But while insisting that station staff tighten their belts, the Pacifica Foundation’s governance sector is still clearly unable to control its own internal expenses. The Pacifica radio network’s newest audit indicates that for the year ending in September 2010 the organization spent no less than $378,023 on its station subscriber and staff elected boards. This brings the total price tag for the network’s experiment in democracy to $2,802,685 since it commenced in 2002. Another year like the last six, and it will easily surpass $3 million in 2011.

And although Pacifica officials make noises from time to time about cutting board expenses, 2010′s board/election budget was the third most expensive in Pacifica history—over $112k more than the previous year. The “national division” spent a whopping $175k on board expenses. In 2009 it was $94,859.

Here’s how these board/election expenses played out on a station by station level for 2010:

KPFA (Berkeley, CA): $40,431

KPFK (Los Angeles, CA): $45,956

KPFT (Houston, TX): $22,548

WBAI (New York City, NY): $76,183

WPFW (Washington, DC): $26,500

National Division: $175,405

WBAI’s board expenses almost doubled in 2010, up from 38,422 the previous year.

In the past, critics of my articles on this matter have all but characterized Pacifica’s board costs as a bargain, contending that they represent a relatively small portion of the network’s annual expenses. This assumes, of course, that the cash strapped network can afford to spend something like $378k per year on what passes for governance rather than programming.

To give you an idea of what $40,431 means to KPFA, consider the justification that Pacifica management recently gave for the layoff of the entire KPFA Morning Show crew last December:

Eliminating the former Morning Show was the most cost-effective programming change we could make at KPFA. Three part-time positions were eliminated (two hosts and one producer) or 2.3 full-time-equivalent positions, each with full benefits as all employees working at least half-time receive full health benefits. This saves KPFA approximately $147k per year in salaries, payroll taxes and health benefits.

In retrospect, it’s difficult to see how that move was worth the subsequent trouble. Since then, one of those staffers has been rehired following a union grievance that staff estimate cost KPFA over $32,000. Another’s case is in arbitration. Protestors of the layoffs have collected over $60k in donation promises, forthcoming upon the return of the popular programmers in question.

But while Pacifica claims that it couldn’t afford these individuals, apparently it thinks that it can afford a substantial percentage of their estimated costs on board members, whose contributions to the organization are dubious at best. Hopefully the network will take a serious look at these priorities before Pacifica embarks on its next expensive round of subscriber and staff elections, scheduled for next year. Pacifica management has just announced a drastic makeover of KPFA’s schedule, without having consulted most of the station’s listeners or staff—hardly evidence that the folks at the top are taking the democratic principles implied by the election experiment seriously.

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Now the ‘Mix’ and the 9 am rebroadcast of Democracy Now! will be replaced by Flashpoints and Hard Knock Radio. Flashpoints will broadcast at 8 am. Hard Knock at 9. Against the Grain and Living Room will moved to 11 am. The Morning Music shows will air at noon with an extra half hour. And a new program called “Talk Back” will broadcast at five PM.

All this will happen following the May fund drive, write Interim General Manager Andrew Phillips and Interim Program Director Carrie Core.

Preliminary analysis

Why is the ‘Morning Mix’ on the way out? The memo doesn’t say. The show was initially heralded as “a new day” for the station. In March, KPFA/Pacifica management stood down calls to restore the old Morning Show with Brian Edwards-Tiekert and Aimee Allison by insisting that its controversial removal “was the most cost-effective programming change we could make at KPFA.”

The 7-9 am time slot is a big fundraiser throughout public and listener-supported radio. We are still analyzing the results of the current fund drive, but even though there has been a concerted effort to undermine the new Morning Mix program and calls from some quarters for a boycott—our preliminary analysis shows the morning programming change is holding up pretty well financially.

We expect the new programming to continue to gain audience support over time, and we will continue to work with our staff to discontinue their efforts to undermine the new programming and the station. We support this experiment in bringing new community volunteer voices to our air, and we’ve heard from many of our listeners that they do too.

That was then. This is now:

“We want to thank and praise those who pitched in on the Morning Mix over these past months,” the memo says. “Most were unpaid staff and they did a good job under difficult circumstances.”

But despite the fact that Edwards-Tiekert has been rehired (following a union grievance) and Allison’s case is on the way to arbitration, their Morning Show is not coming back, Phillips and Core insist.

