Another result was a long history of dissident movements that supported various contrary notions of what Pacifica ought to be, depending on when they discovered the network and what they were doing there when they decided things were going sour. Many of these never had a vision larger than the restoration of their favorite shows.

"The great mass of people came to the fight because what they like got attacked," says David Adelson, head of the local advisory board at Los Angeles' KPFK and lead plaintiff in one of the lawsuits against the outgoing national leadership. "They didn't come to it from a point of view of listening and thinking, 'You know, things really need to change.'"

Even so, there are a number of inchoate, sometimes overlapping models for the network's future. One group sees Pacifica as an advocate for a host of leftist movements. (Within that set, naturally, different figures regard different movements as paramount.) An overlapping camp -- based around the daily program "Democracy Now!" -- wants to build Pacifica as a national voice for hard-hitting public-affairs programming, in what Matthew Lasar, author of the 1999 history "Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network," calls "the grand Pacifica dissenting style." Other Pacificans have similar visions, Lasar adds, "but on a much more local level."

This bleeds into another approach, in which the stations serve, in one much-used phrase, as "the voice of the voiceless," with more airtime devoted to low-income and minority communities. Yet another model, in Adelson's words, favors programs in which "you're not constantly trying to demonstrate that your point of view is correct." Instead, as he puts it, "You're trying to explore. The programming inquires deeply into features of our life that we don't frequently have the opportunity to inquire into ourselves," then expands its boundaries by fostering such discussions off the air as well as on.

And then there is a faction based at two bastions of the left-liberal press, the Nation and the L.A. Weekly. The former publication has its own show, "RadioNation," while journalists from both organs enjoyed a fair amount of airtime in Los Angeles under former KPFK manager Mark Schubb. Members of this group generally favored the Schubb administration's approach to programming, though they sometimes criticized the national board for its mismanagement. Several still have airtime in Los Angeles, but they exert most of their influence from the outside, via those two publications.

"The thing that bugs me about the Nation the most is that they won't admit that they are a faction within the organization," comments one observer who requested anonymity. "They constantly represent themselves as taking the higher ground, and refuse to acknowledge that they are, like other Pacifica factions, a close-knit group of people within the network with specific interests in terms of airtime, exposure for the Nation itself and their own careers."

This party's line was laid out in a March L.A. Weekly article by Ella Taylor, whose film criticism sometimes runs on KPFK. Taylor praised the outgoing station management as a group of "'60s activists who have become intellectuals and argue that the left must work from within society and refine itself through dialogue and debate." The new crowd, by contrast, were also "'60s activists" who had become "hard-line Marxists or self-appointed guardians of minority identity, who believe that any contact with corporate capitalism and white elites contaminates and dilutes the cause."

The shrillest exponent of the Nation line, "RadioNation" host and L.A. Weekly writer Marc Cooper, routinely paints the dissidents-turned-managers as creatures of the far-left fringe, citing the kookiest e-mail he gets -- such as accusations that he's a CIA agent -- as typical of the anti-Nation forces. As we shall see, there are in fact more cogent criticisms of Nation-style radio.

On a national level, the debate over Pacifica's future is taking second place to the crisis in its present. By the final days, the old Pacifica board was, at best, shockingly inept: It left the network with a deficit of more than $5 million, most of it run up in the last 15 months. Apologists for the board blame the dissidents for the debts, noting that the network spent nearly $1.5 million fending off their lawsuits. But looking at the mess they left behind, one gets the impression of a group more willing to drive Pacifica into bankruptcy than to compromise with their critics.

It wasn't just legal costs that pushed Pacifica into the red. There was $90,000 for public relations, more than $200,000 in consulting fees, some $230,000 for a security firm to gather intelligence on dissident activists, a stunning $237,000 in bank charges, and a number of payments that seem downright corrupt, morally if not legally. Most notably, the board promised almost $500,000 in severance packages in its final days, offering golden parachutes to 20 executives. Meanwhile, individual executives ran up heavy hotel bills and other personal expenses, spending $320,000 on the corporate American Express card -- more than 5 percent of the entire organization's annual budget -- in just six months.

Meanwhile, the legal costs themselves ballooned, without anyone keeping track of expenses. (Toward the end, no one was making financial reports to the board.) "At one point there were five big Washington law firms representing Pacifica," notes Dan Coughlin, the network's interim director.

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