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.
[...] No Comments An intriguing piece on the Matthew Lasar’s recent Uneasy Listening release is here. Well worth a [...]
Pingback by New Essay « Rolas de Aztlan: KPFT Notes — February 6, 2007 @ 11:33 am
It fascinates me to watch KPFA & Pacifica’s experiment in media democracy evolve because we are attempting a major change in a large and old institution. I don’t know how many on the left see the question of institutional form as a central problem to be grappled with, but I do. The right has it’s institutions and the competitive hierarchical model works just fine for them. One of our weaknesses is our lack of institutions and that those which do exist are filled with practical contradictions.
This essay is too cynical for me. It’s Smart, Articulate and Aware of some of the critical dynamics, but somehow conflates the worst and the best to paint a negative picture.
There’s no doubt that the word “democracy” can be defined in many different ways. There’s no doubt that many of the folks involved (both insiders and outsiders) bring their own agendas and fight for the turf.
But it’s reductionism to see the media democracy struggle at Pacifica as a matter of turf wars for air time in which one side happened to use the Internet better.
I know many people personally who worked very hard to “save KPFA,” & “save Pacifica”. Like me, they were concerned about a media outlet which had meant a great deal to them individually and which they saw as powerful in the interests of issues they believed. They heard it going in a more conservative direction. They made an effort and discovered no recourse to prevent this change in the structure of the organization. They worked together and changed the structure. They worked together in a movement that was both diverse and effective.
These people, like me, had opinions. They had suggestions. But they did not continue for many months, even years, in order to win control for their personal opinions. Most of them were much too smart and much too busy for that.
I am concerned that this great passion and flowering not be forgotten. After the board change, it could have been the basis for a huge increase in fundraising, marketing, staff skill, organizational advances and, yes, better programming. Mostly, the opportunity has been squandered. But, perhaps not entirely.
When Nobob talks about “be the change we want to see” as a “destructive tendency in left organizations,” she/he is shutting off a vision of an institution that welcomes those who love it. If we don’t have our institutional processes set up to embrace and connect with most of those who come to help, we have a weaker less effective institution.
I still have hope that Pacifica is moving in a direction where individuals are treated well. I still have hope that Pacifica will be a more powerful voice for positive change as a result of its ability to synthesize, collaborate and utilize the tremendous energy of the humans around it. The current government structure has flaws, but is a step toward inclusion and transparency. Consider this e-mail verbal flowers for those who are doing the hard work of running the experiment & tabulating the results as they come in.
Adrienne Lauby
Listener-Activist
Unpaid Programmer (KPFA)
Comment by Adrienne Lauby — February 6, 2007 @ 8:37 pm
First, who is the author of the piece, above? I wanted to send it around for comments, but I don’t do that with anonymous posts …
Secondly, although there is much of interest in the essay, there are some fundamental assertions that I think are wrong. For instance, this section: “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.”
The concern over the need to democratize skills is not as ludicrous as it is portrayed in this essay. The reliance on “the expert” exists only because proper training is not available to all who want to learn how to install a transmitter, for example. That would change the gendered and sometimes racial makeup of those who know how to do that job, and it would not remain an all-boys network. The same for ALL jobs at the radio stations — give people the opportunity to learn a skill if they so desire, and you not only train a whole new generation but eliminate the basis for the feelings (and reality) of institutionalized sexism and racism.
- Mitchel Cohen]
Comment by Mitchel Cohen — February 7, 2007 @ 8:03 pm
I have changed the name of this blob to “Bob Mason’s Blog”. My name is Bob Mason. I’ve gotten over my fear of being visible.
On the second point, I agree my statement was overblown. Yet I also submit that the notion that ALL expert competence exists only because proper training is not available to all is also an over statment. Even in a much more egalitarian world, there will be those with particular competencies and those without. Competence matters. So does fairness and equality. Often they are at odds. A radio station that always values democratic virtues above relevant competence will not be able to stay on the air long enough to further its own cause.