“Restoring the old Morning Show is not the answer,” the memo says. “We need to step into the future, not back to the past.”

Former WBAI-FM Program Director Andrew Phillips is headed to become the station’s interim manager, following the resignation of the last guy (who lasted about a month). You can find a brief mention of Phillips in my second book on Pacifica here.

Brian Edwards-Tiekert of the recently tanked KPFA Morning Show has been re-hired with back pay. The Pacifica Foundation, which owns KPFA, is not challenging his union appeal.

“Pacifica has basically conceded it can’t win the pending arbitration over my dismissal,” Edwards-Tiekert explained in a public letter.

But he’s been hired to work in the News Department, it should be noted, not on the Morning Show. And the job of his co-host Aimee Allison has not been restored.

Meanwhile KPFA News reporter John Hamilton has now been laid off, just as he returned from live coverage of the labor struggles in Wisconsin. Talented, dynamic, formerly with Democracy Now—Hamilton was a huge infusion of creative energy for KPFA. On the right check out his investigative report on the Byron Williams ACLU/Tides Foundation alleged assassination attempt.

Critics of the move question the need for the layoff. I’m going to skip the inevitable he said/she said on this decision. Bottom line, if you didn’t like these people, you’re happy about these developments. If you are like me and you loved them, well, it’s a problem.

I’ve been pretty discouraged about the station since Aimee and Brian’s version of the Morning Show got nuked, and listen a lot less. Still, despite the fact that I’ve drifted away, I have a strong emotional attachment to KPFA and want to help (I did write two books about the place, after all).

Some KPFA supporters seem to think that giving more to the station during pledge drives will somehow convince Pacifica to keep Hamilton on. Good luck with that.

As for me, I just don’t want to give any cash to the Pacifica Foundation, whose principals—Executive Director Arlene Engelhardt and CFO LaVarn Williams—very loudly supported the Morning Show purge. Pacifica gets a 20 percent chunk of KPFA’s pledge drive income.

But there are ways to give to KPFA while denying Caesar her fifth of the take. These suggestions are, presumably, applicable to the other five Pacifica stations as well—they being WBAI in New York City, KPFK in Los Angeles, WPFW in Washington, DC, and KPFT in Houston.

Give during non-pledge drive periods

Pacifica does not tithe non-pledge drive related income. So if you contribute via KPFA’s online form, your money goes entirely to the station, but only if (nota bene) you do it two weeks after the last fund drive ends.

The safest way to donate without giving to Pacifica is to mail KPFA an old school check or money order. Just make it out to KPFA and send it to 1929 Martin Luther King Jr Way, Berkeley, CA, 94704. You can do that any time.

Buy tickets to KPFA events

Pacifica doesn’t tax KPFA events like speaker events and forums. So purchasing tickets to those occasions is a great way to support the station and, of course, enjoy an interesting evening.

Attend the Holiday KPFA Crafts Fair

The money from your purchase ticket to the fair goes entirely to the station, and not to Pacifica. Ditto for any non-pledge product you buy directly from KPFA there (a t-shirt, bumper sticker, book, etc).

Make in-kind donations

During a pledge drive, call a delivery restaurant near KPFA and order food for the volunteer pledge call takers. Or buy some kind of equipment for the station. Rest assured, KPFA can always use more office or equipment supplies. And you can get a tax deduction for that too.

Donate your old car or other dying transportation device

The next time your clunker reaches death’s door, donate it to Vehicles for Charity, specifying that the remaining net worth goes to KPFA. This will also get you a deduction from Uncle Sam.

Put KPFA in your will

In addition, when you reach death’s door, you can leave a chunk of your net worth to KPFA as well. This too will go entirely to the station.

There’s one more possibility: pledge to the SaveKPFA bring-back-the-morning-show fund, which has amassed a considerable chunk of change ready to hand over to KPFA if the old Morning Show is restored. But Pacifica seems pretty adamant about sticking with the status quo. So that’s a maybe strategy, not a sure thing.

I can anticipate some push back to these suggestions. The most important is that Pacifica in various ways funds  Democracy Now, Free Speech Radio News, and the Pacifica Archives.

