> On a personal basis, I'm surprised to hear Mark Bevis being
> trashed so. Can't defend his statements over the last
> decade, but when I worked closely with him from 1985-89
> (including fairly militant anti-apartheid protest, as well
> as radio news) I always found him full of integrity. His
> social-anarchist politics (a fairly serious current in
> Baltimore) and his radical instincts as a journalist were
> amongst the most interesting in that Pacifica news shop.
>
Patrick,
I'm sorry to keep insulting your old friends on this list. All I know of Bevis is what he puts on the air and the way he chooses to respond to activists interested in their radio network. The notion that these matters are somehow private and not the business of those who actually pay his salary is less than contemptible. It's not ABC he works for, although it increasingly seems like it. Like so many on the Pacifica board of directors, he seems to believe that this is his private little piece of turf and he wants to play his way.
I'd surely be interested in any explanation anybody might have for referring to state-capitalist China as 'communist' (gratuitously -- the story wasn't even about economics). I guess it could be his radical anarchism being reflexively adverse to anything 'communist', but I doubt it.
Maybe when he gets dumped, he'll become a believer in democracy at Pacifica -- it's happened to others.
--
Joseph Noonan jfn1 at msc.com