Comment by nobob — February 9, 2007 @ 7:54 pm
Hi Bob — I believe the story about “democratic” installation of an antenna is an apocryphal one. I was pretty close to events, and I never heard it. What I do recall hearing was that a radio station could not be governed by a listener board because radio is a technical art, beyond the competence of the listeners to understand and judge. The analogy given was that you wouldn’t let the passengers into the cockpit to fly the plane. The reposte to that was that while you don’t want the passengers flying the plane, you also don’t want to get on a plane that’s supposed to go to New York and have the pilot suddenly divert the plane to Houston! The listeners are certainly competent to decide whether or not they’re getting “good radio” as well as what kind of programs they want to hear.
By the election of local station boards – made up of 3/4 listeners and 1/4 staff — it is hoped that they can arrive at some sense of direction for the station to guide management in evaluating, improving, retiring and initiating programming. No easy task! But I still have faith that they will find a way to do it once everyone gets used to the idea that a broad range of interests must be served. Narrow sectarianism has so far stymied the board’s efforts to focus on this question — but time will tell.
As for the old Pacifica National Board — one thing we do know about them is that they tried to get rid of Democracy Now! And another thing we know is that they had no idea of the place KPFA held in the local community. They were too far removed to understand who and what they were dealing with when they installed armed guards, took it off the air & talked about selling the station.
Thanks for writing your provocative essay.
Comment by Carol Spooner — February 10, 2007 @ 5:14 am
Hi,
Would you be willing to be on the air to discuss all this at some point? As you know, I used to do programs about Pacifica a lot, but haven’t recently, for various reasons.
Best,
Larry
Comment by Larry Bensky — February 10, 2007 @ 5:11 pm
Sure. I sent you an email at sundaysalon.org.
take care,
bob
Comment by nobob — February 10, 2007 @ 7:56 pm
Thanks so much for your essay. Over the past four years, I’ve spoken with some of the targeting people who were being the targets of the slander and hatred that you described. Some of them, I know, from the former Board are, to this day, are deeply wounded and even traumatized by the virtual lynching they received by a reckless and hugely successful Campaign to Remove the Board. Many former listeners, former staff and former donors are waiting to see if anyone from the various Lawsuits or the Pacifica Campaign will ever have the decency to admit some of their errors and, certainly, some of the damage they did in their zeal to “take back” Pacifica. The Lawsuits, especially, created and adversarial environment and too often, the people who followed the “save Pacifica” links and dutifully sent in their angry emails, jammed the phone lines and promoted economic boycotts seemed to be following directions without applying their own critical analysis to the problem at hand. Lasar’s book and your essay point out some of these unexamined assumptions. I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read it!
More than anything, I am looking for honestly in any leaders….corporate, non-profit, media, academic and community. We’re drowning in lies. Today, the network is such a gravy train and employment scam it’s totally beyond belief. It’s become a very corrupt organization in that sense. Perhaps it’s time we realized that “We” aren’t really so much different from “Them.”
I have followed all this closely and feel very sad about the conduct and the consequences of these battles over the past decades in Pacifica. Rather than create a sense of community in our local station, it has done a lot to separate and alienate our community. I don’t know where this will end, but your refreshing essay and Lasar’s book were both small steps toward a period of more honest reflection which is, in my opinion, long overdue. Thanks again.
Comment by Nalini Lasiewicz — February 14, 2007 @ 3:45 am
This is an e-mail I sent to Larry Bensky, but thought you should see it as well, after listening to you this AM on KWMD.
Larry, I am sorry to see ya go, especially for the reasons you have expressed. To that
at first I thought there is nothing I could add, but after listening to the last
hour today, I sure did want to call in. The effort made clear why it is I never
hear anyone from Anchroage on SundaySalon. I made 54 attempts, and never got through.
