http://www.savepacifica.net/media/20011023_sfexaminer.html
In a 2001 SF Examiner article, incidentally also written by Fred Dodsworth (see url above), Sherry Gendelman, then Chair of the KPFA LAB said:-
"The national organization is just a bunch of incompetent liars,"... "National programming has declined and national news has gone from bad to worse and has nothing to do with Pacifica's mission."
Ken Ford, vice chairman of the Pacifica Foundation, also quoted in the same article countered: "We're making the programs and the programmers more professional,"..."They're zealots," he said of local activists who have blasted Pacifica. "I see parallels between this group and al Qaeda, the terrorists who bombed New York. They have an innate anger towards society as a whole."
Elsewhere in another article written by Dodsworth in October of 2001 Ken Ford said 'he is building a more professional, more listener responsive network while securing its financial future.' http://www.wbai.net/pnb01/pnb_sf_examiner10-22-01.html
Fastforward to 2005: sounding not unlike her erstwhile 'adversary' Ken Ford, Sherry Gendelman quoted in the 10/21/05 edition of Knight-Ridder owned East Bay Daily News says: "'Undemocratic' is the mantra they're using to bring the network down. They're attacking the paid staff. They want to reduce the staff and move in more esoteric conspiracy theorists. Nonprofit community radio is still a business and it needs to be run *professionally, by professionals*." (emphasis added)
see below:-
http://www.taemag.com/printVersion/print_article.asp?articleID=17349
A LITTLE REBELLION HERE AND THERE By Wirkman Virkkala
Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America By Jesse Walker New York University Press, 326 pages, $24.95
Though amateurs invented broadcast radio, the amateur spirit did not long prevail. Professionalism took over. As Jesse Walker, an associate editor of Reason magazine, relates in Rebels on the Air, it was government that quickly squelched the diversity and experimentalism early radio promised.
With the Radio Act of 1912, the American government in effect nationalized the electromagnetic spectrum, divvying out user privileges by licensing. What the government was trying to do was rein in the “hams.” For a while, it seemed that every other clever lad was making his own crystal set, receiving and sending messages over the ether. These hams had begun experimenting with broadcasting (rather than mere point-to-point communication) a few years before the 1912 Act.
As businesses entered the broadcast game, they turned to hams for expertise. During World War I, the military realized, likewise, that the hams provided the best source of radio communications skills. But the Commerce Department’s efforts to solve the problem of radio interference precipitated a larger crisis that Congress tried to fix with the Radio Act of 1927, which created the forerunner of today’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The bill was not without dissenters. One senator charged it was “fair to only one institution…the monopoly that will be created under it.”
These words were prophetic, if overstated. Radio became, primarily, the domain of business. Competition persisted, but the early promise of a voluntary order—the hidden history that Walker uncovers in his fascinating second chapter—vanished in the advance of Progressive-era regulated capitalism.
Still, the innovative spirit did not die outright: Mainstream radio helped reinvent American life, and innovators outside the main current have surfaced now and again to stir the airwaves. It is on these “rebels” that Walker focuses. For example:
Lewis Hill, conscientious objector, dissatisfied radio broadcaster, creator of Berkeley, California’s infamous KPFA. In 1946, “no station like KPFA existed anywhere else in America. Over the next decades, its commentators would range from Trotskyists to Georgists to Caspar Weinberger; its music would range from opera to jazz to John Cage.”
In 1968, in Seattle, Washington, Lorenzo Milam turned a donut shop into a radio station where “a single day’s lineup might include both a special report from the front lines of the civil rights struggle and a 15-minute program produced by the White Citizens’ Council.”
Also in Texas, much more recently, Joe Ptak and Jeffrey “Zeal” Stefanoff ran a little radio station—Kind Radio—out of a garage. One a registered Democrat, the other a registered Republican, they had a loyal following in their town of San Marcos.
Businesses discourage the FCC from licensing low-power niche stations like these, and the government did shut Kind down. As a result, most radio is relatively uniform and boring.
Walker concedes that “today’s radio marketplace is open enough that the stations that survive in it are meeting somebody’s needs.” He has no wish to drive off the air “those two oxymorons, ‘classic rock’ and ‘young country,’ ” or even “ ‘easy listening,’ ‘adult contemporary,’ and the unlistenable concoction called ‘smooth jazz.’ ” After all, diversity and freedom demand tolerance. But, he asks, why not open up radio beyond these still rather constricted genres?
“A freer media landscape is possible,” Walker writes, “one that would allow us greater freedom to choose, to create, and to escape.”
Wirkman Virkkala is a writer living in the Pacific Northwest.
_________________________________________________________________ Is your PC infected? Get a FREE online computer virus scan from McAfee® Security. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963