"How wonderful, then, it was, to find this communality on the radio dial. Those of us who had a love for Joyce and the Beats and Marlowe and Bach and Dallapiccola and Telemann and Louis Armstrong and Blind Gary Davis and the Music of Macedonia had, at the same time, an antidote to the world that had suddenly gone off the track. Here was a voice of reason, one beamed at us with gentle calm, telling us that it was, indeed, wrong to destroy the country that we loved for a single, dark, knock-'em-dead world view."
My own introduction to Pacifica came very early in life. In our decidedly upper-middle-class L.A. Westside scene, supporting the Pacifica FM station KPFK was just one of those things people did, along with joining the ACLU and voting the straight Democratic slate. Scream all you want about rich liberals, but they gave money and money is what makes radio go. It puts the bop in the bop shu bop shu bop. It puts electrons into transmitters and keeps corrosion off antennas, not to mention brains. And so I recall many parties, and much earnest talk of the kinder, gentler revolution that rich liberals were into at that time.
From birth, I resonated with "the K." Even at age 7 or 8 I appreciated the kind of L.A. Bohemia which rallied around it. You know who I'm talking about. Topanga Canyon used to be full of them. They were the creative, working artists and writers with the KPFK bumper stickers on their VWs. Now the Bohemians are history, along with most of the liberals, apparently.
Not that much later on I got interested in the engineering side of KPFK. I met the chief engineer at one of the parties. He was a young guy, way older than me, but still a young guy; much younger and cooler than the aging military types who were teaching me radio at the time. He was justifiably proud of the K's flame-throwing transmitter, which at the time blasted an area larger than many of these here United States with a very nice signal indeed. Studios at the K have not always been exactly state of the art, but the transmitter was always world class -- a super-power RF output into a killer 4-bay antenna on the best site on the best mountain in SoCal. It slings so much juice into the Aether that the spacing on the 4-bay has to be degraded from optimum to keep a safe level out in the public street! But that's a whole nutter story.....
I love my K, and so I've thrown in my lot with the "Pacifica activist movement." I came to it late, and I've stepped on a lot of toes in my eagerness to get involved. The politics are often Byzantine, the personal rivalries are a minefield for the unsuspecting, and it often idealizes over the ugly turf battles and rivalries that have always lurked behind "Pacifica means peace," but know what? I don't care. I'll take one of Carol Spooner, Rafael Renteria, Robert Knight, or Lyn Gerry over 100 of Mary Francis Berry or Steve Yasko every time. They're bright, articulate, informed, and committed. They're my people.
And the people have to win this one. It's our last stand. It's that big.
"All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.
Pacifica means peace.
The Pacifica Foundation was started in 1946 by visionary Lew Hill, and a group of pacifists who were tired of their viewpoint always being ignored by mainstream media. Sound familiar?
Hill and company originally tried to build an AM station in the blue-collar San Francisco Bay Area town of Richmond, but that wasn't about to happen. Things improved fast when they washed up in nearby Berkeley, where new ideas were guaranteed support.
They also washed up on the FM band. FM, as some may know, was all hot to go as a huge commercial threat to AM radio's domination, until the entrenched AM broadcasters successfully lobbied the FCC to move its frequency band much higher in the radio spectrum.1
This, of course, crippled FM for a long time, cutting its potential coverage, and briefly ruining its commercial potential. It sounds very bad, but paradoxically it also allowed kind of a second golden age of radio, where anyone could start up a little station, and do esoteric, highbrow things on it. Nobody was going to buy an FM radio, which was still an esoteric and costly device, without a darn good reason. The audience was small, but fanatic; usually well-off financially, and considerably hipper than average. The growth of "hi-fi" was spurred by FM music, and modern jazz was given a huge boost. So, of course, was Pacifica.
Starting at KPFA in San Francisco, Pacifica put on the original experiment in listener-sponsored radio, where the audience chips in to keep alternative programing on the air. Nobody had tried this idea before, at least not with any success. This time, it worked. In time, KPFA could even afford to give away FM radios (which became far cheaper) with subscriptions over a certain amount.
There's a big difference between listener-sponsored radio and public broadcasting, or at least there used to be. (That, in fact, is just what the "Pacifica crisis" is about!) In public broadcasting, the listener coughs up taxes and/or pledges and the station takes the money and runs, throwing it into the bin with all their nice corporate underwriting. But public broadcasting hadn't even been invented yet, at least not in the United States. Lew Hill's Pacifica intended for the listeners to be real sponsors, to vote with their money and their input, and to help decide what went on the air. This caused a series of raucous, anarchistic, and wonderfully leftist structures that led ultimately to today's equally contentious "Local Advisory Boards."