It is interesting that for a lot of people I know, including a Pacifica person I
was talking to recently, it takes very little prompting to get them to launch into
an attack on NPR, usually because of the “Sameness” of NPR stations. The conflict
became internal for this one particular Pacifica person who called me to ask my opinion
about the possibility that Pacifica might invest more in the nascent Pacifica network,
saying Pacifica should produce more national programming, and help smaller stations
to organize, fund raise, etc. So though I support the notion that Pacifica should
focus on being national, this individual had not recognized their own conflicting goals.
Larry; My thinking is that much of your concern is misplaced. Today, in a technical
sense, with the internet and very little money you can start a nationally distributed
radio program. Distribution costs are almost nill. Consider the full slate of
programs I have on KWMD, including yours.
What is missing might be money to do marketing, and to support people who do production.
Still, I can imagine you sitting before your television set, lifting CSPAN audio,
holding a microphone which is connected to a $50 mixer, feeding your laptop, which
is feeding the internet and thus thousands of listeners and a handfull of radio stations.
Where I DO 100% agree; that opportunity is lost by not funding people to, for example,
go to the Middle East and produce war documentary. But people are doing that without
Pacifica. Karen Button and Dahr Jamail both left Anchorage, with no support, to
report on the Middle East. They use blog, reports to other media, and, I think,
are being noticed. So… Pacifica, and FM radio, though still important, live in
a far more diverse media environment.
And, as I say, today, anyone with DSL, a mocrophone, and a computer can become an
internet broadcaster in a moment.
Comment by Jeremy Lansman — March 25, 2007 @ 6:55 pm
Just heard Bob’s segment on Sunday Salon (a program which I will sorely miss, maybe especially because I often find myself in disagreement with Larry, who I love anyway).
The big thing Bob has done with his essay is to open another opportunity for dialog that may bring some light to the increasingly turbulent and darkened times of “public radio.”
I am a listener area expatriate member (web listener who moved away from the Bay Area) and KPFA continues to be a daily, and very important, part of my life here in Missoula, MT.
My basic observation is that Pacifica is suffering from inertia. Old ways of doing things are not working. New, creative, and entirely new ways are needed. Crisis is opportunity.
Some points of potential agreement with what I heard this morning:
1. Governance at KPFA and Pacifica continues to be a mess, though I submit that it is less of a mess than under the Pacifica Board that brought us the “Save Pacifica” crisis.
2. Representative democracy is a failed model, generally and specifically as it is currently practiced at KPFA and Pacifica.
3. Technical expertise needs to have a seat at the table and not fear being shouted down or expelled if non-technical people do not like what is said. OTOH the technicians should not be allowed to be in control of policy.
4. Circumstances beyond the control of the listenership have conspired to bring all marginalized groups (what a great list in the essay!) together in the only media home left that will take them in, and that forcing all these people, often with wildly differing points of view and priorities, to compete for limited air time tends to create a political chaos that serves the interests of the right rather than the any of the disparate groups that are in competition.
5. Largely as a result of items 1-4, I believe, listenership is declining as a result of a failure of programming quality and quantity.
6. National programing, such as live broadcasts of hearings(which I actually don’t care much for myself), and nationally significant events seems to have evaporated and has left a large gaping wound in the body of Pacifica and diminished its influence and likely has contributed to a loss of listenership.
So here are my, not so humble, suggestions:
1. Make lemonade. Turn the handicaps that have developed into opportunities. Larry is 100% correct to harp on the issue of democracy being meaningless without participation. The contributing membership ($ as well as useful volunteer efforts) should be honored by being given a significant role in running the network and the local stations. But to pretend that “participation” can consist in casting ballots for station representatives, that you know nothing substantial about, is just silly. Better would be to establish very local councils, small neighborhood membership groups of 8-15, who meet face to face, discuss issues presented to them by local station and national management (and communicate issues up to the board as well), and select a delegate from amongst the group to represent their views at similar area gatherings, who would in turn send delegates of their own, and so forth until 8-15 delegates are sent to board meetings as voting members. I would predict, contrary to cynical expectations, that there would be a great deal of stability in the makeup of such delegations and that actual reasonable, articulate people would be chosen. Delegates would be responsible to the folks who sent them and could call them back if they went off the tracks.
