More KPFA

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Jul 16 13:35:21 PDT 1999


Carl Remick quoted The Economist:


>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.

I can't speak about KPFA in much detail, but this is decidedly not true of WBAI. The producers - and as far as I can tell the audience too - are a very diverse bunch. There's certainly a problem with reaching younger people, but the station is definitely not the plaything of aging white radicals.

They're wrong about


>The left's last gasp

There have been many gasps in the last 20 years, and there are probably a few left. But it doesn't look like there's a big inventory remaining.

Doug



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