, Marksman studied political science and cinematography at New York University before coming to WBAI. In 1977 he began producing interview shows for the station while working for the government of Grenada as a researcher and publicist. His friend and admirer Louis Proyect remembered him “as belonging to the grand tradition of Afro-Caribbean Marxism” exemplified by C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney, and Eric Williams. Radical intellectuals of all backgrounds throughout New York cherished his daily interview show Behind the News, on which one could hear Marksman grapple with figures as diverse as the British Labor Party’s Tony Benn or former CIA director William Colby. Long before Marksman became program director at WBAI he exemplified a postcolonial cosmopolitanism that became characteristic of the station’s news and public affairs focus.

Marksman’s tenure also signaled the emergence of a new audience for Pacifica’s second frequency: Caribbean immigrants. By the 1980s New York City had become “the Caribbean cross-roads of the world,” in the words of anthropologist Constance Sutton. Over 324,000 women and men hailing from Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados, Haiti, and a dozen other Caribbean countries lived in the city, according to government census data. WBAI’s latest generation of programmers took note of and inspiration from their presence. African-American producer Valerie Van Isler traveled through the Caribbean for WBAI, producing features on Grenada’s ill-fated New Jewel movement and democratic struggles in Haiti. Robert Knight and the public affairs show Undercurrents won a Polk award for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Panama.

Goodman thrived in WBAI’s atmosphere of diversity and political commitment, switching off with Robert Knight and Marksman as news director for the station. In 1991 she and Alan Nairn traveled to East Timor, barely escaped with their lives, and won awards for an eyewitness account of a massacre on the island. Then in 1992 Goodman teamed up with Bernard White, a droll, witty producer who excelled at live talk, to co-host the station’s morning program, Wakeup Call. The show both reported the news and championed causes, among them the case of Moreese Bickham, incarcerated in Louisiana’s Angola prison since 1958. Tipped to Bickham’s plight by independent producer David Isay, Wakeup Call told his story, that of a man who defended himself against armed Klansmen, only to be convicted of murder and placed on Louisiana’s death row. Heart attacks induced by terror just hours before his two scheduled execution dates had saved Bickham from state-sanctioned extermination. White and Goodman publicized his plight and urged WBAI listeners to call authorities for a reconsideration of his sentence. Upon his release, Bickham came to WBAI and thanked the staff over the airwaves.

For years, Pacifica had been shopping around for some kind of national daily public-affairs show to prove the viability of the concept. In 1995 the network briefly distributed an interview program hosted by economist and syndicated columnist Julianne Malveaux. Publicist Tony Regusters produced the show out of WPFW. Malveaux brought fire and erudition to her work, but she had little patience with the poor studio conditions Pacifica had given her. The experiment lasted three months. At the same time a former governor of California accepted KPFA’s invitation to host a news and talk show at 4 p.m. Jerry Brown titled his offering We the People. Although the program invariably featured a guest or two, most of the hour focused on the rambling meditations of the host. One Pacifica staffer privately referred to the segment as “I the People.” WBAI and KPFK picked up the program. The show lasted for some time, ending when Brown ran for mayor of Oakland.

In the midst of all these fits and starts, Pacifica asked Goodman to produce a national show on congressional politics. It was early 1995. The Republican Party had just swept Capitol Hill, enabling Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich to become Speaker of the House of Representatives. Right-wing talk show hosts hailed his “Contract with America,” for the most part a glorified array of privatizations and budget cuts. Goodman moved to Washington, D.C., and accustomed herself to the daily routine of a national reporter. By the end of the series she was seething with anger. She covered House committees where Representatives spent most of their time discussing ways to fiscally penalize states where women on welfare had “too many” abortions. “They wanted to go after women on welfare,” Goodman later recalled, “keep down the number of children that they have, but at the same time they didn’t want to encourage abortion. And so they started to discuss why women have sex.” Ways to cut social services, especially for poor women, were always high on the agenda. Meanwhile Gingrich had figured in a minor scandal. In January of 1995 television reporter Connie Chung had just interviewed his mother. When Chung asked mom what her son thought of then First Lady Hillary Clinton, she got hesitation at first. “Why don’t you just whisper it to me,” Chung pressed, “just between you and me.” A “bitch,” came the smug reply.