For the sake of discussion, consider that 1000 out of 10,000 listener members are actually motivated enough to attend monthly meetings in their respective neighborhoods, each consisting of 10 people. In the second week 100 folks would meet in 10 area meetings. In the third week 10 ultimate delegates would meet with the board at its next session as voting members.
2. Strike a formal balance between lister participation in governance and professional expertise. Designate board slots, with guaranteed terms,for folks with specific needed areas of expertise (lawyer, programmer, station manager, etc.) and have board (with member delegates) select these people.
3. Divide up the broadcast day into regular, predictable content areas so that local programing categories and national programing do not compete for time with each other. Competition between fairly matched competitors produces good results, between those poorly matched produces poor results. Ownership is really the problem. People care about what they perceive as that that they own. If say, Friday afternoon, 2-5 is for local self-help and health programing, then replacement programing would continue to fill the needs of people tuning in at that time, and you would have less outrage than experienced when a different kind of show (music replaces public affairs, new-age replaces techno-geek, etc.).
Local programing serves as a kind of farm team, a seedling bed, for national programing after all. Vigorous competition and regular turnover is good. No point in setting up matches between the little kids and the mature ones who should be moving up.
Well, that is way too long as it is. Hope someone finds it useful.
herb
Comment by Herb Ruhs — March 25, 2007 @ 7:28 pm
Dear Bob,
I think you point many very important issues here. Thank you. I also heard the show this morning and sent a note to Larry. Here’s part of what I said:
Chris Hedges (American Fascists, p.33) rightly states “the awful paradox of tolerance. There arises moments when those who would destroy the tolerance that makes an open society possible should no longer be tolerated.” We need to recognize that this does not only apply to the extreme Christian right. The problem is too deep and complex to broach here, but suffice it to say that there are as many sides to the left as there are to the right. Most on the right belong there and most on the left belong on the other side (of course precisely these will dispute that). It all has to do with whether the individual has transcended or outgrown the self-serving individualist and tribalist mindset or is just latching to a left cause for personal gain or benefit. Sadly we have not learned this and we the left keep getting stuck and stung. It is ultimately a developmental issue. That’s why the worst of history repeats, not because we don’t know our past. It is hard to develop and grow under normal circumstances, and it is next to impossible when one is being starved or poisoned at least intellectually or informationally–and we know starvation goes beyond the milder and the toxic and, in countless, attacks the physical leaving them also more vulnerable to ideological attack.
The STATION BOARD ELECTION PROCESS MUST BE REVISED to avoid the unknown and lurking exotic, the deranged, or plants by the right from self-nominating as candidates, getting elected and ruinning the station. There should be a committee elected by the member-listeners made up of “known individuals” (that means with a public and known track record), the likes of Larry Bensky, that in turn elects or at least vets candidates running for the board. The current self-nominating process by which anyone walking off the street can run leaves the door open to disaster brought about inadvertently by people who don’t know how to fly the plane or by those who’d hijack it for their narrow sel-serving nefarious designs.
History is the struggle between the forces for and against human progress. Regardless of any other associations, interests and orientations, that is the primary defining factor. On what side of that struggle do we all fall? But after that, there is competence, too. We need the best people we can get to make us that much more effective in carrying out the struggle and having any hopes of succeeding.