Here’s the simple fix for this problem. Just directly donate to these venues yourself. They all have PayPal or similar donation buttons on their sites. Now your money is going to programming. None of it is headed for Pacifica central, with its crazy internal politics.

One final caveat—Pacifica can change or try to change these rules if it wants. Or it can just raid KPFA’s accounts if the Pacifica National Office is desperate. But generally these fund collecting protocols apply.

On the heels of my post about FCC enforcement of “legal” low-power AM broadcasting, I learn that Pacifica plans to jump into the LPAM arena. The plan is for Pacifica’s Los Angeles station KPFK to serve its Spanish-speaking audience with a network of Part 15 LPAM stations deployed strategically in Latino neighborhoods. According to a recent Radio World article, the LPAM plan is to compensate for the fact that KPFK only has 24 hours in a broadcast day, already split amongst many different types of programming, but with an apparently strong audience for its three hours of Spanish programming a night.

Networks of LPAM stations have been tried before. Perhaps the most prominent was Allston-Brighton Free Radio, a Massachusetts station that started out as a 20 watt unlicensed FM before going Part 15 LPAM. The station has been mostly defunct since 2003, but that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t a good one.

Rather, given the limited broadcast range of LPAM stations I think it shows that it’s difficult to keep a full schedule of volunteer DJs motivated and the station funded. Therefore KPFK’s idea of using LPAMs to rebroadcast a stream of already existing Spanish programming seems more sensible. According to RW the cost of a transmitter setup is just $850 — it likely will cost more to feed the station a good audio feed. KPFK program director Alan Minsky tells RW that the station won’t produce more Spanish programming. Instead it will rebroadcast its current Spanish block supplemented by programming from other sources.

However, I suspect that the FCC might pay a little more attention to a prominent licensed station messing around with unlicensed AM transmitters. Commission field agents will probably want to confirm that those transmitters are fully compliant with Part 15 regs.

This should be a very interested experiment to watch when it gets off the ground.

Conservatives crying “Defund NPR” at the top of their lungs might have gotten the most attention in 2010, but look beyond the headlines and it gets worse.

Nonprofit groups all over the country who hold FCC construction permits for new community stations are struggling to come up with the bucks to build.

The massive new contract for Ryan Seacrest is part of a dangerous trend perpetuated by Clear Channel that can only mean fewer net jobs in the industry. (Remember when Rush Limbaugh was given a $400M raise and Clear Channel chopped $400M from the rest of its payroll?)

Major cuts are coming to the BBC, following a frustrating few months highlighted by journalists going on strike. President Obama’s depressing “deficit commission“ has recommended the US stop funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Public Telecommunications Facilities Program entirely by 2015.

The Pacifica Network is apparently on the brink of bankruptcy after six decades and the KPFA fight has turned allies into foes. Free Speech Radio News is threatening to shut down its daily operations despite endorsements from journalism advocates like author Bob McChesney.

Look to the fighting spirit of the Save KTRU movement if you like, but the ugly takeover story in Houston is a reminder of the grave situation student radio stations are struggling against nationwide, as cash-strapped university administrators see FM licenses as dollar signs.

At least college students have stations on the air to fight for. The dedicated volunteers in Salem, OR who want to launch KMUZ have found today’s economy much more difficult than expected.

The Radio For People Coalition knows of around 100 groups who applied along with KMUZ in 2007 and were granted permits, but are now facing mandatory FCC construction deadlines. Economic hardship is the key factor in almost every case. Sadly, the inspiring WGXC barnraising in Hudson, NY was a rare exception.

Including me, there are basically only four people in the country whose job descriptions include capacity-building support for new stations. Prometheus Radio Project, Common Frequency, Latino Public Radio Consortium and Native Public Media can’t do it all.

But radio is still the best communications technology for reaching the American people. It is free to listen, of course, and community radio provides citizens with access to the public airwaves, and opportunities to amplify voices underserved by NPR and Clear Channel.

According to Camille Lacapa at Native Public Media, only about a quarter of First Nations radio projects with construction permits are in “good” financial shape yet 16 are required to be on the air sometime in 2011. Reports vary about the exact numbers but it seems clear that with 500 recognized nations spread out across the land, every frequency counts.

Wannabe public service operations are facing the worst economy since the Great Depression.

