With the bills coming due, the national network is faced mostly with fighting fires. It's successfully negotiated down some of the debt and some of the severance packages, and has made substantial cuts in the network's operating expenses. Meanwhile, revenues have increased, with all five stations raising record amounts in their March pledge drive.

But there's a long way to go. It's not that no one in the national office is thinking about programming. As Coughlin says, "We can't just move forward without understanding what went wrong in the past, and how to improve the situation for the future." But with millions to be paid, Pacifica's immediate concern is avoiding bankruptcy.

On the local level, it's another story -- or, more precisely, five other stories. In Berkeley, for example, the entire station rebelled against the national board back in 1999. As a result, comments Matthew Lasar, "Whatever debate there might be at KPFA about what direction it should go in, there isn't a lot of wiggle room for change."

One consequence is a feeling in many quarters that the station has grown stale. Its formerly activist and controversial local news operation is now dominated by rip-and-read wire copy, while it has become nearly impossible to eliminate programs that have gotten tired or to recruit fresh voices to take their place.

That said, the station has its defenders. "I understand why people say it's gotten encrusted," comments Lasar, who lives in nearby San Francisco. "But I have to say, on a very subjective level, that I love listening to it. I think KPFA does a lot of really great stuff."

A similar situation holds in New York, where WBAI's staff was in open revolt even before the rebellion in Berkeley. With the so-called "Christmas coup" of December 2000, Utrice Leid replaced Valerie Van Isler as general manager and a series of broadcasters were banned from the air. Now the old staff is back in place and, again, there's little room for radical change (although Van Isler plans to leave later this year). So whereas three years ago it was not uncommon to hear KPFA and WBAI described as the only real Pacifica stations left, the most wide-open debates about the network's future are now taking place in Houston and Los Angeles.

At Houston's KPFT, similar rumors about the station's new direction have been swirling in all directions, in what interim program director Otis Maclay, a Pacifica stalwart who started at New York's WBAI in 1967, describes as "an absolute McCarthy campaign" full of ad hominem attacks. A typical flurry came when Monica López, a reporter from the Berkeley-based "Free Speech Radio News," came to Houston to cover the Enron scandal and related stories. Naturally, KPFT allowed her to use its facilities. In the e-mail netherworld, this became a sinister plot by a Berkeley cabal to "take over" the KPFT news department and make the Houston station "a repeater signal for KPFA." No such conspiracy ever materialized.

The conflict in the Middle East has also left a mark, especially after a particularly pro-Israel edition of the program "Jewish Voices." The next show's host, Bob Buzzanco, began his program with a nasty retort: "Sorry for that digression into the Fox network. We now return to regular Pacifica programming." Pro-Israel listeners immediately called for Buzzanco's head. The issue at stake, arguably, wasn't Israel vs. Palestine so much as the ideal of open debate. One of Buzzanco's supporters, Curt Schroell, says that both the pro-Israel show and Buzzanco's response made him cringe -- but that's OK. "I expect to hear more cringe radio at KPFT," he says. That, he feels, is the price of free speech.

KPFT still hasn't hired a permanent program director. Maclay hopes to keep the job, but there's a frantic campaign against him, aimed more at the people he associates with than the material he actually broadcasts. But for all the infighting, if only one Pacifica outlet emerges from this mess as a strong and compelling radio station, it will probably be this one.

Under the previous manager, Garland Ganter, KPFT adopted the tagline "The Sound of Texas," a slogan that at its best meant rootsy country and blues and at its worst meant bland yuppie-rock piped in from a public station in Pennsylvania. Now the slogan has changed slightly, to "The Sounds of Texas." The idea is to diversify the schedule without losing the best of the old. "What we're trying to do," Maclay says, "is not fire any listeners."

One of the few really enjoyable elements of KPFT's programming in the last few years has been its willingness to put local musicians on the air, playing live from the station's studios. Maclay wants to expand on this and even hopes to build a better studio for the visiting musicians to use. At the same time, he hopes to expand the non-music programming as well.

Maclay's model for Pacifica is radically different from Ganter's -- not, he says, "an object-subject model, where you feed the listener and they consume," but "an interactive model, where you're telling the listeners, 'Hey, come down to the station and play. Be involved with this medium to the extent that you want.'"

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