I don't understand Doug's contempt for Pacifica given that he has a program ona Pacifica station. As to Marc 'Couper' he is more accurately described as a former shill for the neo-liberal corporate raiders who attempted to hijack pacifica. Pacifica is not 'self-maginalizing'. Please check out this essay about the history and culture of Pacifica for a better sense of what Pacifica is all about.
PACIFICA IN VINCULA
http://www.ringnebula.com/folio/Issue-1/VINCULA.htm
John Whiting
>From Radical Poetics, No. 1
January 1996
Free media everywhere are in chains. Pacifica Radio, America's uncompromising listener-supported, non-commercial FM network, now passes its programs through the fine mesh of the Arbitron rating sieve to make them more easily digestible. In Britain, the BBC's intellectually up-market Radio 3 is, like Pacifica, being made more "user-friendly" with "strip" programming (cf. strip poker) which presumes that your favorite station, like your marriage bed, should titillate without any rude surprises. London's Guardian, which was the newspaper you turned to if you wanted to exercise your brain without assaulting your eyes, has added a tabloid section that dresses up hard news as soft porn. Even the Internet, which was structurally designed so that, in the words of John Gilmore, it "interprets censorship as damage and routes around it", is now being sucked inexorably into a maelstrom of commercial and political sewage. The Age of Aquarius is going down for the third time.
Pacifica Radio was founded by Lewis Hill, a poet, broadcaster, and WW2 conscientious objector. Driven by the awfulness of American radio, he created in 1949 an alternative somewhat similar to the old BBC Third Programme, which was going on the air at the same time that Hill was marshaling his forces. He intended to cut straight through the root of commercial corruption:
The purpose of commercial radio is to induce mass sales. For mass sales there must be a mass norm, and the activity must be conducted as nearly as possible without risk of departure from the norm....By suppressing the individual, the unique, the industry reduces the risk of failure (abnormality) and assures itself a standard product for mass consumption.... This is the first problem that listener sponsorship sets out to solve--to give the genuine artist and thinker a possible, even a desirable, place to work in radio.
It's hard to remember or even imagine how boldly ambitious Lewis Hill's concept was at its inception. Fifty years ago, all the avenues of communication, including newspapers and radio stations, belonged to established forces such as the government, churches, corporations, and universities. There were local media, but they were for the most part incorrigibly conservative. Alternative art and politics occupied the footpaths: small magazines and newsletters, often mimeographed, which were handed out at meetings and distributed by mail. No information superhighways in those days! Aside from a brief spasm of labor-supported broadcasting in the mid 1920s (WCFL, supported by the Chicago Federation of Labor but killed off with the connivence of the AFL), the only efforts at niche broadcasting had been made by a handful of radio evangelists such as Aimee Semple Macpherson, whose Los Angeles station, KFSG ("Kall Four Square Gospel"), had gone on the air in 1923 when there were only two other LA stations and 100,000 receivers.
The culture shock of tuning in to KPFA in 1949 was like hearing an atheist sermon preached from the pulpit of Grace Cathedral. The airwaves had never been available to iconoclasts, but now they were reaching not just a handful of people at a meeting or a concert, but an indeterminate mass of the general public. "Indeterminate" is the operative word. The Nielsen ratings, with their little boxes attached to consoles in a few living rooms, were already up and running for AM radio, but FM was still only a gleam in an ad man's eye. Lew Hill could ignore with impunity the size of KPFA's audiences because there was, mercifully, no way of measuring them.
>From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
>Reply-To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
>Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Americas Vichy Left vs. Michael Moore
>Date: Tue, 13 Jul 2004 16:56:42 -0400
>
>Stephen E Philion wrote:
>
>>Cooper delcared that the only people who would like the movie would be
>> seals clapping in the audience. But on his blog comment section, a good
>>number of positive reviews of the film came from commenters who were not
>>on the left at all. very interesting. also the film is being reported
>>around the country as having a good reception by vets, repubs., etc.
>
>Cooper used to denounce the weird, self-marginalizing Pacifica left. So
>then Moore comes along, who's not weird or self-marginalizing, and he
>denounces him too? Some people are never satisfied.
>
>This link was posted earlier, but the text is worth considering. The film's
>audience is *not* the choir.
>
>Doug
>
>----
>
><http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Movies%20and%20Politics.htm>
>
>Movies and Politics
>
>July 13, 2004--Two surprising movies this year have drawn entirely
>different audiences to the theatre.
>
>Fahrenheit 9-11, Michael Moore's entry into the election debate, has an
>audience that is 47% liberal, 26% moderate, and 25% conservative. The
>audience for Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ is 51% conservative, 27%
>moderate, and 21% liberal.
>
>Other demographic differences abound:
>
>*
>Women make up 42% of the audience for Fahrenheit 9-11 and 53% for Passion.
>
>*
>The President's Job Approval among Fahrenheit viewers is 26%. Among Passion
>fans, it's 58%.
>
>*
>The partisan make-up for Moore's movie is 47% Democrat, 19% Republican, and
>34% unaffiliated. For Gibson's, the audience is 41% Republican, 36%
>Democrat, and 23% unaffiliated.
>
>*
>Fahrenheit fans will vote for Democrats in Congress by a 66% to 20% margin.
>The Passion crowd will vote for Republicans by a 48% to 39% margin.
>
>
>There is a bit of common ground between the movies. Fans of both named
>Rock'n'Roll as their favorite music. However, Classical music was the
>second choice of the Fahrenheit 9-11 audience while country music ranked
>second among the Passion audience.
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