Think about progressive folks trying to change the landscape in Red State America. Let’s take Boise, Idaho and Spokane, WA as examples. In a piece titled “Never a Better Time to Fund Noncommercial Radio,” my friends Jeff Abrams and Lupito Flores point out:

Boise and Spokane represent the Northwest’s third and fourth largest population bases.  New licensees in these two cities are now planning the largest combined expansion of noncommercial radio service in the entire country.  Boise Community Radio (KRBX) and Thin Air Radio (KYRS) will be serving populations of 469,000 and 249,000, respectively.

Both groups have received $415,000 in Commerce funding and are now seeking matching funds totaling $152,000 to help build strong, listener-supported community radio stations that empower people – especially ethnic minorities, low-income, and other marginalized groups striving for a more just and sustainable world.

Combined, their programs will help make a stronger and more effective regional social change movement by promoting and facilitating communication and collaboration among nonprofit organizations, and by encouraging and enabling increased participation from community members.

However, these new licenses expire in 2011.

What makes no sense to me is why the social justice community, from MoveOn.org to the NAACP, doesn’t get behind the build-out of community radio right now. Instead of repeatedly handing over millions of dollars to corporate broadcasters for fleeting ad messages, MoveOn.org could help communities build and sustain new infrastructure for communications using affordable radio equipment.

The passage of the Local Community Radio Act in the US Senate, finally, means the FCC will offer up hundreds of new 100-watt licenses for community radio stations. Great! But first… how about supporting these one hundred secular, alternative, independent community stations right now? With unemployment rising, idiotic Bush/Obama economic policy, and dried up foundation funds, many nonprofits who have done everything else right may never launch their FM stations without financial support from the activist community. The clock is ticking.

More funding stories you might have missed, in brief:

• KPFK’s new solar energy project overshadowed by Pacifica’s battles
• The nation’s 3rd largest radio conglomerate, Citadel, rejects two takeover offers from Cumulus, the 2nd largest
• See Howard Stern’s expensive contract in context
• Community group promises “added local emphasis” in acquisition of Long Island public station
• Beloved outlet Democracy Now! offers donors the most expensive coffee ever
• Incoming House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet Chairman Greg Walden is a former radio station owner
• New Jersey public broadcaster lays off 130
• Hard Knock Radio veteran explains why he left KPFA
• Peek inside KUT’s controversial staff salaries
• Veteran jock Danny Holiday threatens 3 hours of Manilow if nobody pledges
• and Alec Baldwin delivers some mildly funny pitches for WAMU.

The dumped crew, however, had another plan. They got to the building first, piled into KPFA’s studios with a lineup of supporters (including me) and announced the news themselves. Demonstrators were already getting ready to march outside, as they had the day before.

“We come to you with a very heavy heart,” explained Morning Show co-host Aimee Allison, “yesterday the Pacifica Foundation cancelled the Morning Show and fired the entire staff. It’s been my utter honor to serve the community for the last three years here.” That was just the beginning of the show.

But Engelhardt wasn’t fazed by this. When Morning News reporter Aileen Alfandary noticed her angrily milling about the scene, she invited Pacifica’s new boss to explain her position. Previous Exec Directors would have fled in an instant. Engelhardt stood her ground.

“You know there are great concerns,” she began with a tone of supreme exasperation, “about how we’re going to keep this station going, given that the station lost a million dollars last year, or the year before this. The year that just ended lost $500,000, and it’s heading into this year unable to make it’s payroll.”

For those of us who have been following this drama for a while, KPFA’s red ink numbers have become something of a whack-a-mole affair. In last week’s debate between Engelhardt, Pacifica Chief Financial Officer LaVarn Williams, and Morning Show host Brian Edwards-Tiekert, I heard three 2009 figures cited: $900,000, which then got lowered to about $500,000, then was raised back up to $950,000 as the conversation went on.

Now it’s a million. If it gets any higher, I’m going to float a credit default swap on the station.

We told you so

To be fair, KPFA is obviously losing money. The staff and KPFA’s Local Station Board proposed an alternative “sustainable” budget which would allow the signal to get through this lean period without trashing its best programmers. Engelhardt rejected the proposal out of hand.

