Riding the Waves at Pacifica

 I was invited to write this piece for Project Censored by its director Mickey Huff. At the time I was interim general manager at KPFA, Pacifica Radio in Berkeley CA (2011-2013). Project Censored is a media research, education and advocacy initiative that champions the importance of free press. The project's mission is to expose and oppose news censorship and promote independent investigative journalism, media literacy and critical thinking. Back to note books...

 

Riding the Waves at Pacific 

By Andrew Leslie Phillips

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.

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, Nicole Siwaya 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 24^th, 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...”

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.

Back to note books...