>Since I was remiss and did not follow the recent history, it seems to
>me a problem of communication. How would I characterize the core
>issue, in a coherent and meaningful way, without any of the history,
>complexity and ingrown minutia? What's the sound bite? As the teach-in
>from last week (which I missed) said, this is about corporatizing
>grassroots media.
WBAI's late and badly missed program director, Samori Marksman, started telling me about the plans to corporatize Pacifica more than 5 years ago. He said that the national board was full of "God that failed types," ex-CP members who now wanted respectability and corporate and foundation funding. National Pacifica owns all the station licenses, but has very little in the way of funding aside from the percentage (I think it's around 17%) of their fundraising the local stations (WBAI, New York; KPFA, Berkeley; KPFK, Los Angeles; WPFW, Washington; KPFT, Houston) have to pass along as tribute. All stations were instructed that they had to double their Arbitron ratings and beef up their fundraising efforts.
They've pretty well restructured the DC and Houston stations; from what I've heard (and correct me if I'm wrong, anyone in their listening areas), there's almost no politics and no local news on either. LA has partly been restructured. At KPFA in Berkeley, they had booted a few old-timers, but there was no wholesale overhaul. And then, a couple of months ago, they fired the station manager as a clear signal the onslaught was about to begin. The staff went into open rebellion, denouncing Pacifica management and telling the listeners what was going on. That's verboten; no one is supposed to talk about internal Pacifica affairs on the air. (Some listener-sponsored, grassroots radio, eh?) The rebellion went on for weeks, until the other day, when the armed thugs they'd hired to "guard" KPFA around the clock dragged Dennis Bernstein out of the studio after he'd broadcast objectionable material. That ejection was going on during the evening news broadcast; the news director interrupted the regular broadcast to cover Bernstein's ejection. Management pulled the plug on that, and the station has been running taped programming ever since. Regular staff have been denied entry to the studios.
WBAI has largely been left alone, aside from the pressure to boost ratings and fundraising. With fundraising, though, the board had nothing to complain about; it was the first community station ever to raise $1 million in a fundraising drive. There are probably several reasons why WBAI has been largely insulated so far - distance from the Berkeley HQ, the strength and intelligence of Samori Marksman (no longer of course), and, most recently, the rebellion at KPFA. But it may also be proof of reports that the board would like to sell the WBAI license, for which they could get something around $100 million, so they just don't care what the station does in its final days. Who knows?
The national board's agenda is pretty clear: less politics, and what politics remains shall be NPR-ish Clintonoid mush. Some of the more paranoid see the government's hand in this. Supporting that are the facts that their previous PR director, Burt Glass, came out of Clinton's Justice Department, and that the chair of Pacifica, Mary Frances Berry, was appointed by Clinton to head the national Civil Rights commission. The Republicans have long wanted to gut Pacifica; Bob Dole made it a pet project of his. It's easy to see why Clintonoid Democrats would want to destroy the highest-profile broadcast source of even quasi-radical news and analysis. Countering the conspiracy view is Samori's characterization of "God that failed types" running the show: they're just reflecting the broader changes in the political culture. Some of the most popular programs at WBAI are the health quacks; there's a hard core of political listeners, but the money and Arbitron numbers come from the chelation therapy and vaccines are bad for you crowd.
I'd never argue that WBAI or any of the other Pacifica stations are broadcasting ideals that should be left as they are. But as Alex Cockburn wrote after the less-than-ideal Soho Weekly News closed in the early 1980s, soon the only place left to write will be the bathroom walls. Oh well, at least with radio there's RealAudio.
Doug