Media Democracy and its Contradictions
Notes on Matthew Lasar’s “Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War”
In Which is Discussed:
1. Pacifica Radio and its Discontents
2. Good Guys and Bad Guys – or What?
3. Whose Democracy? Our Democracy?
4. Your Basic People’s Radio Station
5. Mundane Realities of Ownership, Power, and Control
6. We, Them, Us, It, and all the Others
7. How Come We Always Lose?
8. If Only They Did Need to Attack Us
9. So how should we carry on?
In Which it is concluded that:
The struggles at Pacifica Radio illustrate how the left’s inability to develop a realistic and useable concept of democracy has made its political posture appear incoherent, and thus be marginalized and dismissed.
1. The Pacifica Radio Tempest – Why?
Matthew Lasar’s second book on the history of the Pacifica Radio Network focuses on the power struggle that raged from 1999 to 2001 for control of its stations. Lasar raises very basic yet rarely articulated questions about our media, about the idea of media democracy, and, I think, about the nature and incoherence of the contemporary American left. This essay is an attempt to come to terms with those questions.
This Pacifica story is difficult to tell well – the sheer number of personalities, groups, radio programs and political and cultural tendencies expressed and exposed on the Pacifica stations in their 5 locales – New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC and Houston – boggles the mind. The psychological and anthropological terrain of the Pacific network is largely the terrain of the American political and cultural left over the past half century. Socialists, Feminists, Black Liberationists, New Age Spiritualists, Liberal-Left Antiwar dissidents, Conspiracy Theologians, La Raza activists, Rastafarians, Palestinians, Haitians, Students of the middle east, Africa, East Timor, Central America, South America, and Korea, Hip-Hoppers, Left Folkies, Trotskyists, Leninists, Stalinists, Anarchists, West Coast Buddhists and many more types show up, often proclaim the righteousness of their cause, and appeal for support. Reviewing the history of these left wing radio stations even over just the last decade leaves one exhausted and out of breath, wondering what this rather preposterously complicated struggle is/was all about.
Lasar tries to answer by framing the struggle in the context of (a) contemporary patterns of media control; (b) the left’s desire to fashion a response to the Right’s dominance of American politics since 1980; and (c) the growth of identity politics on the left and in the country. To wade into these issues, I start with a very brief description of what happened at KPFA/Pacifica from 1999-2001.
2. The Good Guys and The Bad Guys – or Not.
The struggle of the local management and staff of KPFA in Berkeley against the national Pacifica Board saw firings of senior staff, the station being shut down, armed guards being posted, 10,000 people marching against the Board’s control, and eventually, a remarkable victory for grass-roots listener-activists, who gained control of the station. Or that’s how the narrative usually goes. The national Board claimed that it was consolidating Pacifica, in order to make it one effective organization( not 5 disorganized ones ), make its listener-ship more diverse (especially more African-American), and make it a stronger network, capable of broadcasting a progressive viewpoint to a increasingly non-progressive America. The local activists claimed that they were the voice of the people, the defenders of democracy and free speech, and that the board represented a non-democratic authoritarian force. Sometimes ‘non-democratic’ meant corporate interests in general, sometimes it designated the corporate drive to media consolidation, and other times the centrist politics of the Democratic Party. Lasar shows that this mutual demonizing masked the fact that this conflict was not primarily political – as in left vs. right, or progressive vs. centrist, or grassroots vs. corporate. Rather, it was a bitter struggle for a resource that has become extraordinary scarce – airtime, in the middle of the FM dial, with a powerful transmitter – a resource made increasingly precious by the ferocious rate of media consolidation and monopolization. There were not just 2 sides to this struggle: on the contrary, many different groups, with different agendas, and very different competing notions of what the terms ‘democracy’, ‘free speech’, ‘progressive’, ‘diversity’, and racism meant.
The victory of the ‘listener-activists’ came about because these groups that would normally be in conflict found a way to work together against the Pacifica Board. Pacifica had, over several decades, alienated, angered and aggrieved legions of listeners of different persuasions and scores of ex-program hosts and staff, turning them into remarkably relentless activists. They were relentless, Lasar shows, because in the surrounding media landscape these left alternative minority media activists had nowhere else to go.
