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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
After seven years of bitter infighting, the dissidents have retaken control of Pacifica, the venerable left-wing radio network. Now comes the hard part.
Jun 20, 2002 | It was a familiar sight to listeners of Pacifica, the independent, radical-minded radio network: An e-mail from a DJ, warning that Pacifica's central powers were planning sweeping changes for his radio station. "WPFW's existence as D.C.'s last bastion of cultural programming is being seriously threatened in the immediate future," the message claimed. A "vocal minority" of hijackers, "none of whom were elected," intended to remake WPFW as "an all-talk station." If listeners didn't want that to happen, they should make their feelings known at a teach-in the following week.
For the past seven years, Pacifica has seen purges and protests, a management bent on radically revamping its five stations and a growing body of dissenters opposed to its plans. (For the record, I was one of those dissenters, writing periodically about the gentrification process afoot at the network.) In a nutshell, Pacifica was trying to slicken and tone down its eclectic, largely left-wing programming mix and to move power from local stations to the national office, from volunteers to paid professionals. The warning about WPFW, written by "Latin Flavor" host Jim Byers, resembled countless earlier e-mails by outraged programmers and listeners. Except this time, the alleged hijackers were the dissidents.
Late last year, armed with lawsuits and faced with an increasingly inept foe, the dissidents retook the Pacifica board. Station managers left their posts at the Los Angeles, Houston, New York and Washington outlets. (The fifth station, in Berkeley, Calif., was already under the protesters' control.) When Byers sent his e-mail in March, what we were witnessing was not revolution, but aftermath.
The Washington story has a happy ending, or at least has settled into an unstable state of peace. The teach-in took place, and everyone was civil. The accused "vocal minority" -- the station's local advisory board, drawn from its listeners -- assured everyone that the rumors were untrue; it had no desire to wipe the music from the jazz-oriented outlet's schedule. Byers and company conversely conceded that the outlet's public-affairs lineup should be expanded. And for the first time, everyone got to talk with everyone else.
Pacifica, the nation's oldest noncommercial radio network, has entered a new chapter of its history, as the people who brought down the previous regime now face the task of reconstruction. It's an enormous challenge: If the ousted leaders' crude attempts to "mainstream" Pacifica had brought it to the brink of bankruptcy (a threat which has by no means receded), one could also argue that much of the network's traditional political programming had come to seem ossified and irrelevant.
Although the former rebels have now taken the network's helm, the infighting at Pacifica is not over. There have been several inside-out moments like the conflict at WPFW, not all of them resolved so benignly. But you shouldn't start quoting "Animal Farm" just yet.
The dissident movement was always an alliance of convenience, with many visions of a liberated Pacifica contending within it. Each station now has to work out just what a Pacifica station should be broadcasting, and, more important, how it should make such decisions in the future. If the network survives a financial crisis it has inherited from the previous administration, it may yet remake itself as a compelling alternative to both commercial and public radio. If it succeeds, even those who have paid little attention to Pacifica's troubles may find themselves glad that this particular war was won.
The first Pacifica station, Berkeley's KPFA, was founded by Lewis Hill in 1949. Hill had conceived it while working in a conscientious objectors' camp during World War II, but it was the mind-deadening experience of working in commercial broadcasting after the war that shaped his views of what radio ought to be. "If a sound is worth passing through the magnificent apparatus of a microphone, a transmitter and your receiving set," he once wrote, "it ought to convey some meaningful intelligence."
To foster that intelligence, Hill argued, stations should stop thinking of the audience as a manipulable mass. Instead, they should restore power to the actual broadcaster and his listeners, and favor programming with a spirit of dialogue and inquiry.
In five cities across 53 years, Pacifica has moved through several radically different incarnations. It was a highbrow Berkeley station in the 1950s, run by anarcho-pacifists but funded mostly by arty liberals. It was the home base for New York's Yippies and their kin in the late 1960s. It was a "cosmic cowboy" compendium of roots music and sharp satire in Houston in the 1970s. By the '80s, the standard template for a Pacifica outlet (except in Washington, where jazz has always dominated the schedule) was a collection of left-wing political interest groups, music lovers from outside the pop mainstream and foreign-language constituencies, all sharing one frequency and each clinging tenaciously to its airtime. The result was a patchwork of brilliance, mediocrity and doctrinaire tedium.