In solidarity,
Alexander Leon
Comment by Alexander Leon — March 25, 2007 @ 10:11 pm
i heard the discussion of this issue on sunday salon today (3/25) with a great deal of frustration, in that while i was very happy to hear any discussion of the issue at all, i felt that this one missed the point: the problem with pacifica is not with the various boards or staffs, but with the news blackout that accompanies all station and network activities. larry bensky complained about not being able to find financial records; i’m mad because i can’t find any news at all about pacifica, without taking the time to listen to board meetings on the web. pacifica reports no news at all about itself. only in the brief period between the kpfa shutdown and the settlement of the lawsuits did we get any news on the air about what was happening. once the case was settled, the curtain descended. pacifica went through a two-year process of writing bylaws, with groups meeting at every station — a process unprecedented in american media — without a single on-air report of what was happening. the final bylaws were adopted by a cliffhanger of a vote, and we were never told the details. it is as if one had to follow the workings of the u.s. government by watching cspan. where is the news?
pacifica needs a public editor, to report on working of the stations and network to the listeners. not a management report to the listeners, an independent report. we all can’t attend board meetings or take the time to listen to the broadcasts. we need a journalistic intermediary, just as we do to report on all other politics. do i have to go to berkeley city council meetings to find out what the city is up to? of course not, i can pick up the daily planet the next day.
a pacifica news website would be useful; a regular on-air report by an independent journalist would be a miracle. these reports would be invaluable in the creation of an informed listenership that can elect responsible leaders
i tend to fault the news departments, who deliberately sat on one of the biggest stories of the century, the rebirth — or stillbirth –of pacifica. but the silence has a deeper cause than that; there is a longstanding feeling at the pacifica that listeners don’t care about this stuff, it’s inside baseball, it’s airing dirty laundry, etc. i think that is a wrongheaded view but it’s widely held and it prevails. so we continue to fight and argue and at pledge time we con the listeners once again.
i suggest a website: pacifica watch. not gotcha journalism, just straight reporting on board meetings and other activities. those who wish can be referred to sound recordings, but what’s needed is editing and reporting.
cliff
ps — bob, since you identified yourself on salon as a computer specialist, would you consider making this site a little more readable? white on black, or slate grey, is hard enough to read in your main text; the comments, grey on slate, are almost illegible.
Comment by cliff barney — March 25, 2007 @ 11:25 pm
Thanks for this blog, and the replies. I’m still pondering many of the issues raised, having just been made aware of this blog on yesterday’s Sunday Salon.
This is in response to Alexander and Cliff’s replies. I’m positive I do not want to be protected from “lurking exotics” (to quote Alexander.) I’m all for searching for ways to improve governance. But fear of those who are “unknown” is surely more dangerous than “diversity” and “democracy” as catchwords. There are a variety of reasons, including youth, disability, ethnicity and recent arrival in the Bay Area, which could mean a candidate with skills, resources and ideas of great benefit to KPFA/Pacifica is nonetheless unknown by some gatekeeper committee. However you define the “struggle for human progress”, it will not be advanced if “just us” trumps justice.
My own experience in the left leads me to doubt whether any committee could be totally successful in weeding out those “plants from the right.” Perhaps this mythical committee should out the candidates with the best credentials and interviewing skills! To fly the pilot/hijacker metaphor a few more miles: consider the government’s no fly list and airport security, both in terms of wrongful exclusion and who slips past the guards.
Re: Cliff’s reply: I too have been frustrated these many years by the gag (or whatever the cause is) on Pacifica/KPFA news by the station. This would truly be a quantum leap in transparency: the ability of the station to report on itself!
Although I’m not visually impaired, I’ve got my text zoom up to 150% trying to read this thing. Bob, if this is a WordPress problem, perhaps you can donate some of your computer skills to improving legibility. Background and text colors nearly identical is NOT what we want re: transparency!
Thanks, Bob, and contributors, for giving me a place to read and move my own thinking about democracy and KPFA/Pacifica.
A listener-subscriber-voter,
Barbara, who has both lurked and inhabited the rhelm of the exotic
Comment by Barbara Ruth — March 26, 2007 @ 9:49 pm