But before I get any further up on my high horse here, I’ve got to admit something. I like Arlene Engelhardt. She’s got courage, stamina, and personality—albeit a somewhat hard boiled one in this context. She reminds me of one of my favorite mid-20th century actors, Gladys Cooper, who played Professor Henry Higgins’ mother in My Fair Lady.

And she must have known what she was getting into. Her friends at community station WMNF in Tampa, Florida, from whence she came, warned her a year ago that her stint at Pacifica “could be a volatile experience.”

So at the risk of pissing my friends over at Save KPFA off, I think I want Engelhardt to stick around. Why? Because the situation at Pacifica radio is likely to get much, much worse over the year, and not because of its internal troubles. I’ve got a feeling that a real enemy is coming at us soon, and someone tough like her would come in handy.

But before Engelhardt can make a credible go at KPFA oversight, she’s going to have to learn the rules, most of which apply to the other four Pacifica stations as well.

Rule #1: Nobody ever leaves Pacifica

If you listened to KPFA this morning (Wednesday), you heard Brian Edwards-Tiekert helping Mitch Jeserich do his Letters to Washington broadcast later in the day. He’s not going anywhere. He’s going to stay and fight this.

That’s no surprise. As someone who has been involved in Pacifica politics for thirty years (and written about the other thirty), I’ve seen Pacifica station managers make the same mistake over and over. They dump people, and think their victims will just crawl off, presumably saying something like “Shucks! Oh well. Better polish up the resume and move on.”

Forget it. Take a look at the endorsers of Independents for Community Radio (ICR), the rival slate to Save KPFA (which supports the sustainable budget). There’s one person on the ICR list who has kept up with Pacifica governance for almost third of a century (he used to be the foundation’s President). Another’s been around for at least a quarter. Heck, a decade ago I used to run into a guy who was canned at WBAI in the 1960s and still was active in Pacifica affairs. He might still be.

In fact, folks at Pacifica radio even stick around after they’re dead. Down at KPFK in Los Angeles, Zen essayist Alan Watts, who was integral to Pacifica politics in the 1950s, is still broadcasting over the weekends.

Why is this? People don’t hook up with Pacifica radio because they’re looking for a “career.” They want something else. So if you are a Pacifica General Manager, before you dump somebody, you have to ask yourself one question. If I fire this person, is s/he actually going to leave?

Rule #2: Your stump speech doesn’t matter – what matters is who is listening

Engelhardt keeps trying to present numbers as the cold hard facts in this story. But at Pacifica radio, the real cold hard facts are people.

Because Pacifica depends to a great extent on volunteer or low paid labor and listener donations, power is broadly distributed across the organization. People have a strong sense of ownership in the network. It was like this even before Pacifica launched its disastrous experiment with elected governance boards, which needs to end as soon as possible.

So as the Executive Director, you may think that you have a great rap about the budget, or the need for more diversity, or relevance, or whatever is in your stump speech. But the people around you have their own equally compelling (to themselves) narratives about what’s going on—reinforced by self-appointed experts in their faction (like me).

Since they’re not going to obediently nod their heads at your every word (or even cooperate with your layoff notices) you have to ask yourself another question. Do I really have enough support at Pacifica to accomplish my current goals?

Remember the great KPFA shutdown of 1999? I tried to convey this to the key players in that drama, Lynn Chadwick and Mary Frances Berry. Purging people left and right,  they steadfastly refused to ask the question. They were going to completely overhaul Pacifica radio, they told me. Berry called up and gave me the party line about diversity and relevance. Chadwick took me out to lunch.

I told them the yogurt was about to hit the fan. But they were so impressed with their stump speech that they just pressed on and on, eventually shutting down KPFA in the summer of that year.

The ensuing riot lasted about three years. Today you’d never know they were here.

Look at what Engelhardt’s got as a result of Monday’s bloodbath: furious staff, furious listeners who are not going to pledge in KPFA’s next fund drive, and a new slate (Save KPFA) taking the majority on KPFA’s Local Station Board. The Save KPFA folks are pissed because, incredibly, Engelhardt refused to meet with them shortly after they won the majority of seats on the LSB.

My guess is that Engelhardt thinks she can weather this storm—that some scenario like repeating Democracy Now! twice in the AM with a shorter volunteer Morning Show will pick up the slack and keep listeners. I suspect she’d like to fill the station’s schedule with syndicated programming, but dare not because ICR, which has the ear of her CFO, wants to pack KPFA’s air sound with its supporters. Good luck with all that.