Nobody's objective about the original KPFA. It's still on the air, and something of a national treasure, though it's showing some hard use around the edges. It remains fiercely independent, not only from mainstream broadcasting but even from Pacifica. Imagine this already rather awesome radio station and then stick the antenna in your vein and shoot it up. You've got 50s KPFA, in its heyday, and one hell of a radio station -- or so they tell me.
KPFA fought the law, and the law lost. Lew Hill's little station took on the McCarthy witch hunts almost alone, drawing heavy government investigation. It introduced the Beat Poets to the world, in a historic reading that not only put San Francisco on the counterculture map, but put Pacifica into many years of hot water at the FCC.
As new people came into KPFA, nothing was too far out. At a time when marijuana was considered the world's most dangerous drug, KPFA let four people smoke it on the air, attracting more than a little scrutiny from the cops. At a time when Communism was even worse than pot, it hired avowed Marxists and Stalinists2. At a time when few Americans outside the Beat circle had heard of Zen, KPFA ran the amazing lectures of Alan Watts. It ran them for 20 years. It only stopped because Watts died, and you can still catch the reruns.
It's hard to imagine in today's context, but KPFA was probably never envisioned as a radio voice for the American left. The "Pacifica Mission," as it is still called, always had a bit of inherent grantsmanship, and over the years it has deconstructed into more than a little wishful thinking. This, though, is good. It's probably what kept Pacifica going for 50 years. It made for a very mission-driven organization, to the point of evangelism. This still gives it all something of a dream. We need dreams, badly.
However, Hill, who came from a relatively well-off background, most likely intended KPFA less as a dream and more as a thinking person's talk station, one rather consciously intended as a US version of the BBC's classy "Third Programme." KPFA was less a protest against war than an attempt to understand why wars start and how to prevent the next one. As it developed, it was way more of a liberal than a radical vision, but that didn't last.
 ...a US version of BBC Third Programme |
The first, and very definitely not the last, personal turf war started within only 4 or 5 years of KPFA's first broadcast. More of a hard-left faction got in, displacing or uneasily co-existing with the original anarchists and pacifists who had started it all. This new faction's leader was the redoubtable Elsa Knight Thompson, who everyone either loved or hated. One of her first noteworthy achievements was to interview legendary singer (and legendary Stalinist) Paul Robeson on the air.
Power swung back and forth between Hill and Thompson, ultimately leading to a blow up when the government demanded that KPFA fire several "Reds." Hill eventually caved in and did, but he was overruled, at which point he killed himself. Lew Hill is still, as far as we know, the only person to die in a Pacifica power struggle, although it must be added that he suffered from a very painful form of spinal arthritis.
Pacifica continued on, more or less inventing the free-form FM that helped cause the sixties. It proved, once and for all, that listeners really could pay for a radio station. This lesson was not lost on others, especially those in the emerging movement for public radio. Pacifica grew to a network of five owned and operated stations, some with high-powered transmitters and very wide coverage. These are, in order of creation after KPFA: KPFK, Los Angeles; WBAI, New York; KPFT, Houston; and WPFW, District of Columbia.
Broadcasting is a paranoid industry. It's extremely vulnerable to various forms of government and corporate reprisals, and everyone reads the trade sheets before they feel safe going to the bathroom. Everyone, that is, except the old Pacifica. There, legal hassles were part of the business.
Pacifica spent two generations testing limits, attracting FCC fines, putting FBI raids onto the air live, and providing unpopular leftist or community groups with their only FM voices. Even in the face of staggering legal bills, even when the Klan blew up KPFT's 100 kW transmitter twice in a year, even when emergency fund drives were needed to pay for electricity, all five stations resisted the rating-driven public radio trough as much as possible, maintaining approximately 85% listener sponsorship. It worked. My Lord, it worked.
"They probably have Lew Hill's balls preserved in a jar on a shelf in Berkeley somewhere."
One thing I like about Pacifica is that it's older than I am. I get to be younger than something. That's not as easy as it once was.
Yes, by Pacifica standards, I'm kind of a kid. I missed a lot of the early issues, and I don't always know much about all the players in its perennial struggles. There are still a few people active on the Internet who actually had contact with the Lew Hills and Elsa Knight Thompsons, who I know mostly as folk legends of the American Left. For the rest of us that's what they are - legends, in a movement which needs all the heroes it can get.
I do know that Pacifica became a beacon, a catch-all, a protest, an ideological attic, and eventually a business, changing right along with US culture over the course of 50 years. Pacifica's many power struggles were and are the same ones that have rocked opposition politics in general. At the end of a tough century, both have ended up looking a bit shabby, but still full of inner strength and vitality.