The attempts by the disgruntled radio activists to regain airtime was largely unsuccessful until the mid-to-late 90’s. Things changed because of the availability of the Internet, proffering free or inexpensive ways for people geographically separated to unite against an common foe. That foe was the increasingly impersonal and distant Pacifica Board. Indeed, perhaps the greatest difference between the Board and it supporters on one side, and their opponents on the other, was in the effective use of these electronic resources of web sites, email, and listserves. When KPFA was forcibly taken off the air, people were told to go to a save-Pacifica web address. They immediately began to receive email updates on the increasingly outrageous actions of the board. They became energized members of a dynamic community, a community both real and virtual. They came to the rallies posted on the net. They gave money. They wrote letters, and emails, and successfully pressured their representatives, their cultural heroes ( Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Joan Baez, June Jordan), their mayors, even their attorneys general to intervene on their side. Meantime, the Board, with all of its money and its legally binding control of the stations, seemed to think that stonewalling was better than communicating. The Board was completely blind to the new form of power latent in the bonding of an alternative radio station, one with a devoted, educated following, and the internet community that surrounded it. In this obduracy, the Board surrendered to its opponents both the moral high ground and the media power it would seem to have controlled.
3. Whose Democracy ? Our Democracy!
Many would like to see the outcome of the struggle as a victory for ‘democracy’, or for ‘radio for the people’. But a closer look at these dominant left concepts (e.g. peoples democracy) shows them to be entangled with, and a cause of, the endless institutional wrangling at Pacifica. One of the main groups that fought the good fight was called the “Coalition for a Democratic Pacifica”. But what is a Democratic Radio Network? What does the word democracy, in the context of a left, alternative, ‘free speech’ radio station mean?
Leftists preach about democracy as though we all know what it means. Maybe we do, when we use it as an adjective to describe national governments. We can apply it ( or deny it) to Sweden, Israel, Pakistan, Cuba, Indonesia, Canada, and so forth. Other institutions, like labor unions, are democratic if they are not run by an authoritarian clique; “democratic reforms” are changes that give those at a political disadvantage more leverage. But within the left itself, ‘democracy’ is a sacred cow of a concept with a checkered past. Having lost the credibility with the American people necessary to espouse socialism, the explicit condemnation of capitalism, an end to the master-slave relationship inherent in the modern corporate state, and even liberal secular humanism, we have been driven back to using mainstream-acceptable words like democratic, progressive, and diverse.
One small but not trivial episode in history of ‘democracy’ in American political thought occurred in the 1960s, when perhaps the most influential organization in the student movement of that time called itself ‘Students for a Democratic Society’. In SDS people constantly argued and theorized about the relationship between internal democracy (how SDS was run) and the ends of the organization (creating a democratic society). The prevailing notion, within the student left, and other movements of the 60s-70s, was that as you built egalitarian institutions within the ‘movement’, groupings in which each person has an equal say, you simultaneously strengthened your ability to bring about radical social change. To many of us, this hopeful, romantic discourse about democracy ended with the ascendancy Ronald Reagan, and came to be seen to be utopian and naïve.
But many others on the left – including many who influence the discourse about governance at Pacifica – are still tied to this way of thinking. Of course, it was very useful to stigmatize the national board as authoritarian, corporate, anti-free-speech, anti-democratic. This pro-democratic identity successfully hid the huge differences of opinion about almost everything that abided among the numerous pro-democracy-listener-activists. This concept therefore produced both temporary unity for our side, and public ignominy for the other. It was, in a literal sense, a very opportune ideology. But opportunistic ideologies carry a virus within themselves – they give excellent cover for opportunists to take over, or at least attain serious leverage, within the movement using them. This, more than anything else, seems to me to be the sad moral of the Pacifica story so far.