Bottom line: People at Pacifica don’t bow down just because you wave around scary numbers. You’ve got to work with who you’ve got.

Rule #3: Cheer up, because it always gets worse

I’m just going to say it. Pacifica radio is completely unprepared for another direct attack from the Republican Party. Remember all the craziness from the Gingrich years? The 1995 government shutdown? The Contract With America? A big piece of that was an assault on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

If you want the agonizingly detailed version of that episode, read my second book on Pacifica. Bottom line: the Repubs used some of the more horrific fare being broadcast on Pacifica back then, in particular the ethnic nationalist stuff coming out of KPFK in Los Angeles, to bash the CPB, because it was giving Pacifica money.

Does anyone doubt that Pacifica will once again wind up in that crossfire now that the GOP has taken back the House? They’re already using the firing of Juan Williams to call for the defunding of public broadcasting. If Pacifica appears on the Glenn Beck blackboard over this, who is Engelhardt going to ask for help? The 9/11Truth activists on the current Pacifica governing board? I don’t think so.

Ironically, it’s the very people Engelhardt is battling tooth and nail right now who will be in the best position to defend the organization—the people her current allies denounce as corporate gatekeepers and, worst of all, Democrats.

Wake up Arlene. Get your head out of that financial ledger and figure out who your real friends are. You’re going to need us and, yes, we are going to need someone like you.

“I believe that the results here indicate that the listener-members do not want an explicitly sectarian station,” declared Save KPFA’s Mal Burnstein, who won the most votes of any candidate in the race. “They want a station that presents varying points of view, civil discourse, controversy and comment; a station where ideas and facts not readily available elsewhere can get a hearing; a place where the arts, literature, music and theater are valued.”

KPFA-FM is a listener supported radio station in Berkeley, CA. All five of the  Pacifica Foundation’s stations in California, New York, Texas, and Washington, DC are running these elections. Here is a non-certified account of the Berkeley results, the winners in numerical order. Save KPFA candidates have asterisks to the left.

*Mal Burnstein
Tracy Rosenberg
*Jack Kurzweil
*Margy Wilkinson
Hyun-Mi Kim
Cynthia Johnson
*Matthew Hallinan
*Tanya Russell
*David Saldana
-
*Suzi Goldmacher 1st runner up
Kate Tanaka 2nd runner up
*Terry Doran 3rd runner up
-

Non-certified Staff election results:

Sharam Aghamir
*David Gans
*Lewis Sawyer

Congratulations to Save KPFA, which was easily the best slate running (my assessment of the other slate here). But if the official results resemble previous elections, the real winner in this race was nobody. The great majority of Pacifica listener subscribers never vote in these races. They never wanted them in the first place. These elected boards have cost the organization millions of dollars and brought nothing in return.

And in what is the height of absurdity, there’s still another election to count: the “recall” vote on one staff delegate. Pacifica’s by-laws say that a mere two percent of staff can petition for a recall (eight volunteers at KPFA signed the  petition, it seems). So at the considerable expense of cash strapped Pacifica, the election crew has to follow through on this debacle. And for what? To potentially recall him just before his term expires.

Enough. Hopefully a critical mass of the latest crop of Pacifica governance members realize that this elected board system has got to go.

Eleven years ago 10,000 people marched on the streets on behalf of KPFA, which had been shut down by a clique of panic stricken incompetents. The demonstrators wanted three things: the station re-opened, the license not sold, and board members and staff who thought and acted otherwise removed.

These elections have gone way beyond those basic demands. They serve not Pacifica radio, but small factions who know that they’ll never have anything to do with Pacifica governance without them. It’s time for this debacle to end.

The Washington Post reports what everybody involved in the Pacifica radio network has known for years, that the foundation’s staff are in conversation with Al Jazeera to broadcast the service over its five listener supported stations. I don’t know whether the discussions are going anyplace, but it’s obviously a great idea, so of course it has drawn fire from both the right and the left.

