The left's last gasp
Berkeley, California -- A street filled with angry protesters, shouts, chants and songs through the night, the riot squad called in. It sounds like a 35th birthday party for the Free Speech Movement, but what is happening these days in Berkeley, the American capital of protest politics, is quite serious. The city is embroiled in a dispute about the management of KPFA, the oldest listener-sponsored radio station in the United States and long the voice of Berkeley's far left.
Not many years after KPFA was founded, in 1949, by a pacifist called Lewis Hill, it became the first radio station to broadcast a reading of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl". In the 1960s it broadcast live coverage of Berkeley's famous marches and demonstrations, including the Free Speech Movement sit-ins, Black Panther trials and the battle over People's Park. It was on a tape first broadcast on KPFA that Patty Hearst, the kidnapped heiress of the newspaper empire, announced her conversion to her captors' views and called her parents "capitalist pigs".
But KPFA is not its own boss. It is part of a stable of five major FM stations owned and operated by the Pacifica Radio Foundation; the others are WBAI in New York city, KPFK in Los Angeles, WPFW in Washington, DC, and KPFT in Houston. Hence the present row. Last March, Pacifica's executive director, Lynn Chadwick, refused to renew the contract of Nicole Sawaya, KPFA's station manager, saying she "was not a team player".
Immediately, KPFA broadcast a report of Ms Sawaya's sacking, calling it a "power-grab" by the network. This brought retribution from Pacifica. Other KPFA journalists were sacked for discussing the matter, and on July 13th Dennis Bernstein, the news director, was physically dragged off the air for mentioning it. It made riveting listening.
Whether the KPFA partisans realise it or not, the problems facing their favourite radio station are the tip of a very large iceberg. Over the years, the Pacifica network has become the only real "alternative" network left in American radio. Programmes distributed by National Public Radio, by far the largest network of listener-supported (or "public") radio stations in the country, have grown increasingly bland. NPR's most popular show-after two drive-time news programmes-is "Car Talk", a call-in programme featuring two voluble brothers who dispense in equal parts mechanical and "relationship" advice. Beyond that, the FM and AM radio dials are crowded with commercial stations, providing a rarely-varying roar of rock, country & western, "oldies", talk and rap. By contrast, Pacifica's most popular network programme is "Democracy Now!", a daily hour-long feature that won an award earlier this year for its coverage of massacres in oil-rich regions of Nigeria.
But if Pacifica's programming has remained defiantly the same, its potential audience has been changing, especially in San Francisco. The number of Latinos, Asians and South Americans in the region has grown markedly, while the white population has declined. At the University of California's Berkeley campus, white, middle-class radicals have long since been supplanted by diligent middle-class students, largely of Asian descent. All the more bizarre, then, that KPFA -- which has the signal and the power to reach 6.5m listeners in the greater Bay Area -- has an audience of about 200,000 who are mostly white, male and over 50.
The chairman of the Pacifica Radio Foundation, Mary Frances Berry -- a black woman who marched with Martin Luther King, who also happens to be the head of the federal Civil Rights Commission -- is keen to shift Pacifica's focus away from radicalism towards the interests of ethnic minorities, which also often go unheard. It would certainly make sense in San Francisco, but others fear -- rightly -- that the attempt to reach new listeners will inevitably dilute the one remaining voice of the far left.
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Carl