In re: Is There a Future for Pacifica? by Susan J. Douglas

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=3D20020415&s=3Ddouglas

----- Original Message -----
From: Carol Spooner
To: letters@thenation.com

Sent: Monday, April 01, 2002 10:28 AM

Subject: Is There a Future for Pacifica?

Editor --

One non-trivial fact left out of Susan Douglas' 4/15 report is that the California Attorney General brought suit against the old Pacifica board for breach of charitable trust and violations of California nonprofit laws, including illegal bylaws amendments, among other things. This was a rare move, undertaken after a lengthy petition and briefing process, as well as an investigation and report from the California Joint Legislative Audit Committee, issued in June 2000, detailing many abuses and breaches of California non-profit law by the old board and management. (Pacifica is a California nonprofit public benefit corporation.)

Another unreported fact is that the old board had directors & officers liability insurance to cover their legal defense at little or no expense to the Pacifica Foundation, but chose to hire a law firm in which former director John Murdock is a partner, Epstein, Becker & Green, in addition to the law firms provided by the insurance carrier. It now appears that the insurance carrier will pay the bulk of the legal fees charged by the other three law firms that represented Pacifica -- but not the more than $1 million in fees charged by EB&G.

Serious issues confront Pacifica about how best to fulfill the anti-war /anti-racist purposes set forth in our 53-year-old charter in the current media/political world. And those issues will now be decided by those who are not bent on bankrupting Pacifica if they can't control it. I do believe it is a question worth asking: why were the old board/management willing to bankrupt Pacifica if they couldn't control it? The decade-long fight for Pacifica took place in a media context that saw the defanging and commercialization of most of "liberal public radio" -- after Congress' threats to de-fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the early '90s using Pacifica as an excuse (NPR stations were asked to fill out a questionnaire identifying all of their employees who had ever worked for Pacifica) -- as well as mega-mergers in the commercial sector. This context should not be ignored, and I hope someday someone will write a truly comprehensive analysis of the CPB role in the Pacifica fight, as well as the transformation of "public broadcasting" in general.

Incidentally, I do believe that expanding audiences and journalistic integrity are worthy noncontradictory goals for Pacifica, as do most who fought the old board paradigm which largely failed on both counts. I doubt that any of us quoted by Susan Douglas said otherwise. Now it may be possible to rebuild Pacifica keeping both those goals in mind.

Carol Spooner
Interim Director, Pacifica Foundation

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