[NYTr] The Struggle for KPFA

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Steven L. Robinson -activ-l

IndyBay.Org - Sunday Nov 11th, 2007
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/11/11/18460254.php

The Struggle For KPFA

by Bob Mason

[Reprint of a an important analysis of the ongoing struggle at KPFA. The
same struggles continue at KFCF.]

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 naove.

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.