http://www.ringnebula.com/folio/Issue-1/VINCULA.htm
PACIFICA IN VINCULA
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.
The Bay Area's political, intellectual, and artistic avant-garde, long an embattled minority, now had a sense of instantaneous and simultaneous community. Pauline Kael was cruel but perceptive when she labeled KPFA "soap opera for liberals". Not only was it a source of information and inspiration, but for those who were accustomed to fighting and losing, it was a Land of Oz (itself an IWW allegory) in which the good guys didn't always finish last. The listening audience included family, friends, and followers, and newcomers glued to their sets soon felt that they knew the protagonists as well as they knew the Barbours -- that imaginary San Francisco family living in Seacliff whose serial epic, One Man's Family, was locally launched in 1932 and soon spread throughout the NBC network. (Ben Leger, the left-wing actor whose autobiography occupied almost as much of KPFA's air time as Kenneth Roxroth's, once told me that his greatest career mistake had been to quit the cast of One Man's Family after a couple of episodes, convinced that it wouldn't catch on. It turned out to be the longest-running serial in the history of American radio.)
It was this sense of "engagement", as Lewis Hill called it, quoting the French Existentialists, that not only made KPFA's audience intensely loyal, but gave them a significance in the community which a mere head count, had it been possible, would have grossly undervalued. (A moment's reflection makes it obvious that head counts reveal nothing of a group's importance, except as a standard for setting advertising revenue.)
Engagement typified the staff as well; they worked for peanuts and the shells were often empty. Idealists came to work, often unpaid, remained as long as penury would allow, and then went on to other employment where the skills they had acquired might lead to a distinguished career.
Working for KPFA was reminiscent of the classic Woody Allen exchange:
-- I've got a new job. I'm the dresser in a burlesque house.
-- Wow! What's the pay?
-- A hundred a week.
-- That's not very much.
-- Yeah, I know, but it's all I can afford.
Then in 1985, after years of grinding poverty, the network was both saved and damned by the deregulatory policies of Acting President Reagan. The sub carrier frequencies of FM stations had become a valuable commodity which could be rented out as transmitters of commercial information, but non-profit public radio was forbidden to do so. When broadcasting was turned over to "market forces," Pacifica struck oil. Having got into FM on the ground floor, it now owned half-a-dozen high-output transmitters on elevated sites in big urban centers, whose by-products were suddenly worth a modest fortune. In order to guarantee that the bonanza would not be frittered away on running expenses, the national board of directors quickly staked its claim to the sub carriers of all the stations. By the end of last year, the annual yield had grown from a quarter of a million to about $800,000. The income would be expected to fall off with new technologies, but David Josephson of Josephson Engineering tells me, "I think they have a new lease on life, as there will always be local data distribution needs that can be done on SCA's without any significant capital outlay."
Suddenly Pacifica had moved into the bottom of the Big Leagues. There was money coming in which one could actually control, rather than simply handing it over to whatever creditor happened to be banging on the door. There was scope for management, for planning, for financial rationalization, for serious fund-raising. These skills were in short supply within the network, so experts had to be invited in and the old dogs sent on crash courses to learn new tricks.
With the new tricks came delusions of grandeur. In 1992 A Strategy for National Programming was confidentially circulated which set forth a "five year plan" (its own unfortunate phrase) in order to "draw large audiences and generous subscribers". This was to be accomplished by scrapping an increasing number of locally produced programs which would be compulsorily replaced by "expand[ing] national programming from one half-hour nightly news program in 1993 to 28-30 hours by 1997".
The power structure of the American networks, which had motivated the creation of listener-sponsored local radio, was now to serve as its model. Like Moliere's Bourgeois Gentleman, Pacifica was at the mercy of its new servants. Media professionals who genuinely admired what the stations represented were prepared to work for half what they had been paid in the commercial world; awkwardly, this was still twice the salaries of those already there. A gulf appeared between those who managed the money and made the decisions, and those who produced the programs and went on the air.
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