In his February 15th farewell, Saul Landau concedes nothing, and misrepresents and gives a rightwing touch to practically every matter he addresses. He can't even cite accurately my criticism of his "stop bashing the management" letter of February 2000. He says, and repeats in an exchange with Marc Cooper, that one left intellectual (referring to me) "called me 'the most divisive figure on the left since the end of the cold war." What I said was that his was the "most divisive and destructive-of-the-left initiative taken by any progressive in many years." I stand by that statement.
Landau now describes the management to which he gave de facto support "hapless and witless"--it "reeked of incompetence at best." And "I had no good words to say then or now about Pacifica's board or management." But back at the time of his anti-bashing letter he was kinder--it has "lapses in judgment and [made] resulting mistakes." If it reeked of incompetence wouldn't it be appropriate to bash it?
Landau pretends that throughout the long struggle he has been above the battle--"I had written one email asking friends to help stop the war against Pacifica." He wanted to "to try to settle this in a different way." This is a gross deception in that he solicited signatures to his petition, circulated it widely, and while bashing opponents of the management for attacking it, he failed to suggest anything the management might do to settle the problem. In fact, several original signers of the Landau petition publicly withdrew support and apologized to the resistance movement after learning the real facts.
Former Pacifica chair Mary Berry used his letter quite effectively to protect management against its critics. Landau and his friends did nothing further to settle the matter in a different way, and he was, and remains, opposed to the way that a resolution was pursued, a set of strategies which has been successful in dislodging the former board majority (a board which has indeed plundered the network and left it with a nearly 5 million dollar debt). So it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Landau didn't find much wrong with the work of that ousted management, which merely suffered from "lapses in judgment" in his 2000 version, only deteriorating to reeking of incompetence ex post.
Landau still labels the management's mistakes simple matters of incompetence, and he claims that the "charges that they planned to sell Pacifica stations or plotted to corporatize the network and make it mainstream [are] ridiculous." But nobody has said that the former board "planned" to sell the stations, only that they discussed it and considered it as a serious option--and there is solid evidence for that. They didn't "plot" to corporatize and mainstream, they actually DID those things, as evidenced by their market-share emphasis, their links to NPR and the CPB, the gradual attrition of a left presence on the air, their crackdowns on KPFA and WBAI, their attack on Amy Goodman, their managerial selections (Wash, Ganter, Leid, Yasko), and their significant mainstreaming, music-format program changes in Washington and Houston. Landau seems to think that because he and Cooper were still there that nothing substantive had happened--till the axe fell on himself!
Landau grieves that a "progressive news institution" has been "killed by angry and righteous people who have waged a virtual Jihad..." And four of five station managers have been fired, including Mark Schubb, "without cause." What is interesting is how Landau can wax indignant over these firings, having been completely silent over the hundreds of firings of programmers by the "hapless and witless" Pacifica management over the past several years. The station managers fired now, allegedly without cause, were in fact the willing instruments of Landau's witless management, which had a political agenda obvious to anybody not engaged in massive self-deception.
The victims of the old management were unworthy for Landau; only the victims of the new management, representing the people who were "bashing" the displaced witless management, arouse his emotions. If his friend Schubb fired scores of people, enforced an undemocratic gag rule, cooperated fully with the witless management, even coming to Washington to a meeting to advise Amy Goodman on how she must straighten out her program--in substance as well as style—the firing was for Landau was "without cause," as presumably the firing of former KPFA station manager Nicole Sawaya, former Pacifica Network News Director Dan Coughlin, national PNN correspondent Larry Bensky, and countless others, was for good cause—otherwise why Landau's silence when they were pushed out?
Landau is indignant at the "very ugly" methods used by the progressive opposition to oust the old management, such as, in his words, "screaming and shouting," "picketing the homes" of board members, etc. Yet Landau has never found anything ugly about the methods of that management in its hiring of local police, its use of surveillance cameras and information-gathering security companies, its forcible seizure of control of KPFA and the midnight takeover of WBAI, its rapid firing of personnel across the entire network, its reliance on oppressive gag rules which were used indiscriminately against progressives at each station but never against those supporting the old management, and so on.
Landau does not have a critical word about the old management's squandering of millions for Beltway lawyers, corporate credit cards for staffers, bloated parachute deals and exorbitant fees for public-relations companies which fended off the opposition—his only anger is aimed at oppositional tactics. And in expressing that anger Landau sounds so much like the mainstream media lambasting those protesters at Seattle, Washington D.C., Quebec, and Genoa!
Landau asks why instead of helping "destroy one of its few institutions" [PNN] the Left doesn't picket Enron or the White House, why it attacks him "instead of attacking real political and economic power." Landau simply doesn't get it! We need our own media--urgently--to help fight that real political and economic power. Landau was helping destroy, by integration into that "political and economic power" structure, one of the most important left institutions, Pacifica. The task of fighting him and his crew and their "hapless management" was an essential one for the Left to position it for fighting economic power in the future.
It is a bit ironic that Saul Landau's head should roll, after his long alignment with the Pacifica management and hijackers, and his complete silence as HIS "Pacifica" fired hundreds of paid and unpaid staff. It is also ironic that the extravagance and waste of his Pacifica resulted in a financial crisis that is claiming him as one victim. But losing Landau is a small price to pay for this victory for a left and democratic media.
P.S. Another revealing feature of Landau's thinking on Pacifica, which was made clear in his exchange with Marc Cooper on Cooper's program of Friday, February 15, is its profoundly undemocratic character. He tells Cooper that radio is democratic and participatory because "if you don't like what you're hearing—you change the station." He finds it "ridiculous to try to say get the listening audience to vote," because the members come and go and differ in interest and passion. This, of course, is a rationale for leaving control in the hands of a self-perpetuating elite, as in the case of the hijackers now deposed at Pacifica. Their control was presumably consistent with democracy because people can change stations and therefore exercise control anyway!
This is a variant of the "active audience" model that apologists for the mainstream media developed some years back to prove that it doesn't really matter if Murdoch and Time Warner control the media, because the audience is "active" and will read programs their own way, and they can change stations. But critics of that model made the obvious rejoinder that control is very important as it represents sovereignty and the ability to fix the agenda and work audiences over at sovereign discretion, maybe in the service of advertisers, maybe to a political party or government. The hope of Pacifica was that sovereign control by local audiences and employees would allow local interests to be expressed and a progressive agenda to be heard. Freedom of choice of channels without a station or network with a local participation and a progressive agenda leaves important audiences bereft of options. Landau misses this point, among others. But his Authoritarian perspective on control, writing off direct audience participation and effectively rationalizing self-perpetuating elite control from above, is striking.