Recovering Community Radio At Pacifica

by David Bacon, Free Press Contributor

At seven a.m. on Thursday morning, the insistent twang of Philip Maldari once again crossed that inch of airspace between lips and microphone, beamed out over the transmitter high in the Berkeley hills, and welcomed listeners to KPFA's morning show.

The staff is back on the air. Armed palookas no longer sit in rumpled suits in the lobby, checking every person in and out. The hated gag rule is gone, defeated by on-air civil disobedience which finally let the listeners know the truth about the struggle over the station's direction and control.

Three weeks ago the Pacifica Foundation, which owns KPFA's license, locked the staff out of the station in an incredible night which saw its two news directors, Aileen Alfandary and Mark Mericle, arrested for trespassing as they sat in the newsroom fielding calls from reporters from coast to coast. Fifty-two others were arrested along with them, including Dennis Bernstein, yanked off the air and suspended after broadcasting a press conference on the daily newsmagazine Flashpoints, which talked about previous arrests at the station.

The arrests and lockout galvanized an already angry community. By the weekend before the lockout's end, fifteen thousand people had marched through Berkeley streets to protest Pacifica's campaign against the station. They were led by the station's staff -- paid and unpaid programmers walking together, older white news reporters beside young hiphop apprentices, African-American program producers in step with union stewards.

It was a clear demonstration of the source of the pressure which forced the reopening of the station -- community power.

But the end of the lockout is more a truce than an end to the conflict. The station is more threatened now than ever. Despite months of denials by Pacifica board chair Mary Francis Berry that there were any plans for KPFA's sale, two day-long conference-call board meetings in early July were held to discuss various scenarios for selling the Berkeley license, or possibly that of New York's WBAI. The board decided it would eventually choose between various sale options.

Three board members dissented, including LA's Rabbi Aaron Kriegel. Pete Bramson, another board member, says he was called a "fascist thug" for his opposition, and finally blew the lid at a press conference in front of the Berkeley station.

Profound Differences Remain

The station may also be close to going broke, a bitter irony. Last spring, the staff, while fighting with Pacifica, raised $600,000 in its fundraising marathon -- more money than ever before in KPFA's history. But most listeners checked a box on the pledge form devised by staff, stating they were pledging under protest. Pacifica then wrote them all a letter saying the foundation couldn't accept money under those conditions. Listeners were even more disaffected by the lockout, and pledge cancellations are pouring in.

The lockout's end has resolved none of the underlying issues in a conflict which has not only engulfed the Berkeley station, but rages in New York and licks at the doors of Los Angeles' KPFK. The conflict is unlikely to be settled easily or quickly. The differences between the foundation and its opponents in the local listening areas are profound.

Pacifica's ideology is ill-defined, but its view of how to create an alternative media network is clear. Control over programming and the allocation of resources has become concentrated in the foundation, a reverse from early days when station managers in the five-station chain chose a Pacifica director who had little power.

Now Pacifica's budget eats up 17% of revenues collected from listeners, up from 4% two decades ago. It depends increasingly on revenue sources independent of listener contributions. That's always been anathema at Pacifica, which prided itself on the absence of financial strings which could restrict the sometimes freewheeling leftwing politics of programmers.

Some national Pacifica programs, like Democracy Now!, produce award-winning investigative journalism. But many syndicated shows on the national feed have been sleepers -- interview programs concentrating heavily on the personalities of their hosts. In the Pacifica plan, stations are pushed to become outlets for political content created centrally, rather than material originating in local communities. In a paternalistic style, talking heads define issues, provide what they see as an alternative view, and expect local communities to accept it with little input.

It's a far cry from the original vision of community radio.

Challenging Intellectual Suffocation

KPFA is the U.S.'s oldest community broadcaster. Its founders saw it as a free speech forum which could challenge the intellectual suffocation of McCarthyism. In the 1960s and 70s, Pacifica stations became more radical, giving a microphone to growing social civil rights and anti-war protests, while building an alternative media institution. In the wake of Watergate, Pacifica programmers regularly broke stories exposing the abuse of power, often long before mainstream outlets would touch them.

Programming has always been uneven. Some programmers were long on politics and short on production skills. Debates have raged between advocates of more music and public affairs documentaries. But behind the sometimes messy debates is a core philosophy: Community radio stations need to identify the various diverse constituencies in their local listening area. The stations exist, not to serve the paternalism of a progressive elite, but to concentrate on those who have been locked out of the mainstream -- minorities, immigrants, workers and labor, gays and lesbians, intellectual radicals and political leftists.

