This was posted on the freepacifica list. Never mind the ridiculous right wing politics, he doesn't even have the facts right.
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Joseph Noonan jfn1 at msc.com
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http://www.capitolalert.com/voices/schnur/schnur.080999.html
The Sacramento Bee
Progressive lunacy at KPFA
By Dan Schnur Aug. 9, 1999
Assemblyman Scott Wildman, the aptly named chairman of the Joint Legislative Audit Committee, would investigate a bad hair day if he thought that television cameras would record it. Assemblywoman Dion Aroner represents the city of Berkeley according to the wishes of her constituents, which really tells you all you need to know about her.
Together, the two legislators have scheduled hearings on the recently-concluded controversy surrounding KPFA Radio, a Berkeley radio station which, depending on your own political sensibilities, transmits a message that is either progressive or lunatic. The station's parent company, Pacifica Broadcasting, thought KPFA's employees had become excessively progressive or lunatic, so they fired some of them. The remainder of KPFA's staff, and many of their listeners, thought that the station was not nearly progressive or lunatic enough, so they fought back.
After ongoing protests and not a small amount of violence and destruction of property that resulted in a temporary shutdown of the station, the protestors won. The Pacifica people told their KPFA employees to run the station however they liked, and the station returned to the airwaves last week with a message that was even more progressive or lunatic than it had been previously.
Except for the unnecessary violence, the entire episode may have actually -- and ironically -- been a testimonial to the power of free enterprise. The owners of a business attempted to change its product in order to increase its consumer base. The business's existing customers objected, so they rallied the media and some portion of the surrounding community to their cause. And the owners backed down.
News coverage of the Pacifica-KPFA wars has attracted interest from a disproportionally large audience, far greater than the station's listenership before, during, or after the controversy. Most Californians, in fact, could not care less whether KPFA chose to broadcast material that was progressive, lunatic, or translated into Pig Latin. But no matter.
Birds fly and fish swim. Similarly, if you bestow otherwise normal people with the title of legislator, they will intuitively begin to legislate. If you also tell them that they are regulators, they will regulate. And if there is neither legislating nor regulating that can be done, they will hold hearings. Such is the order of nature.
Throughout the protests, Aroner saw large numbers of her constituents gathered together for some reason other than her. This was unacceptable. So she requested a "legislative oversight hearing and audit", which is a fancy way of saying "many television cameras". Many other politicians, who also enjoy attention from the news media, agreed that this was important. Wildman, who likes media coverage as much as (or more than) the next little-known legislator, was happy to comply.
Aroner says this is necessary because: "When there are reasons to suspect that Pacifica is acting unethically or illegally, we believe a hearing is warranted."
Except all Pacifica did was fire some employees who they believed were causing their station's popularity to diminish, which is entirely legal. A politician's interest in investigating such an action is odd, since this is precisely the action that they take whenever their poll numbers go down. Politicians rarely consider the firing of their own staff to be illegal or unethical: they call it "taking charge."
The hunt for illegal activity, though, leads us in another direction. Laws were broken -- by the protestors who destroyed studio equipment, windows and door locks, as well as by the unidentified individual who fired gunshots onto KPFA premises immediately after the original staff dismissals.
Unless Aroner believes that one of the Pacifica management team fired those shots or damaged station property, it's unclear what illegal activity on the owners' part she could be talking about. But using the committee hearing to investigate the protestors' lawbreaking is unlikely, since their status as protestors presumably excuses their behavior.
The other argument for a hearing is that, although the majority of its operating budget comes from private donations, Pacifica does receive some public money. Therefore, public officials should monitor the use of taxpayer dollars.
But let us first pause for the sake of consistency. Coincidentally, this is a similar financial situation to that of public television stations in Los Angeles and San Francisco, which were among the 28 PBS affiliates across the country to be charged last month with providing its fundraising lists to Democratic candidates for public office.
Though the two controversies arose almost simultaneously, Aroner and Wildman seem much less curious in investigating the public television scandal, though it involved the clear violation of both state and federal election law. If there is a distinction between investigating the potential illegal activity at a public radio station and the admitted illegal activity at several public television stations, then the investigators are being awfully quiet about explaining it.
However, the next issue of "Talk" magazine contains a story in which Wildman and Aroner admit that they suffered as young children from a lack of exposure to Big Bird and Mr. Rogers, so their reluctance to investigate public television as adults becomes much more understandable.
"He was so young, barely four, when he was scarred by abuse that he can't even take it out and look at it," Wildman's wife said in the interview. "There was a terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother over whether he should be allowed to watch 'Sesame Street.' A psychologist once told me that for a boy, being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one."
Mrs. Wildman says that she has forgiven her husband, and they now enjoy public broadcasting together as a family.
Dan Schnur is the national communications director for John McCain's presidential campaign. Dan's column appears every Monday. Readers can send e-mail at shots at ix.netcom.com. Find previous columns here.