Pacifica

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

salon.com
The battle for indie radio
After seven years of bitter infighting, the dissidents have retaken control
of Pacifica, the venerable left-wing radio network. Now comes the hard part.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Jesse Walker

June 20, 2002  |  It was a familiar sight to listeners of Pacifica, the
independent, radical-minded radio network: An e-mail from a DJ, warning
that Pacifica's central powers were planning sweeping changes for his radio
station. "WPFW's existence as D.C.'s last bastion of cultural programming
is being seriously threatened in the immediate future," the message
claimed. A "vocal minority" of hijackers, "none of whom were elected,"
intended to remake WPFW as "an all-talk station." If listeners didn't want
that to happen, they should make their feelings known at a teach-in the
following week.

For the past seven years, Pacifica has seen purges and protests, a
management bent on radically revamping its five stations and a growing body
of dissenters opposed to its plans. (For the record, I was one of those
dissenters, writing periodically about the gentrification process afoot at
the network.) In a nutshell, Pacifica was trying to slicken and tone down
its eclectic, largely left-wing programming mix and to move power from
local stations to the national office, from volunteers to paid
professionals. The warning about WPFW, written by "Latin Flavor" host Jim
Byers, resembled countless earlier e-mails by outraged programmers and
listeners. Except this time, the alleged hijackers were the dissidents.

Late last year, armed with lawsuits and faced with an increasingly inept
foe, the dissidents retook the Pacifica board. Station managers left their
posts at the Los Angeles, Houston, New York and Washington outlets. (The
fifth station, in Berkeley, Calif., was already under the protesters'
control.) When Byers sent his e-mail in March, what we were witnessing was
not revolution, but aftermath.

The Washington story has a happy ending, or at least has settled into an
unstable state of peace. The teach-in took place, and everyone was civil.
The accused "vocal minority" -- the station's local advisory board, drawn
from its listeners -- assured everyone that the rumors were untrue; it had
no desire to wipe the music from the jazz-oriented outlet's schedule. Byers
and company conversely conceded that the outlet's public-affairs lineup
should be expanded. And for the first time, everyone got to talk with
everyone else.

Pacifica, the nation's oldest noncommercial radio network, has entered a
new chapter of its history, as the people who brought down the previous
regime now face the task of reconstruction. It's an enormous challenge: If
the ousted leaders' crude attempts to "mainstream" Pacifica had brought it
to the brink of bankruptcy (a threat which has by no means receded), one
could also argue that much of the network's traditional political
programming had come to seem ossified and irrelevant.

Although the former rebels have now taken the network's helm, the
infighting at Pacifica is not over. There have been several inside-out
moments like the conflict at WPFW, not all of them resolved so benignly.
But you shouldn't start quoting "Animal Farm" just yet.

full: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2002/06/20/pacifica/index.html

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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