Adelson also has a thoughtful proposal for a new station structure, one designed to avoid the pitfalls of personality-driven strip programming while also escaping the fragmentation typical of Pacifica in the '80s. The idea is for the advisory board to take input from the listeners about the general areas they feel the stations should cover: human rights, local politics, the arts, etc. Each topic would then get its own peer review committee, charged not with coming up with, say, a Human Rights Hour, but with surveying the schedule as a whole to see how well KPFK is covering the issue. The idea is to foster breadth and diversity while avoiding the familiar Pacifica scenario in which the hosts become possessive of their particular shows and don't care what goes on for the rest of the week.

"The worst-case scenario is that what you have is a return to power politics within the station where it's a fight over programming slots and time," Adelson says. "Success at Pacifica in the past meant the ability to exclude or eliminate your enemies. Success in the future should mean the ability to synthesize disparate views."

But the station is a long way from putting these ideas into practice. It's been forming programming collectives, but rather than being interdisciplinary groups concerned with larger issues, they've reflected the more familiar contours of identity politics: A black collective, a Latino collective, etc. Nor has the notion of avoiding a one-to-one relationship between collective and program been firmly established. Adelson feels burnt out, in part because he's had such trouble communicating these ideas to others at the station.

The best hope for Adelson's most hopeful scenario -- for a station without power politics but "with a certain dynamism, so it embraces and accommodates change as a regular feature" -- may be KPFX, a new, supplementary KPFK project being built on the Web. The direct inspiration is New York's Web station WBIX, which broadcast former WBAI programs and other material "from exile" during Utrice Leid's administration. But KPFX has a somewhat different mission: to allow new blood to flow more easily into the station. Since its Web streams won't be displacing any existing shows, there will presumably be less resistance to new people brought aboard through it. If sufficient flexibility is built into the FM schedule, KPFK could import the best programs from its Web sister into its over-the-air broadcasts.

A similar arrangement is developing in Houston, where Pacificans hope to launch another Web station, tentatively titled KPFTX, later this year.

One way Pacifica has cut costs recently is by dropping its nightly newscast, the "Pacifica Network News." Few miss it: Battered by a correspondents' strike, it had been reduced to taking reports from Feature Story News, a company whose processed-cheese newscasts are featured on such alternative outlets as ABC, NBC and the Voice of America. One typical story, aired in the last weeks before the program was canceled, was essentially a paean to New York ex-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, notable not just for its lack of resemblance to Pacifica's usual political outlook but, more importantly, by its utter failure to acknowledge that such an outlook might exist. In its final three years, the number of non-Pacifica stations carrying the newscast dropped from 73 to 12.

Last year the striking reporters started a new show, the aforementioned "Free Speech Radio News," with a decentralized structure and contributions from correspondents around the country. The results are now heard on Pacifica, on several other stations, and on the Web. You're not likely to hear Giuliani tributes on it. You will hear a slant, though, and sometimes a rather ham-fisted one. In a February broadcast, the anchor, reading headlines at the top of the hour, declared that "prison conditions in Afghanistan are deplorable," the last word elongated just in case we fail to get the idea. It's fine to do news with a point of view, and sometimes "Free Speech Radio News" pulls it off. At other times it just sounds amateurish.

That clumsiness, says Maria Gilardin of Berkeley's KPFA, "can happen when something isn't centralized and there isn't an editorial authority. But I think there's enough of a feedback mechanism built in for it to improve. Overall, it's a really beautiful model. It's what Pacifica should have done when it created 'Pacifica Network News' -- to build it from the bottom up instead of from the top down."

Now Pacifica itself is being rebuilt from the ground up. It faces a host of pitfalls, from the lack of professionalism exemplified by that news report to the still-looming prospect of bankruptcy. But those who care about the vitality of radio as a medium -- whether they agree with the views aired on Pacifica or not -- can only hope the network survives to bring its listeners the vibrant programming mix it was known for in happier days.

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