Community radio gives those communities access to the airwaves. They in turn support it. That's what makes it different from National Public Radio. Success is measured not just in the number of listeners, but in the kind of base the station builds in the communities it serves.

In the last decade, however, critics increasingly indicted the programming as being irrelevant to most people. They pointed to low production values as proof of their contention that not just technical skills, but programming itself, should become more mainstream.

These critics eventually became Pacifica managers -- David Salniker, Pat Scott, and now Lynn Chadwick and Mary Frances Berry. But even with Pacifica's growing power, it wasn't easy for them to change the stations' political direction.

More control over programming required more control over the staff. As KPFA station manager, Pat Scott first tried to make key Flashpoints programmers into temporary contract employees. Then, as Pacifica director, she hired the American Consulting Group, a notorious firm of union busters, to develop a negotiating strategy to the same end. As a result, Pacifica walked into bargaining at all three union stations four years ago with the same set of proposals -- to make newly hired programmers into at-will employees, who could then be fired at any time. She sought as well to separate the paid from unpaid staff, excluding the volunteers from the union in Berkeley and trying to do so in New York.

Reformatting programming also provided a vehicle for removing staff unwilling to go along with the new direction, and brought massive layoffs to Los Angeles especially.

The mainstream push on programming, the fight for control over staff, and the centralization of power in the foundation, all proceeded simultaneously, while the institution of the gag rule kept listeners out of the loop as the conflict progressed. It's not surprising, therefore, that the large stations in Berkeley, New York and Los Angeles have been rocked by labor strife as a consequence. These are deep-rooted conflicts, and will not evaporate simply because the staff is back on the air in Berkeley.

Minority Staffing at Issue

Berry has continually criticized KPFA for having an audience of 200,000 people in a media market of over 4 million, accusing the staff of lacking diversity and being unconcerned with reaching out to communities of color. African-American and Asian/Pacific Islander programmers responded with statements criticizing her for manipulating the issue.

The union contract at the station has strong affirmative action language, including staff hiring committees -- provisions which Pacifica negotiators sought to weaken. KPFA's minority apprenticeship program, instrumental in teaching broadcast skills to young people of color, is graduating its 20th class. Nothing like it exists elsewhere in the Pacifica network.

Outreach by African-American, Latino and Asian/Pacific Islander staff members has brought crowds of listeners down to the demonstrations in front of KPFA, where a microtransmitter broadcast programming to the surrounding neighborhood. In a recent labor rally, more than 20 unions spoke in solidarity with the staff, along with an official representative of the state AFL-CIO. Four Bay Area labor councils and numerous local unions have passed resolutions in support. One of them -- from District Council 57 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees -- was greeted with particular enthusiasm. AFSCME's national secretary-treasurer, Bill Lucy, is a member of the Pacifica board.

This outpouring of local community support provided the political muscle which forced Pacifica to end the lockout.

But the communities which support the station do need more input into programming decisions, especially because the ongoing crisis can only be resolved with their financial and political support. The station not only has to broadcast to them, but has to use the power of the airwaves to help organize them in its defense. KPFA's staff of color have called for the reestablishment of the third world and women's departments, abolished by previous Pacifica managers in the mainstream push.

The attack on KPFA's staff, by managers who say ending job security is the key to better programming, must be stopped. Making long-term commitments to in-depth programming requires cooperation from the station and Pacifica to the people whose work provides it.

And that work is done by both paid and unpaid staff, who managed to hold together throughout this dispute, despite the efforts of Pacifica for years to pit them against each other. Stations like KPFA can't survive using just paid staff members, nor should they. One of the strengths of community radio is its accessibility to people dedicated to learning the skills and making a commitment. A more democratic system for making programming decisions should give weight to them all.

The return of the staff is an opportunity to do more than defeat Pacifica's drift to the right. It is a chance to redefine what community radio means, far beyond the Bay Area. Hiphop programmer Davey D warns that "if KPFA falls, all the other stations around the country will fall with it." By the same token, KPFA can help remake community radio. It could provide an alternative to Pacifica's top-down conservatism, creating a real network of stations based in local communities, linked by a common progressive outlook.

"We have some restructuring to do," says Khalil Jacobs-Fantauzzi of the station's steering committee, "not just at KPFA, but at Pacifica itself."

It's time to see what community radio can really do.