On Goodman’s final day in Washington, March 3 of that year, she had not intended to go to Gingrich’s daily press briefing. But the crescendo of anti-woman legislation coming out of D.C. had become too much for her, as had the silence of most of the press on the subject, especially at Gingrich-related events. “It seemed like there was a kind of agreement, a protocol, between the press and the Speaker,” she explained. At the last minute she rushed over to his media appearance. Dressed in sneakers and jeans, she positioned herself next to the television camera so that she would be heard but not seen; the focus would be entirely on Gingrich. Goodman raised her hand and charged that Congress had over the past two years essentially declared “war on women.” Then she got down to specifics.

“You fired the first salvo when you called the First Lady a bitch,” Goodman continued. “So why don’t you apologize?”

Gingrich became furious. The two snarled back at forth at each other. “To the best of my knowledge, I never said what you said I said,” he responded.

“Are you calling your mother a liar, then?” Goodman asked.

The broadcast hit the Pacifica network like a fireball. I was visiting KPFA when the piece aired. People stood around the halls and talked about the exchange. Some thought that Goodman had come off as a bit juvenile, a criticism that would follow her over the years, even from colleagues who admired her. “She is earnest to a fault, with little patience for folks who may have a more nuanced stance on certain issues than she does,” commented journalist Danny Schechter. “She has only fastballs, and she throws at the head,” observed Time magazine’s Steve Lopez.

But most Pacifica listeners quickly came to identify with Goodman’s intense, insistent tone. They could see themselves standing in Goodman’s place, asking the same angry, obvious questions that most journalists never ask. The Gingrich confrontation did not just report the news, it made news, and not just at Pacifica either. “Gingrich Can’t Ditch Bitch Remark,” ran one headline after the fight. Soon right-wing talk show hosts were talking about Goodman, demanding that she apologize for upsetting the Speaker of the House.

What Amy Goodman’s critics and supporters both missed, however, was that her style represented a decisive break with earlier Pacifica public affairs broadcasting. Since the late 1960s, most Pacifica programmers had shunned any kind of on-air contact with the Right, arguing that the network’s resources were better used airing rarely heard voices from the Left. Indeed, KPFA listeners sometimes complained when the station broadcast a presidential State of the Union address. Goodman emphatically rejected that stance. She constantly pushed to get government officials, right wing ideologues, and corporate flaks on the air so that she and her favorite progressive activists could pelt them with critical questions. Nothing better characterized her approach than her telephone dogfight with Bill Clinton. In November 2000 the President thought he would pleasantly surprise New York radio stations by calling in urging listeners to vote. Chances are that if he had called WBAI in 1977, staff would have hung up on him. But when Clinton phoned in to give what he thought would be a routine thirty-second “get out and vote” pitch, Goodman rushed to the receiver, turned on the tape recorder, and challenged him for thirty minutes on everything from welfare reform to the embargo against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

“You are calling radio stations telling people to vote,” she began. “What do you say to people who feel the two parties are bought by corporations and that at this point their vote doesn’t make a difference?” Whatever problems anyone had with Goodman’s tone, no one could dismiss her work as the Left talking to itself.

Shortly after the Gingrich fight, Pacifica development staffer Julie Drizen asked Goodman to continue the program indefinitely. In early 1996 the two came up with a title, Democracy Now!, and an on air slogan that reflected the show’s sassy spirit: “The Exception to the Rulers.” Larry Bensky signed on as a political commentator. Columnist Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News joined as co-host twice a week. Almost immediately the show began making waves across the community radio system. In early 1997 WRTI in Philadelphia unceremoniously dumped Democracy Now! just as it prepared to air commentaries by controversial Pennsylvania deathrow inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal, convicted of killing a police officer.

But most community stations enthusiastically stayed with Democracy Now! – once they joined. The trick was getting them to join, which meant getting them to apportion an hour every day for the show, which meant getting at least three or four volunteer hosts at each station to move aside. “We all feel very strongly about how good a program [Democracy Now!] is,” a manager for radio station WORT in Madison, Wisconsin, told a reporter for Current magazine. “But our commitment by mission statement is to provide as much local access as we can, to provide our community with a window to the airwaves.”