Pacifica's history, then, is the history of post-modern American dissent. When the sixties' New Left came along, it rallied to Pacifica, often coming into conflict with the older generation of leftists. When the left fragmented, so did Pacifica. This, again paradoxically, actually improved the programming. Or, at least, my generation always thought it did. In retrospect, it is easy to agree with Clare Spark that all the turfing did nothing for staff harmony at Pacifica, and that it probably led to the rather confused and conflicted message of today's left. However, I still think it worked.
It's a process which Lew Hill had prophetically called the "audience of one" concept. This means that programmers are not drilled in the proper demographically calculated and focus-group-tested behavior. They are instructed to program for a hypothetical person that they want to reach. Artists relate to this on a visceral level, as it comprises basically the difference between art, or pleasing oneself, and commerce, or pleasing the most customers for the least financial outlay. It respects the audience, as well as the Muse.
It's not so much reductionism or multiculturalism as it is two-way radio, attempting to involve rather than entertain listeners. It's pure Pacifica. It led to a certain clutter in the programming schedules, as the communities fragmented, but it was for the most part a good clutter.
If the blacks wanted their own show, that spoke to their own community, instead of a bunch of white liberals telling them what they should be thinking, that was great. Give the blacks a show. As long as even one person was radicalized, made more aware, made more passionate, made empowered by what they heard, Pacifica's mission had been accomplished. One person. Just one soul saved from ignorant hell. That was enough. (That and the host's willingness to bring in a few bucks at fund drive time.)
If the gays wanted a show, same thing. Put 'em on. If the Latinos, Native Americans, feminists, consumer advocates, handicapped, Marxists, anarchists, even (shudder) Democrats wanted shows, well here they were.
Later on, this was called "Balkanization" and considered a bad thing. It wasn't a bad thing at all. It made Pacifica the closest thing America had to a truly vital opposition voice on FM. For better and worse, and there was plenty of worse, one lived for that single minute when it all worked. It made your hair stand up. It proved the incredible power of this little medium called radio, as it rallied communities, built alliances, shook things up, made things happen, spoke truth to power, and gave power to the powerless. Sure, one needed a program schedule to sort it all out, but hey, that's one more reason to pay up. It's always been worth the preaching, hipness, and moral high-grounding to hear the good stuff. That's Pacifica. It's messy.
Like democracy.
"The information nation took their clues from all the sound-bite gluttons.
Nineteen eighty, eighty-four, eighty-eight, ninety-two too, too.
How to be what you can be, jump jam junking your energies.
How to walk in dignity with throw-up on your shoes
They amplified the autumn, Nineteen seventy-nine.
Calculate the capital, up the republic my skinny ass.
T.V. tells a million lies. The paper's terrified to report
anything that isn't handed on a presidential spoon,
I'm just profoundly frustrated by all this. So, fuck you, man. (fuck 'm)"
So what happened? How did we get from there, the messy 70s Pacifica, to here, the radio version of Ground Zero?
Historically, Pacifica suffered from two major problems. The first was turfing, a process most likely inherent to Balkanization, and one reflecting the general entropy seen in the post-modern left, where (as Che said) "A firing squad would stand in a circle, rifles pointing in."
People invest a lot of ego in Pacifica. Different programmers try to take over the station, to carve out fiefdoms, and then to fight over turf. They have passions, egos, and careers to advance. They're people. Consequently, they tend to get along just about as badly as, well, the Balkans.
The other problem was poverty. Pacifica studios were traditionally pig stys. The stations gained an incredible windfall when the FCC allowed them to rent out subcarriers, but they never saw a penny of it. The national kept it. The national executive types got delusions of being a real network, hanging out in DC, taking trips, schmoozing, being PLAYERS. Bye bye subcarrier money. Make do with your broken turntable for a few more years......
Pacifica, then, has always read like a bad soap opera, punctuated by gag rules, mass firings, strikes, lockouts, and stations leaving the air for weeks at a time. Groups on the outs would perennially scheme against the in crowd. If this sounds like now, well, yes. This is definitely not the first time around for banning and firing at Pacifica!
But there was always hope. Everyone knew that at least it couldn't get worse. Then, right about when I went to grad school and got serious about some of this stuff, it got worse.
