RIDING THE
WAVES AT PACIFICA RADIO
By Andrew
Leslie Phillips
A native of Australia, Andrew spent seven years in Papua New
Guinea as a government patrol officer, radio journalist and filmmaker before
coming to New York in 1975. He produced award-winning investigative radio documentaries
on a wide range of environmental and political issues for the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation, and WBAI Community Radio in New York City. He taught
journalism, radio and “sound image” as an adjunct professor at New York
University for 10 years. He is permaculture teacher and was interim general manager
at KPFA, Pacifica Radio in Berkeley (2011-20013).
The Pacifica
foundation was founded in 1946 by poet and journalist Lewis Hill and a small
group of pacifists, intellectuals and experienced radio people They did not
have the same political or economic philosophy but shared a vision which
supported a peaceful world, social justice and creativity. At 3pm, April 15,
1949, Lew hill sat behind the microphone and announced: "This is KPFA,
listener sponsored radio in Berkeley, the first such radio station in the
world”.
At the time, less than nine-percent of the Bay area radio audience owned
new FM receivers and Pacifica gave them a special KPFA radio with 94.1 on the
FM dial, to get people tuned in. FM was a new, technology and Pacifica was
backing the future and inventing an entirely new funding mechanism - the theory
of listener sponsorship.
It was daring, audacious and brilliant. And it caught on. Today there
are Pacifica radio stations in five of the ten top radio markets[1]
The concept of listener sponsorship appealed to the politically savvy
and zealously left-leaning progressive community in the Bay Area. They were
happy to support a radical alternative to the commercial pablum, incipient
McCarthyism and the atomic bomb Cold War politics of the 1950’s. The social,
political and cultural leadership eagerly sought the free access offered by
KPFA as they do to this day. Today the audience is more diverse reflecting the
milieu.
Equality of access to airtime has always been at the center of
controversy at Pacifica and community radio everywhere. Most on-air people at
Pacifica were not paid until the mid 1990’s. They volunteered and they made
money to support the Foundation by pitching their programming on free-speech
Pacifica radio. That was the deal. It was a tacit agreement – Pacifica provides
opportunity and access whilst producers agree to pitch and encourage on air
pledges. By far the largest percentage of financial support for Pacifica still comes
from listener donations.
This model changed in the mid-nineties when the National Federation of
Community Broadcasters under Lynn Chadwick and David Le Page, adopted the
so-called Healthy Stations Project. Lynn
Chadwick later worked at Pacifica as Executive Director during the disastrous
1999 shutdown and police raid at KPFA.
The Health Station Project
called for reducing the power of volunteers, professionalizing the on-air sound
and adopting more paid on-air producers. It was a model more like National
Pubic Radio than community radio. It was designed to increase listenership and
revenue for community radio and also increase the amount of money the CPB might
potentially give stations.
Programming was “professionalized” and moderated; made less abrasive, music
more homogeneous, more consistent. It was an idea derived from NPR programming
consultants. The mission was consistency in programming, to smooth the rough
edges. The same consultants would go on to advise Pacifica when in November
1996, Pacifica lead by former KPFA manager and then Executive Director, Pat
Scott rolled out Vision for Pacifica Radio Creating a Network for the 21st Century – A Strategic 5 Year Plan.
The Strategic Plan was impractical and showed little understanding of
the realpolitiks of the five stations. It led to more expenses and the need to
raise money to feed the beast and make pay roll. It created a two-tiered system
of paid and unpaid staff. It encouraged a-them-and-us culture. Volunteers
subsidized paid staff since they pitched to raise money and met their own
work-related expenses, while paid staff received a salary and full health
benefits. It was and continues to be unfair. The "old hippie
paradigm" of diverse programming and volunteer-based management disappeared
a long time ago. Today, paid staff call the shots and the community is less a
part of community radio than it used to be.
The Healthy Station Project
didn’t go over well with Pacifica’s volunteers and in 1996 spawned the
Grassroots Radio Coalition, which was a reaction against the increasing
commercialization of public radio and lack of support for volunteer-based
stations. The Coalition is stronger than ever today and grass roots community radio
presses on while Healthy Station Project
stations like the Pacifica network, are floundering.
Today the five Pacifica stations revolve in a loose orbit around the
Pacifica mother ship based in Berkeley California. Sometimes the orbit gets
wobbly. Pacifica owns the FCC license for all five stations and the non-profit
501(c)(3) status. The five stations work under aegis of the Pacifica
Foundation. Ultimate authority is held by a board of directors elected from
local station boards. Perhaps more than ever, the current unwieldy and
expensive Pacifica governance structure that grew out of the drama and lockouts
of 1999, has created slates and factions within Pacifica as groups vie for
power and airtime. Pacifica Boards of Directors, comprising political diehards
with no radio experience have done little to improve the air sound, revenue or
audience numbers. There is a serious disconnect between boards at national and
local levels, the community and producers and this disconnect has been evident
for a very long time.
Yet Pacifica has and continues to be an incubator for many important broadcasters
and programs like Democracy Now, Counter Spin, Explorations with Michio Kaku and
now the Project Censored Radio Show.
Probably the most valuable assent Pacifica has is its intellectual
capital: past, present and future. It is the seed germ and should be protected.
Today radio crosses over to the Internet to become a trans-media system with
opportunities for international distribution, video streaming, interactivity
and e-commerce. Creating and being part of trans media systems is the future.
I fear the more things chance the more they remain the same. The popular
general manager of KPFA, whose controversial firing by Lynn Chadwick
precipitated the crisis at KPFA in 1999, was subsequently twice selected as
Executive Director of Pacifica in 2007 and 2008. In her September 24th,
2008 departure letter Siwaya, in the form of a letter to late Pacifica founder
Lewis Hill, wrote:
“…Sadly, it (Pacifica) is no longer focused
on service to the listeners but absorbed with itself and the inhabitants
therein. I call it Planet Pacifica, a term I coined during my hiring process.
There is an underlying culture of grievance coupled with entitlement and its
governance structure is dysfunctional. The bylaws of the organization have opened
it up to tremendous abuse, creating the opportunity for cronyism, factionalism
and faux democracy, with the result of challenging all yet helping nothing.
Pacifica has been made so flat, that it is concave — no leadership is possible
without an enormous struggle through the inertia that committees and
collectives.
“Pacifica calls itself a movement, yet currently it behaves like a jobs
program, a cult, or a social service agency. And oftentimes the loudest and
most obstreperous have the privilege of the microphone. There are endless
meetings of committees and “task forces” — mostly on the phone — where people
just like to hear themselves talk...”[2]
Can Pacifica change or is it too late? Has Lew Hill’s experiment been
supplanted by the Internet and smart phones? At a time when the need for
community radio and citizen journalism seems more important than ever, can
Pacifica adapt and change? Unfortunately the prognosis is not good. Ironically,
should Pacifica finally collapse, it will be in large part due to the Healthy
Station Project which ripped the heart out of community radio.
Ends (1,352)
[1] KPFA
circa 1949, Berkeley; KPFK circa 1959, Los Angeles; WBAI circa 1960, New York;
KPFT circa 1970, Houston; WPFW circa 1977, Washington DC. There are approximately 170 affiliates
that take Pacifica programming which is distributed over an Internet portal.
[2] Current – A
newspaper about public media in the United States, Sept. 25, 2008
No comments:
Post a Comment