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LA Weekly - March 22-28, 2002
Family Feud The left eats its own at KPFK
by Ella Taylor
WORD IS OUT THAT I'M WORKING ON A STORY about the latest coup at KPFK, and troops from both sides are massing on my voice mail, my e-mail, my editors' voice mail in varying tones of panic, paranoia and PR. The radio station's interim manager, Steven Starr, worries that the opposition is giving me a distorted picture of what's going on. A woman who had pitched a KPFK story to the L.A. Weekly a year ago leaves me precise instructions on how my piece should be written. A member of the newly rejuvenated Local Advisory Board, fondly or otherwise known as the LAB, wants to set me straight about the "antics" of Marc Cooper, host of the station's most popular drive-time talk show, who was suspended by Starr for refusing to raise funds for the new KPFK because he didn't like the direction in which it was headed. And my in-box is buried under an avalanche of variously furious, anguished or waggish electronic mail from the dispossessed, who have taken to calling the LAB and the national board "the Branch Pacificans."
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Meanwhile, the wrong people are telling me that the staff, paid and volunteer, is beaten down and barely functioning. The money from the pledge drive, even though it was earmarked for the exclusive use of KPFK and is supposedly sitting in a local bank account, has yet to filter down to the station. So short is ready cash that there's no money for colored markers; recently the phones were cut off for a day. More than one employee expresses weary frustration at the endless internal sniping on and off the air. One predicts that in six months the audience will dwindle into "the banned and the fired" and their supporters -- the LAB's "true" audience.
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It seems the antagonism and mistrust between activists and intellectuals that has always bedeviled the left never dies. On almost any issue, Cooper, Schubb and their volunteer allies at the station -- among them Weissman, Wiener and Barbara Osborn, who hosts the weekly show Deadline L.A. -- can think and talk the LAB people into a cocked hat. They have a grasp of how radio is made and used. They're willing to entertain new ideas and debate those who disagree with them, on and off the air. They're witty, irreverent, and brimming with ideas and a sense of fun -- something that's always been in short supply on the Marxist left. Schubb recalls a meeting about cultural programming early on in his tenure in which he noted that KPFK had given birth to Fireside Theater, Harry Shearer and a whole new world of political satire. One protester sprang to her feet and yelled that there were horrible things going on in the world and the last thing that was needed was more jokes. The activists don't want for sincerity or commitment, but as a group they come off as anti-intellectual, dull, humorless and hidebound. The new Pacifica board held its meetings in Los Angeles two weeks ago, and for sheer lumbering, procedural tedium, the live broadcasts out-snored even KCRW's Santa Monica City Council meetings.
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Marginalization has the virtue of keeping the marginalized honest, in a limited way. But it can also cramp the mind and narrow the spirit, creating a siege mentality that's defensive, sanctimonious, mistrustful of change and suspicious of political maturity. If there's one Pacifica radio show that exemplifies the best and worst of the American far left, it's Amy Goodman's popular Democracy Now, which is broadcast nationally out of WBAI in New York. Goodman is unflagging in her pursuit of corporate and political malfeasance at home and abroad. She is incorruptible, unimpressed and unintimidated by power or authority, which is why she's one of the few interviewers who've ever been able to fluster Bill Clinton. And she's excellent at providing a voice for the wretched of the Earth, from Ohio to Afghanistan. But one doesn't turn to her show for open debate about leftist thought. On almost any issue, she will trot out verbatim speeches of a small circle of like-minded friends -- Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Cornel West. During KPFK's fund drive, Goodman rebroadcast a tortuous speech by West in which he contrived to read into the bombing of the World Trade Center a parallel with the oppression of blacks in America. Admittedly, this is more dotty than harmful. More seriously, when Goodman rightly scolds the commercial media for their distortions, she's not above replacing those distortions with others of her own. As the conflict in the Middle East escalates, she routinely reports Palestinian casualties -- which the mainstream media have also been doing for some time -- while ostentatiously omitting those on the Israeli side.
So diligently has Goodman internalized her identification with the oppressed that she has come to believe herself to be one of them. When it comes to the Pacifica wars, Goodman is hobbled by a whopping martyr complex that plays on the air as the irritating whine of the career victim. Thus WBAI, from which she was exiled for five months in a dispute with the old Pacifica board, became "the station of the banned and the fired." This continued throughout KPFK's mid-February fund drive, when her show (which had not been broadcast here while she was fighting with the board) sometimes aired three times a day, in which she peppered her energetic pitches with requests for cash to help restore a "plundered network."
Goodman has played a key role in shaping the on-air narrative of oppression worked up by KPFK's new regime during the fund drive. If that wasn't dreary enough to listen to, the station also saw fit to boost the fund drive's final hour by peddling the video of Mike Ruppert, a defrocked cop who sought to convince us that the CIA was behind the attack on the World Trade Center. Dave Adelson, a LAB member who told me he saw no reason to condemn the hateful rhetoric of the black separatists on the air even though it made him "cringe," nonetheless leaped to interrupt a Grateful Dead show and excoriate programmer Barbara Osborn for the crime of paying tribute to Cooper and asking listeners to call in their response to his suspension. Starr, who was initially seen by the opposition as a nice fellow who was in over his head, is by now so thoroughly in the pockets of the LAB that he allowed this intrusion. When the public-affairs programmers, led by Beneath the Surface's Suzi Weissman, handed him a forthright letter of outrage over the Mike Ruppert debacle, he responded that, in the context of a rebuttal, the program made "compelling radio." Thus does the loony left come full circle and join hands with the meshuggeneh right. If confirmation were needed of what Christopher Hitchens has called the "ardent confusion" of the ultraleft, this is it.
The sad part of all this is that there is nothing visibly new about the new regime at KPFK. It's a classic and possibly terminal case of the divorce of thought from action in that part of the left that refuses to grow up. All the signs are that, now the first flush of victory is over, the station is sliding back to the vapid populism that distinguished it before Schubb arrived, when programming was carved up by putative interest groups and any nut or bigot with a grievance could grab the airwaves if he or she yelled loud enough. Programming collectives, which bring people together solely on the basis of their ethnicity, age or gender, can only aggravate such separatism. Someone has to be responsible for making good radio that won't bore listeners to death. In the unlikely event that a new manager with vigor and vision is hired, he or she will have his hands tied behind his back if he tries to lift things out of the uncertainty and confusion that already prevail at the station. "We were here for the listeners," says one employee sadly. "Now we're here for us."