We've put the "Pacifica crisis" into a historical context, but we must also give it a political one. In a phrase: rightward drift. Conservative Republicans found a convenient straw man in "liberal media." The harder it got to actually find any liberal media, the more the abstracted concept seemed to resonate. People found something to blame, besides their own apathy and greed, for the general decline of whatever they thought was in general decline. And so the right hammered away, year after year, ultimately eroding all resistance. Pressure grew for big changes in community radio. Pacifica's always uneasy balance of power shifted one more time, and farther from even the 70s mission, let alone the 50s one.
Clearly, it was all about to blow. Blow it did, when someone leaked the infamous Palmer Letter to Berkeley media activist Andrea Buffa. This memo suggested the possible sale of WBAI, and format changes at KPFA, the staff of which went absolutely ballistic. Berry sent in Garland Ganter, Houston's proven hit-man, to straighten the whiny old California lefties out. Berry, Chadwick, and Ganter tried everything, leading to an extended lockout, a boarding-up of the studio, a dissident campout in the street, many arrests, and finally the biggest demonstration in Berkeley since Viet Nam.
The Free Pacifica movement came of age right here. The strategy called "turn up the heat and cut off the water" began. From this time on, people were going to fight, by any means necessary. There would be direct action and boycott, not to mention two more legal suits. Ganter slunk back to Houston. Finally, in 2002, he took his golden parachute and got out of the way.
Pacifica's Draconian gag rule, which prohibited even discussion of internal matters outside the stations, made the Internet the central nervous system of a growing alliance. This is quite noteworthy, as it is probably the first time this net was used to bring about a political change. Isolated protest groups in the five cities suddenly found out they weren't isolated any more. People in Texas discovered there were people in San Francisco and Los Angeles and New York and DC, and vice versa. Suddenly, everyone was thinking globally and acting locally.
This was empowering. It was potent. It made for an incredibly powerful rush. Working activists could see themselves making a difference, and they could talk about it, organize, and socialize. It was amazing. Wherever you went, everyone was using the same words. We were all on the same page. This was the future.
All this had probably really started way back in 1995, a time of organizing throughout Pacifica, when union steward Lyn Gerry was fired in one of that station's inhuman purges. Poor Lyn lost not only her job, but, in best Stalinist practice, her history. KPFK manager Mark Schubb and his circle of friends banned her, her friends, her mention, her memory, and even her photograph from the building. Lesser persons would have been beaten. Lyn wasn't. She didn't mourn. She organized.
 ...banned... even her photograph from the building...
|
Gerry went to work with an unshakeable determination, talking to people, writing her butt off, collecting every scrap of information from everywhere, and literally teaching herself the World Wide Web from the bottom up. She began posting everything, gigabytes of it, to Free Pacifica on Radio4all, an enormous information archive for the whole movement. Lyn stopped updating it after the legal settlement, and the link to it is currently broken. Too bad, because it's the Library of Congress for the Pacifica movement. Moreover, it is perhaps the definitive example anywhere of the uses of information technology in grass-roots, bottom-up, politics. It's remarkable.
With this kind of computer savvy, and with the post-1999 anger to carry people along, the Pacifica movement was winning, but they didn't know it yet. Perhaps Pacifica's hijackers, by then a sleazy DC clique of vaguely Enron-type wannabe players, suspected as much. By 2000, they were into a Fuehrerbunker mentality, fleeing Berkeley for a new DC headquarters literally in the dead of night, churning weird alliances, and wildly hatching weirder business schemes with anyone out there who would take a retainer.
Ultimately, they tried to fire the audience and hire a sexy, rich, demographically correct new one. It didn't work, because Pacifica does not fire the audience. That's not how the rules go.
The audience fires them.
That is how the rules go.
You're fired.
"We will get by,
We will get by,
We will get by,
We will survive!"
Around this point, someone said that Pacifica's descent into the 13th sub-pit of sectarian leftist Hell would surely reveal the character of all involved. Truer words were never spoken. Some people became great, some had greatness thrust upon them, and some turned out mostly to have great personality flaws. We were treated to the best radio soap ever.
Finally, Lew Hill got his answer on why people go to war. It's a positive feedback loop, where one lousy behavior reinforces another, and nobody wants to be the one who just calls the damn process off. Even when people become aware that their behavior is digging a deep hole, the usual response is to dig faster. At least these two insights fulfilled that much of Pacifica's mission!
In retrospect, we can see this as a rather timely lesson, coming as it did in late 2000, just when the American war party was quietly and effectively siezing the government. One of the few noteworthy critics of this process was Amy Goodman, a courageous and incisive newscaster that Pacifica was lucky enough to have hired. She spirited Nader into the Republican convention, and put Clinton up against the wall in an election-day phone interview. He held his own for around 20 minutes, but was forced well off-message.
