Source: Article in Los Angeles Weekly, 3/21
I was all set to write a serious piece of journalism, reviewing the long-awaited Los Angeles Weekly story about the latest KPFK/Pacifica wars. You know, I'd sit down to a rather routine task of correcting the occasional factual error, rebutting a quote or two, you know, making a dignified little piece for the web site.
Plop.
As I sank ever deeper into the stinking, oozy field pastry that Ella Taylor dropped into far too much of the Weakly's newshole, I realized that nothing resembling journalism was happening here. As the stuff piled up in her labored, agonized, protracted lead on how much she wanted to take the high road and couldn't, I realized that I, too, would have to venture out beyond the cattle guard, and into the rather mushy grass.
Taylor's sodden attempt at transparent straw-man dirtying and brown-pie-flinging was obviously intended from the start as a rant; a screed; a written version of what gorillas do when they get mad. There is next to no journalism here. It's just about the steamiest, warmest, most calculated moose pie since that one Utah Phillips gave his co-workers on the railroad. This time, though, I won't get stuck writing for the Weakly if I bitch about it. Therefore:
POOOOOOOP!
Juvenile? So was this article. It would have been about a B+ job in our middle school paper. Cliche follows cliche about the "Pacifica Movement," and as the brown stuff piles up, one thing comes all too clear. This is barely even Ella Taylor's writing at all. Oh, she put the words together and handed the thing in, but it's got the nasty touch of the venomous Marc Cooper all through it.
It's Frauds of KPFK all over again. This great radio station, Ella would have you believe, was the best thing on the air, climaxing daily in the marvelous gathering of like-minded pundits called the Marc Cooper Show (yayyyyyyyy!), and as a consequence the K was well on its way to grabbing bigger drive-time CUMEs than all of Clear Channel Radio put together. But then came (ssssssssss!) those scraggly-ass barbarians (that's us), and now the K will be lucky to have a single listener left.
Do I exaggerate? Not much. Consider this quote; prime Cooper/Schubb "Radio is an appliance" rhetoric:
"Schubb is infuriated by the thought that the balkanized programming he so painstakingly dismantled will return to KPFK as a result of such woolly and condescending thinking about how ethnic minorities use radio. "I'm sure," he says dryly, "that if you're a janitor working a 10-hour job and then another in some fast-food place, you want to come home and listen to the Marxist Struggle Hour or the Latvian Accordion Hour on KPFK.""
POOOOOOOP!
Or this one; even better:
"To me her response was dispiritingly emblematic of the defensive maneuvers of a far left that has been spinning its wheels on vulgar-Marxist doctrine of the oppressors and the oppressed since the '60s. Cocooned in monastic disengagement, its adherents are hanging on for dear life to a set of rigid and often obsolete principles so as to avoid contamination by the evil corporate empire."
POOOOOOOP!
Nobody bashes the left like Ella, Marc, and their whole, overwrought posse. With leftists like them around, the FBI can save its tax dollars.
It's not worth even wasting any more of my bandwidth on this stuff. Let me leave you with the clincher, the chase, the proof that this is nothing more than a puff piece coming from the same old Nation/L.A. Weekly wannabe-pundit clique which never got over losing its former 17 of KPFK's 20 weekly drive-time public affairs hours:
" The jewel in the crown was drive-time public affairs: Cooper's daily show, plus Radio Nation, his weekly collaboration with The Nation magazine (He also writes a column for L.A. Weekly.); Jon Wiener's, Suzi Weissman's and Joe Domanick's early-evening drive-time shows. (Full disclosure: I occasionally contribute film commentary on Wiener's show.) "
At least she's honest. I'm honest too. I consider this whole incestuous thing biomass, and I can't even burn it for electricity.
POOOOOOOP!
Goodbye.