On the right, Newsbusters is running the obvious headline:

“Taxpayer-Funded Pacifica Radio Planning to Air Al-Jazeera Audio.” Pacifica—which owns five listener supported radio stations in Berkeley, New York, Washington, DC, Houston, and Los Angeles—gets $1.6 million in Corporation for Public Broadcasting money, the article notes. The implication, of course, is that your tax dollars will fund this terrorist evilmonger network from Hell that aired bin Laden dispatches after the attacks on September 11, 2001.

The fact that Al Jazeera also broadcasts interviews with U.S. State Department and Israeli officials and journalists isn’t mentioned. Why would Newsbusters want to do that?

Then there are a host of objections raised by Steve Brown, long associated with board governance at Pacifica station WBAI in New York City. In fact, the WashPost article is almost entirely based on Brown’s public criticisms of the possible deal. Based on my conversations with previous executive directors and board members, however, I can confirm that Pacifica has had a longstanding interest in some kind of arrangement with Al Jazeera, and has been trying to pursue the matter for about four years.

I really hope Pacifica can get this going. The network urgently needs to draw in a younger, more diverse audience, and it’s never going to be able to do that on its own. This is just the kind of outside-the-box breakthrough Pacifica needs.

Brown raises the following objections to the proposal, with which I respectfully disagree.

“I do object to the secrecy and lack of member input on an issue that could have dire consequences for the foundation. Do Pacifica’s negotiators—whoever they are—have the knowledge, skill, and experience to negotiate such a contract? Who are they? What are their credentials?”

The question of negotiation skills is a legitimate one, given Pacifica’s unwieldy system of democratically elected local station boards (and which, last time I checked, Brown supports). This system allows candidates to become part of Pacifica governance based on relatively few station subscriber votes. But the payoff for getting Al Jazeera audio on the five Pacifica stations is so potentially big that it outweighs any risks in the negotiation process.

“Al Jazeera is a totally government owned and funded broadcast entity, and the government that owns and funds it is among the most repressive on earth.”

Yup. If you’re looking for objective coverage of the situation in Qatar, Al Jazeera is not the place to go. It does, however, offer a fresh, complex, and original perspective on the rest of the world, one that lots of new folks might tune into Pacifica to hear.

“Another question is: Will Pacifica have the right to follow any Al Jazeera newscast with commentary, rebuttal, or elaboration of its own choosing? Will other Pacifica broadcasters be allowed to comment negatively on whatever Al Jazeera says, since there is a ban on bad-mouthing other Pacifica programs on the air. This in itself is not a minor consideration.”

Any attempt to stop Pacifica programmers from reacting to Al Jazeera broadcasts would be stupid and futile. They would openly defy the order. Were they disciplined for so doing, they would easily rally listeners to their support. It would be a huge brouhaha, and management would lose.

“It is not even surmise, but an absolute certainty, that if we broadcast Al Jazeera – without appropriate official comment and disclaimers—or even with appropriate official comment and disclaimers—support from many and perhaps most of our Jewish listeners could vanish overnight. Even though the decision to broadcast Al Jazeera is (arguably) legally and morally correct.

Let us be realistic. Jewish listeners comprise many of our major donors, and even among ‘ordinary’ donors they contribute far more than their numerical representation. So we could be looking at another ‘Skokie incident.’ (For PNB members too young to remember, this was a 1977 lawsuit in which the ACLU defended the right of a neo-Nazi group to hold a march through the Jewish residential village of Skokie, Illinois.)”

It’s just a tad unfair, I think, to compare Al Jazeera to a bunch of goose stepping schmucks from the suburbs. As for Pacifica’s Jewish listeners, if they’ve stuck around for the last twenty years of hooray-for-me-I’m-an-anti-Zionist rhetoric on various Pacifica shows, they’ll probably experience Al Jazeera’s far more sophisticated approach as a breath of fresh air.

“Although Pacifica management may have the legal right, I do not think it has the moral right to sign a potential bombshell—such as this contract is likely to be—without passing it by the membership, or at least the 5 LSBs in executive session. For once we sign, we are bound—for better or for worse.”

If the people who supposedly run Pacifica on a national level can’t take any risky, bold chances without submitting them to the organization’s five Local Station Boards, the network is doomed. I hope that, somehow, the people allegedly in charge of Pacifica can get to the other side of this project. If they can’t, it is yet another indictment of the foundation’s excessively democratic and wasteful system of governance.

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.