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.
A couple of weeks ago, PacMan denounced the old guard at KPFA as a bunch of white enemies of "diversity" - which prompted outraged denials from the black, Asian, and Latino staffers. It's like Clinton's "cabinet that looks like America" - "diverse" perhaps in color and sex, but a bunch of bourgeois hacks nonetheless.
Doug -----------
I think this structuring of the debate is interesting--that is pitting diversity against radicalism. It is absolutely dripping with race and gender overtones--It depends on manipulating an assumed white guilt in the ranks, and then makes the presumption that there are unheard voices in the community. This is a nice neo-liberal and politically correct variation on Nixon's silent majority ploy. Of course the really convenient thing about a silent majority, is they can be constructed in absentia and represented by anyone.
Kevin Guillory an African American reporter for KPFA said tonight on KQED's 'News Week in Northern California', that beyond some vague statements on programming for a greater diversity, there has been nothing put forward by Pacifica and Chadwick. During the KQED exchange that followed, the SF Examiner reporter asked why Pacifica was using Stalinist tactics, knowing that this kind of public mess and its headlines would be the result. Guillory, said he had no idea.
Since there is nothing of programming substance on the table, counter to what The Economist article indicates, then such an absence suggests, the concrete issue is power--all of which obviously now resides outside the local community, no matter what its theoretical diversity. (Its not that I ever doubted that power was the point, but the lack of any evidence to the contrary, makes the argument stronger)
>From this note in Doug's later fwd [KPFK in LA just cut off FAIR's
Counterspin show because it was about the Pacifica crisis.], I would
assume that Pacifica is now in very deep panic mode.
Tonight on the 11:00p news (NBC, ABC affiliates), Norman Soloman of FAIR essentially repeated his statement (see fwd, FAIR-L) that called for the national board to step down. Local attorneys in Berkeley formally filed the threatened lawsuit in Alameda County Court today, charging unfair labor practices against Pacifica.
Meanwhile tonight's rally was in its usual mode--a few hundred or less, MLK blocked, people honking support from the main thorough fair at the intersection (MLK & University). Another local group has hiked up to the transmitter towers in the Berkeley Hills and is camping out up there to protest and possibly prevent Pacifica from engineering a remote signal from Los Angeles. So much for the great local diversity argument. (see transmitter post)
I am going climbing this weekend, so I won't see any of the weekend rallies. If these rallies are fun and interesting and bring out enough crowds, then they will keep the KPFA story in the lead on tv and on the front page of the local papers. Hopefully somebody from around here will go and report to LBO.
Any way, I've got to say thanks again to Marco for the LBO archive. It will make it possible to come back and wander through the culture and poverty thread at some point.
Chuck Grimes