At its worst, within KPFA circles, being against ‘democracy’, in any sense, will be called elitist, patriarchal, racist, sexist, etc. At one point even claiming that only those who know how to install a transmitter should decide how to install a transmitter, was resisted on ‘democratic’ grounds. Competence is seen as a authoritarian imposition of patriarchal paradigms. Or something like that. People with this mindset claim participatory democracy as the central way to promote grassroots liberation, unifying process and purpose, subjective and objective. This is a facile, sometimes jejune, largely symbolic style of thinking, and a very destructive tendency in left organizations – particularly, it seems to me, at Pacifica stations. One example of this is the claim that if we “be the change we want to see”, like become compassionate and non-violent and sustainable and so forth in our private lives, we will bring about stuff like the end of war and a just economic and social order in the wider world. This idea seems to me mainly wish-fulfillment. Thinking this way defeats the reality principle and encourages utopian fantasies. Running a successful radio station/network in a decent, fair way, and building a successful movement to achieve global social equality are 2 very different, and very difficult undertakings. Conflating them gains nothing and loses much.
4. A Democratic Radio Station For the People?
So what were we fighting for when we said it was a ‘Democratic Pacifica’? What makes a radio station democratic, and is democracy a meaningful goal for a radio station to have? Some possible meanings of democracy with a radio station are:
. Internal democracy, where staff decide, together, who is hired and fired and who gets what on-air time.
. Democracy for the paying listener sponsors, whereby everyone who subscribes to the station gets an equal say in those same critical matters.
. The commitment of the station’s resources to the building of democracy in the larger world outside, focused on advocating for the interests of oppressed and exploited peoples, whether those people listen to the station, subscribe to the station, work at the station, or have ever or will ever hear of it.
My sense is that while we might think we know what we’re talking about when we say that we want a democratic radio network, unless we disambiguate these (and other) different meaning, we actually don’t know. We carry around a vaguely defined mixture of these concepts, and we let ourselves believe – since we want to be on the side of the angels – that this mixture is coherent, virtuous and useful. Lasar’s narrative makes us look at these questions and issues as they exist in reality, not in the safe world of our ideology and our left habits of mind. The rather bracing truth that Lasar thus reveals is that the different forces in Pacifica struggles always claim to be advancing democracy and progressive politics and defeating racism, but most of the time, what they are actually struggling for is for their group to gain turf and airtime on Pacifica.
5. Ownership, Power, and Control
When the protestors outside KPFA in 1999 shouted and chanted “ Who’s Station? OUR Station!”, they were making the central claim to ownership in the battle over Pacifica. Lasar, somewhat provocatively, claims that those who made this claim may have been morally right but were factually and legally wrong. The station was owned by the Pacifica Foundation, which did not consist of the listeners. Further, he reveals the central irony of the struggle in 1999-2001: that owners of the station – The Pacifica Board – made their biggest mistake not in the falsehoods they told but by telling this truth about ownership, the raw, distasteful truth, bluntly asserted in a seemingly mindless and brutal fashion. To wit, the Board told the Listeners that, no, it is not your station, now please shut up and go away. The Listener-Protestors went into a paroxysm of outrage at this, and who, really could blame them: as Lasar notes, remember that these people had had the pleasure of listening to about 8-10 weeks of marathons a year, decade after decade, in which they were incessantly informed that this was THEIR radio station, and please send us your money! What is unusual is that this outrage was channeled into effective organizing, and that the disagreements that usually pull the left apart via internecine warfare were avoided for the 3 years it would take to prevail. And it is notable that this victory, as Dick Cheney would put it, changed the facts on the ground. The rules of Pacifica ownership were actually changed; the activists had reclaimed the station. Which meant we/they were about to find out what democracy looked like.
6. We, Us, Them, It, The Others
The ideology of a democratic Pacifica, like all ideologies, can trump reality only for a while. Pacifica was now ‘ours’; it was now going to be democratic. How are ownership and democracy related? When something becomes ‘Ours’, does it become democratic? This depends on many things: such as who ‘we’ are, and how many divisions and competing interests are latent or become apparent among us; how we relate to each other; what kind of institutions and informal power sharing agreements we can work out; and how those who are not ‘us’, but whom we claim to represent – ‘the voice of the voiceless’, as it were – relate to us, or do not. And so, after the Listener Activists prevailed, and made it our/their station, we/they had to go back to being us, which meant fighting over airtime, fighting over who was really democratic, who really represented the people, who the people were, and who had a right to bump who off the air and for what reasons.
