>More on Pacifica, specifically the decline of KPFK in Los Angeles
>which has turned into a station barely worth turning the the dial to.
>I used to listen to the KPFK news regularly -- no more though it is so
>awful, insulting compared to the previous incarnation. Mark Schubb
>and Marc Cooper dominate KPFK now and it has badly deteriorated. We
>now have ooga booga shows about spiritual healing, etc., little to no
>original news reporting (Frank Stoltz left a couple of years ago and
>the department died), and far too many NPR type hosts who the station
>claims are more "professional" but are boring to the bone.
Whatever you think of Marc Cooper (and I like him), dullness and quackery aren't among his faults.
Here's something Cooper wrote the other day.
Doug
----
X-From_: owner-pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu Sat Jun 9 01:26:41 2001 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: dhenwood at popserver.panix.com Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 01:24:42 -0400 To: PEN-L at galaxy.csuchico.edu From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> Subject: [PEN-L:13028] Fwd: Re: Fwd: Re: Re: Reply to Marc Cooper Reply-To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu Sender: owner-pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
[I forwarded the thread on Pacifica to Marc Cooper, who responds:]
Reply-To: mcooper at thenation.com From: "marc cooper" <w6iww at hotmail.com> To: dhenwood at panix.com Date: Sat, 09 Jun 2001 00:56:31 -0000
Doug.. You may post the following if you wish.
The basic facts in Clare's report are correct. But they are overstated, individually and as a whole.
The Friends groups were indeed composed of people whose commitment ran deeper than just subscribing. However, there were few such groups and in no way could they be deemed representative of anything. In total, they were about 150 people out of a listenership one thousand times greater.
Second, the Local Advsiory Boards then, twenty years ago, were just as dysfunctional and irrelevant as they are today.
Third, the National Board at that time was hardly viewed as an "oligarchy." It was seen more as your usual sort of non-profit board: detached, flabby, more conservative than its constituency, and ineffective. And stupid. As stupid as the current board.
Fourth, I think it a great distortion to say that Clare or I were fired because we were resisting "impending" corporate funding of the news. It is true that in 1981 the then executive director Sharon Maeda came up with a proposal to seek 100K in funding from Exxon to pay for "promotion" of Pacifica News. We opposed this measure, as just about everyone else at the time did, and it suffered a quick and painless death. There was NO other such suggestions "impending."
Clare, Tim Frasca (founder of PNN) and I ran into trouble with Pacifica not because we were in some anti-corporate faction. We got into trouble I would say over two key issues: a hard push by us for more cooperation among the stations and toward more sense of a network. And because in general we were VERY tough in demanding accountability throughout the network, a sort of professionalism that clashed with the prevalent "laissez faire" mentality. We argued then, as I would argue now, that such a mentality (which today parades as "pure community radio") was in fact just a cover for poorly produced programming that better served the pyscho-political needs of the progammer than that of any real or imagined "community."
Those criticisms made.. I would say there is something VERY VERY valuable in what Clare wrote. If read properly, you can see that the supposed left/right fight within Pacifica today is something that is in fact decades old. Which means that the "left" argument that the current trouble is the product of some conscious, "corporate" move to the right by the current board is just plain not true. The problems are endemic and transcend simple ideological characterizations.
Indeed, Tim Frasca and I were both fired in September of 1983, that is to say 18 years ago, right after we forced a very acrimonious debate at a National Board Meeting. We raised hell because KPFT in Houston and WPFW in Washington were not carrying the newly introduced PNN national newscast. KPFT at the time was paying 8k a year to run NPR's All Things Considered! And WPFW which had no news department of its own, wouldnt run PNN because it was primarily a black jazz station. KPFA was just as local-centric then as it is today. It also refused to run the entire PNN newscast.. At that time there was no ideological objection made.. it's just that KPFA didnt want the national product-- so it would chop up PNN and use pieces of it in its own local newscast.
Reflecting on this will perhaps give the reader some insight into why, two decades later, I so easily dismiss the screeches of the Free Pacifica people who claim some horrible corporate takeover is transforming the network. Wrong. KPFT was running NPR 20 years ago. I remember no protests from the "comrades" at the KPFA news dept who were around then and are STILL there today. WPFW as a music station? You bet it is. It was always only a jazz station. KPFA at war with PNN? True today. And true twenty years ago!
In the end, many of the "principled" fights within Pacifica are not at all about ideology or "direction" of the netowrk. They are usually only about access to the air. Scratch beneath the surface of the "crises" at either KPFA or WBAI and what you will see is a grubby fight to stay on the air-- waged by contending programmers who cloak themselves in political purity. Frankly, most ALL Pacifica programs are mediocre and dreary-- be they of the "Free Pacifica" or the "corporate" Pacifica faction. In the case of KPFA, for example, the news department has been in the forefront of the "struggle." But four of their key people have been there roughly twenty years or more. Principle, shminciple.. they are fighting to retain tenure. My two cents.
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>To: Marc Cooper <mcooper at thenation.com>
>Subject: Fwd: [PEN-L:12979] Re: Re: Reply to Marc Cooper
>Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:00:24 -0400
>
>Marc - someone forwarded this to the progressive economists list -
>any comments? - Doug
>
>>X-From_: owner-pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu Thu Jun 7 22:14:00 2001
>>Date: Thu, 07 Jun 2001 19:08:36 -0700
>>From: Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net>
>>Subject: [PEN-L:12979] Re: Re: Reply to Marc Cooper
>>To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
>>MIME-version: 1.0
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>>Reply-To: pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
>>Sender: owner-pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu
>>
>> From a manuscript of a forthcoming book of essays by Clare Spark, a former
>>programmer at KPFK, the Pacifica station in L.A.
>>Michael Pugliese
>>..."I and my supporters in the News and Public Affairs
>>department had brought the listeners meaningfully into the dialogue that
>>created programming decisions: not only did I conduct an open-phone,
>>unscreened Report to the Listener for an hour at prime time every week, but
>>newly formed "Friends of Pacifica" groups, dispersed throughout our broad
>>listening area, discussed the articles I wrote each month on programming
>>philosophy and approaches, giving me valuable feedback. As a result,
>>momentum existed for the Friends groups, viewed now as more than dutiful
>>fund-raisers, directly to elect representatives to the local advisory board
>>(that in turn elected members to the National Board) hence potentially
>>breaking the oligarchy that ruled the foundation. The Friends groups were
>>dissolved about a year after my removal, but supplied troops to protest the
>>second stage of the purge a year later when Marc Cooper (News Director) and
>>Tim Frasca (Head of the Pacifica Washington Bureau) and Robert Knight (News
>>Director of WBAI) were fired: all had protested the impending acceptance of
>>corporate money to fund news operations..."
>>Michael Pugliese