Within Pacifica, then executive director Pat Scott pushed hard to make sure that all five network stations ran the program. Then in December of 1997 the foundation launched its own satellite service, a less expensive alternative to NPR’s Public Radio Satellite System. Pacifica’s new service distributed Democracy Now! and 17 other programs, including a half-hour Pacifica Network News. Soon dozens of community radio stations began affiliating. In 1998 Pacifica listed 56 community station members. By 2000 one audience research analyst estimated that Pacifica radio alone reached approximately 800,000 people a week – with affiliates, the total came to about one million a week. Some Pacifica stations played Democracy Now! twice a day. KPFK ran it twice every morning. Amy Goodman and Pacifica quickly became synonymous.

#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

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:

“All the candidates we endorse have agreed to do whatever they can to support Cynthia McKinney as the next executive director of the Pacifica radio network, a nationwide network founded at KPFA, and a Black public affairs show on KPFA in a regular, desirable time slot produced by a collective headed by Block Report Radio and the SF Bay View.”

The alleged program supporters in question include Henry Norr, Sasha Futran and Akio Tanaka of the Independents for Community Radio slate. It’s unclear to me whether they’ve made these commitments or not, since their candidate statements do not mention them. Beyond that, it would be interesting to know how many of the over 100 contenders around the network have pledged to try to obtain air time for somebody who has endorsed their bid for a board seat.

Full disclosure: I’ve endorsed the Concerned Listeners slate, whose candidates, I’m happy to say, have offered me nothing but their thanks.

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.

But let’s put the complexities aside for a minute. Here’s how I described the demonstration in my book, Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War.

By the time I got there at about 11 a.m., it was already obvious that the event would be enormous. The plaza had become a forest of placards – “FREE FREE-SPEECH RADIO” and “Free Speech SAVE KPFA.” Dozens of organizations that depended on the station for outreach – Physicians for Social Responsibility, Global Exchange, Berkeley’s La Peña Cultural Center, Earth First! – came with their own banners. “We’ve got no SAY without KPFA,” read one. Dozens of activists came to the Sproul steps to speak. “I will protect KPFA until the day I’m done,” declared Dolores Huerta of the United Farm Workers Union.

Then Larry Bensky [the station's senior political reporter] introduced attorney Dan Siegel. Thirty years earlier Siegel, as president of UC Berkeley’s student body, had spoken at a noon rally urging students to take back People’s Park, a piece of land cordoned off by the university administration. Berkeley officials rewarded him with an inciting-to-riot charge, which he beat in court. Now Siegel represented a group Pacifica station local advisory board members who on June 16 filed suit in Alameda County Superior Court, charging that Pacifica had created “a self-perpetuating [National] Board without any accountability to the members and subscribers of the Foundation.” Unless restrained, the complaint continued, “the Board now threatens to utilize its newly created powers to abandon the mission and historic role of the Pacifica radio network and threatens to sell one or more of the Foundation’s five radio stations.”

“Look around,” Siegel told the crowd. “There’s something wrong with this demonstration this morning. And it’s not a lack of diversity. It’s not a lack of commitment. What’s wrong with this demonstration is that it’s not being carried live on KPFA.” The audience roared its approval.

“So here’s my thought for the day,” Siegel concluded. “Let’s go down and take our radio station back!”

And with that the throng, led by a dance/percussion ensemble and veterans of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, marched down Telegraph Avenue. Marching bands played “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.” One delegation brought a float depicting a cheerful Lynn Chadwick wielding an axe over handcuffed KPFA listeners. Others manipulated giant puppets – gagged, of course – who hovered above the walkers. A demonstrator in pink tights rode on a unicycle around banners urging justice for Leonard Peletier and Mumia Abu Jamal. Behind them union locals – especially the service unions – carried banners and American flags.

After five blocks, they turned right on a side street corner to the accompaniment of drums, crying, “Shout it out loud . . . free speech now!” and marched down to KPFA. The police were gone. Pacifica had boarded up the station’s front door and windows. Although some suggested occupying the building, it would have been a pointless act of defiance, since Pacifica controlled the transmitter on Grizzly Peak. Demonstrators raised their fists and uttered warwhoops as they passed the structure. Others just gazed sadly at their building and wondered how things had gotten this far. A band played “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall Not Be Moved” as the protesters slowly made their way toward the park. Staff now led the charge with a huge banner: “FREE SPEECH 1964-1999 . . .? SAVE KPFA!”—1964 a reference to the Free Speech Movement of  that year.