Any serious news organization would have promptly given her an office and a staff. What Pacifica did, though, was to repeatedly threaten her with termination. Employees were allowed to call her a "white bitch slave," fight her physically over her camera, and scare her to the point where, for reasons that depend on which side you believe, she finally decided to make her show outside WBAI and its hostile workplace. At this point, all ambiguity stopped. Pacifica simply dropped her from the payroll - and the air.
Character was being tested everywhere. One national officer was "outed," by the Pacifica Campaign, amid subjective and somewhat questionable accusations of "web pornography." He resigned, amid a justifiable howl of homophobia. Another officer blew a fortune on lawyers, security guards, surveillance cameras, and PR companies. She was fired, amid charges of racism. As if by magic, a $600,000 surplus instantly turned into $4.8 million in debts. Purges continued apace at the bleeding local stations, where more people DIDN'T work than did. Everywhere you looked on the Internet, there was another show being done in exile.
By December of 2001, checkmate was at hand. There were now four lawsuits pending. The dissidents' boycott and litigation were working, and the war was over for lack of money. Even so, the foundation would probably have collapsed, imploded, simply vaporized, had Bob Farrell not pulled off the political miracle of his life.
Farrell, like everyone by then, had kind of a bizarre past. He'd been a somewhat embattled Los Angeles councilman for many years. He'd also knocked around the Byzantine politics of L.A.'s local ADA and the KPFK LAB, which had also tried to recall him. In 2001, he backed into the National Board chair, and promptly began writing peace initiatives, trying to start any kind of a dialog. Nobody believed him at first, but he kept at it, and the lawyers and mediator types finally scheduled some talks.
The third time everyone got together, they actually managed to whack out a legal settlement for the four suits, and the national board resigned en masse (a primary aim of the activists). Nobody could believe it. Just like that, after seven years, it was over, and the activists were in a good position to finish it. Carol Spooner, a lead plaintiff, called it her most intense experience since giving birth to her children.
Unfortunately, 2002 became one of those cases where a revolution snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Rather than switch to a peacetime mode, many of the scrappy Pacifica activists simply turned on one another. New friendships, and even some old ones, turned to new animosities. The Internet became a depressing source of daily battles, misunderstandings, semantic disputes, zero-sum turfings, and dueling agendas, usually hiding behind some fanciful interpretation of the Pacifica mission. The bylaw revision became a sectarian quarrel over identity politics, and ground on for month after expensive and draining month.
Several years and two bitter elections later, the dogs of war are still loose. No one's talking. WBAI is perhaps the most dysfunctional station, with severe financial problems, imploding listenership, and a truly toxic atmosphere for staff and volunteers alike. In a startling reversal from the Schubb era, KPFK is perhaps the best functioning station at the moment, with heroic fund drives and kind of a fatigued peace setting in.
However, it remains hard to sort out reality from Internet illusion. History might or might not record that we who lived by the Net, 'died' by the net. It's just too soon to tell. This whole thing continues to read like a Shakespeare tragedy, and we are only in Act II.
Stay tuned for Act III!
Notes:
1. FM broadcasting was invented by Major Armstrong in the 1930s, and in 1940 it was given an allocation at 43-50 MHz. In 1945, when consumer electronics restarted after the war, this range was given to TV channel 1 (yes, Virginia, there WAS a Channel One), and FM was moved to its current 88-108 MHz, on the rather flimsy pretext that the lower range had a problem with long-distance "skip" interference. (Indeed, skip might have been a minor annoyance for a few winter months every 11 years. Meanwhile, AM has this same effect nightly.)
Legal fights with FM broadcasters continued for years, keeping TV stations from ever using Channel One, and by 1948 the FCC had reassigned 43-50 MHz to land-mobile 2-way radio (police, fire departments, tow trucks, and the like, whose weak signals have a worse "skip" problem than high-power entertainment broadcasting ever would have). In the 1970s, small portions around 46 and 48 MHz were given to the first generation of cordless phones, baby monitors, toy walkie-talkies, and the like. (back)
2. I am not a Stalinist, being much more convinced by the school of socialist thought that argues the USSR was fundamentally flawed by trusting a top-down system to wither away when its work was done. Neither, though, am I a Red-baiter, being essentially a Red from a family of Reds, and I will continue to defend every left winger's right to work at a radio station, just as I would defend Rush's. (back)
3. I'm not ignoring the fact that the Local Station Boards are often quite dysfunctional. Since they elect the national board, it would be a very good idea to watch them closely, or even participate. (back)
El pueblo! Unido! Jamás será vencido!
Minor update 1/14/06