For reasons of brevity (this piece is way too long already, I’m sorry) I will not discuss the struggle since 2002 within Pacifica. It’s thick and it’s ugly: few would disagree with that. Those who represent all sorts of social groups and all sorts of ideologies have struggled for control, more often than not claiming to be the white hats. I’m actually thankful that the station (KPFA is the only one I’ve stayed familiar with) has survived as well as it has. I get to hear Democracy Now in the morning, I get to hear a lot of wonderful, beautiful, challenging music, and the schedule allows me to mostly safely avoid the stuff that drives me nuts.
7. Hey, if we’re the people, how come they kick our ass all the time?
While writing this, I was told that the FCC is about to open up some 300 new licenses for non-profits in America. Groups of all kinds are submitting applications, making their case that they represent people not represented by the for-profit media. It would seem – to the degree these 300 licenses will change things – that the forces for media democracy have won a big battle. But who will actually get these licenses? There is a real fear among those who follow media issues closely that the Christian Right will acquire many, maybe most, of the stations. Because, lo and behold, they think they are ‘the people’, too. And they think that corporate America — who they call ‘pagan’ – has frozen them out, as we do. The Christian right has for nearly half a century been better organized than the left. And now, not only better organized, but ( I estimate) more numerous as well. They are, more than we are, ‘the people’. And in a democracy they will get more say than us. If you feel like saying ‘Jesus Christ’ right now, it’s all right. The practical bankruptcy, if not hypocrisy, of Pacifica style posturing about democracy becomes clear if we see these facts for what they are.
8. If Only They Needed to Attack Us
I believe that the depressing irrelevance of most left activity to the prevailing political order it wishes to change is partly due to the contradictions in its rhetoric about democracy. We are not the people; the people do not believe what we believe, nor do they want us to represent them. These harsh realities, I think, inform Lasar’s demonstration that the notion that corporate power was allayed against Pacifica in order to silence the voice of the voiceless was a sadly self-serving conceit. I say sadly, because I wish that it were so – I wish that Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton needed to worry about what is said on Pacifica stations, or even whether Pacifica exists. They don’t – because the marginalization of the left and the left’s radio network is so successful. My guess is that the reason Lasar’s book hasn’t been more discussed, above all on Pacfica itself, but also within the liberal-left media democracy movement, is this: He maintains that the allegation that the Pacifica Board represented the interests of Corporate America, with an agenda to stop Free Speech Radio, was a powerful, compelling, yet false claim in Pacifica’s civil war. This is a larger pill than the media left wish to swallow.
9. What to Do
The great gaggle of voices that make up the Pacifica stations in its 5 cities, have among them the wonderful and articulate and beautiful and honest, and also the intolerant, boring, painfully pathetic, and the hostile. All of these voices have the right to exist, the right to make their claims on the radio, the right to lobby for more power and convince others of their viewpoints and make their calls to action. But none of them/us have the right to speak for the people, especially now in this ultra-complex hyper-urban globalized electronic society, where no one can honestly and intelligently claim to know who “the people’ are. What we have is the right to represent ourselves individually and collectively, the right to say what we think, the right to struggle for what we honestly think is our fair share in the economic, political, media and all other arenas. If the left were to take this more humble and realistic stance – and accept that being straightforwardly on one’s own side will always ring more true than claiming to be pure and just and always struggling against evil incarnate – perhaps we can find a new direction, and see some way out of being suffocated even by our own radio network.
“Uneasy Listening: Pacfica Radio’s Civil War” by Matthew Lasar is available at http://amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-4602287-4629663?url=search-alias%3Dstripbo
Bob Mason
Bernal Heights, San Francisco, Sunday, Jan 28, 2007.
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