At Martin Luther King, Jr., Park, [Berkeley Mayor] Shirley Dean greeted the demonstrators. “Thank you for being strong,” she declared. “Thank you for being there. Save KPFA!” She was followed by a procession of Bay Area politicians whose offices had been overwhelmed over the previous three weeks by email, voice mail, snail mail, and faxes – among them, San Francisco supervisor Tom Ammiano and San Francisco’s Mayor Willie Brown. Brown called for the resignation of the Pacifica board as some protesters, irate at his housing and homeless policies, stupidly booed him. It was, in fact, a testimony to the strength of this movement that so many political figures ambivalent about the station’s politics came to pay homage.

Equally remarkable declarations of solidarity came from afar, one from an alternative radio station banned in Serbia. Larry Bensky read its communiqué at the rally. “Radio B92 condemns in the strictest terms the repression and exertion of force against the staff of Radio KPFA,” its staff declared. “Long live freedom of speech! And down with media repression which knows no ideological or national boundaries, in either Berkeley or Belgrade.”

The park was packed; the streets beyond overflowed with people. Police estimated that ten thousand demonstrators had come to defend KPFA, the biggest East Bay crowd since the Vietnam antiwar protests, and surely the largest demonstration in American history on behalf of a radio station.

What impressed me then (and still now) about that fight was the extent to which it spilled out into the larger civil society. In the immediate moment a big chunk of the East Bay had no police protection for days because of the number of cops stationed around KPFA to keep its listeners and supporters out. As the crisis spread to varying degrees to all the Pacifica stations and some affiliates, the California state assembly held a hearing on the battle, as did the New York City Council, as did Congress. Dozens of newspapers covered the conflict: just to name a few, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, and even overseas newspapers such as Le Monde and United Kingdom’s Guardian and The Economist. Scores of activist groups, non-profits, and alternative media outlets struggled to make sense of the fight and to offer some kind of constructive response to it, most notably The Nation magazine.

Photo: Susan Druding

Why did Pacifica shut down KPFA? Easy explanations point to corporate intrigue or the machinations of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I think the crisis had its roots in a twenty year effort by progressives to turn Pacifica into a broadcasting network competitive with commercial and mainstream public media. That project, full of centralizations and schedule cleanups, produced some good results, most notably Democracy Now!, but pushed the organization beyond its limits. In the 1990s it threw too many people off the air who had no where else to go to reach a big signal terrestrial radio audience (Pacifica’s five stations have powerful transmitters; well over 100,000 watts in the case of KPFK in Los Angeles). These ejected programmers and their supporters, in turn, availed themselves of the Internet’s then new tools—most notably listserves and websites—to resist those changes. By the late 1990s Pacifica’s managers and directors had simply lost patience with the process and opted for repression.

In the end, Pacifica radio is a bad candidate for centralized makeovers. For better and for worse, its political economy is bottom up. The listener sponsored system, with its emphasis on voluntarism, puts too much power in the hands of volunteer workers and contributors to allow any small group of people to self consciously contour the network in any coherent way. This is good news if your heart palpitates at the sound of words like “grassroots” and “community.” But if your whistle whets at the prospect of a broadcasting organization that can compete with mainstream media to reach a big terrestrial/streaming audience, well, take a look at Pacifica’s resources and its present very complex democratic structure (a result of the settlement of that war). To put it gently, your efforts are best directed elsewhere.

What the Pacifica stations can most effectively offer today, I think, is what is missing from so much broadcast media at present: localism. As the rest of radio automates and newspapers continue to collapse, these signals stand out as unique resources for news/information about the local political process and as venues for local music and other cultural forms. Web 2.0 has yet to really prove whether it can do this. KPFA, KPFK, WBAI in New York City, WPFW in Washington, D.C., and KPFT in Houston already have.

But this blog post is not about working out Pacifica’s future. It’s about celebrating that moment ten years ago when thousands marched in Berkeley, declaring that radio of the people, by the people, and for the people should not vanish from the earth. I am sure that I am not the only person who remembers that amazing day.