Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Berry's divisive management style is well-documented in the Pacifica debacle. She played the race card early and often, insisting the changes she proposed were necessary to diversify KPFA's staff and listener base. But she refused to meet with people of color from the station's staff and leadership, who mostly opposed her high-handed attempts at reform.
"KPFA has been doing everything it could for years and was on the right track," says Pat Scott, who was once called "the black manager of a white station." Concludes Scott: "This whole issue is crazy."
Maybe the most bizarre episode yet is Berry's appearance at Pacifica station WBAI in New York in late August, where she dropped by unannounced and asked to meet with staff. She lectured the staffers about "diversity," apparently not noticing that most people in the room were black, Latino or Asian.
"We were amazed how little she knows about radio or what programming we do," reported Mimi Rosenberg, a labor reporter and local advisory board member at WBAI, who ended up in the unannounced meeting with Berry because she happened to be dropping off a tape at the station when the chairwoman swept through.
Berry then flabbergasted her listeners by suggesting the network sell WBAI and/or KPFA and buy a string of small, black radio stations in the South. "A kind of black NPR," one staffer described it. "Laudable, but to cannibalize Pacifica with its own 50-year history and listeners? She should go out and build that network on her own and see how hard it is!"
But Berry has always seemed determined to use Pacifica for her own ends. Her detractors point to a statement she made when she took over as chair, in which she said nothing about her vision for the future of the progressive network. Instead, she vowed not to let anything that happens at KPFA destroy her reputation.
And Berry has used her federal connections to further her Pacifica agenda. She used contacts at the Justice Department to get a department official to call Berkeley Police Chief D.E. Butler and ask why KPFA supporters who were peacefully demonstrating outside the station hadn't been arrested. The Berkeley cops got tough for a day, arresting scores, until outraged citizens and the City Council reversed the get-tough policy.
"Many labor disputes have taken place in Berkeley over 25 years," Butler wrote in a letter to the East Bay Express. "But the Pacifica Foundation's decision to turn a labor dispute into a mass arrest situation was a first." Chadwick then demanded the City of Berkeley pay for the security Pacifica had hired because the police had failed to protect the station. The City Council fired back a bill for $200,000 to Pacifica for police overtime at the round-the-clock demos.
To be sure, wrangles between central Pacifica management and local stations predate Berry. It was Pat Scott, KPFA station manager and later Pacifica Foundation executive, who began an all-out push for "professionalization" of the stations. Scott and her allies believed the amateurish, circa-1960s, anything-goes style of KPFA, WBAI in New York and KPFK in Los Angeles couldn't wash in the increasingly conservative '80s.
She and the board took control of finances away from the stations, which she says had either been unable to keep books or, in the case of the Washington station, wasted money on fancy offices for the station manager. Scott inserted the board into programming -- traditionally left to the stations -- when she fired black nationalists at KPPK in Los Angeles for anti-Semitic remarks on the air, and got rid of longtime programmers at KPFA whose shows she deemed outmoded.
Such changes, condemned by critics as "mainstreaming," were opposed furiously by many staffers and members of the local advisory boards. The Pacifica executive committee began to view the local advisory boards, the traditional backbone of Pacifica's listener-supported, "free speech" culture, as the enemy. In 1995, the executive board issued what became known as its infamous "My Way or the Highway" memo urging local board members who disagreed with the vast changes at the stations to resign if they didn't agree. The board also closed all finance committee meetings and ruled board minutes "confidential," again over furious objections of listeners, most staffers and local advisory board members.
Not surprisingly, the network's attempts to go mainstream have met with approval, not suspicion, from federal regulators, and the choice of a board chair who is herself a high federal official has only won the network friends. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, for instance, which funds Pacifica, has been happy to see it lose some of its radical tinge, since the agency had been savaged by right-wing senators in the early '90s for funding "a communist network," as Sen. Jesse Helms called Pacifica.
When some local opponents of the network's centralization moves filed a formal complaint with the CPB, on the grounds that CPB rules dictate that all public stations keep open books and hold open meetings, the investigation went nowhere. Two investigators lost their jobs over the controversy and when a watered-down but critical report was finally released, it was dismissed by the CPB president, Robert Coonrod, who actually praised Pacifica in the meeting in which the report was presented.
Top CPB officials were also only too willing to help Pacifica in its battle to bring the stations, listeners and their local advisory boards to heel. Before Scott left Pacifica, she discovered an obscure CPB rule that prohibits local advisory board members from serving on the governing board of a public station. It had never been enforced. Scott reported to the CPB that the Pacifica stations were violating the rule.
At first top CBP officials seemed unconcerned, calling it "a technicality" in conversations with one Pacifica board member and several local advisory board members. Documents show, though, that in the weeks before the critical Pacifica board vote over cutting ties with the local boards, Lynn Chadwick was in close contact with Coonrod.
Suddenly, on the eve of the vote, Coonrod sent a letter to Pacifica threatening a cutoff of CPB money if the ties weren't cut. The board went along with Berry and Chadwick, a decision that is being challenged in California court by a group of local advisory members and listeners from the five stations.
Chadwick, in a recent interview, said, "The CPB tries to give as much autonomy as possible to the stations it funds ... the board's decision was the least disruptive alternative ... only a vocal few oppose it."
The Federal Communications Commission, too, has given Pacifica free rein. When the network shut down KPFA during July, and installed an ISDN line to its transmitter so it could pipe programming from its Houston station -- outside its FCC-approved signal area -- Pacifica did it before it had even asked the FCC for a waiver. Ten days later, Pacifica got permission. "We don't intervene in labor-management disputes," is how FCC spokesman David Fiske characterized the lockout.
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