The Pacifica radio network is in turmoil. Veteran programmers charge that network management, under the leadership of executive director Pat Scott, is selling Pacifica's radical heritage down the river. Scott responds that Pacifica's ossified programming was endangering the network's very survival.

In the small world of independent, alternative media, Pacifica is a giant. The radio network's five stations, located in New York (WBAI), Washington (WPFW), Houston (KPFT), Los Angeles (KPFK) and Berkeley, Calif. (KPFA), reach an estimated 708,300 listeners each week, all on an annual budget of just $9 million a year.

Yet by some accounts, the network is a failure. The listening areas of Pacifica's five stations encompass 22 percent of all American households, but only one percent of those households tune in during any given week. The current Board and Management of Pacifica Foundation, the Berkeley-based non-profit that owns the network, want to drastically increase the network's listening audience and its influence.

But before Pacifica can expand its audience, management believes the network itself must change. The network's soon-to-be-released three-year plan, "A Vision for Pacifica Radio: Creating a Network for the 21st Century," puts it this way: "One barrier to our growth has been our own inability to fix ineffective - and change unsustainable - aspects of Pacifica Radio's programming, financing and basic operations."

Critics maintain that Scott and other network executives, in a drive to increase its listening sudience, are corporatizing the network's alternative culture and compromising its politics. They include Alexander Cockburn of The Nation, who charged in a May 5 column that Scott and the Pacifica Foundation Board planned to "eviscerate all traces of regional programming autonomy and impose the bland ideological and programming regimen that has made NPR the hideous listening experience that it is today."

Similar, if less deftly expressed, sentiments can be found on the Free Pacifica Web site (www.radio4all.org/freepacifica), where a group of ex-volunteer programmers, listeners and terminated employees are battling what they call the "regressive/corporate/fascist attitude and behavior" of Pacifica management. Lyn Gerry, a former production assistant who was fired from KPFA (sic) in 1995, paints Scott's tenure as "quite literally a reign of terror." "Essentially Pacifica has become much more liberal and much less radical, " she says. "When you replace a staff of volunteer activists with so-called paid professionals, then management can exercise stringent control on the content. The incentive to keep a paycheck is a strong one."

Pacifica management insists that changes are about attracting more listeners. "We're faced with an amazing opportunity." says Pacifica communications director Burt Glass. "There is a lot of concern about the consolidation of media under corporate control, and even in public TV and radio you are seeing changes that are disturbing traditional supporters. On NPR, you can now hear out-and-out commercials. And for Pacifica, this opens up a door. We can fill this void of corporate-free and commercial-free programming, and that will allow us to take our independent style of news and cultural affairs to a big audience.

To reach the broader public, Pacifica management plans to rely on both improved programming and savvy marketing. In the late '80s, Pacifica and the rest of public radio discovered through research that consistent, well-produced programming on important topics increased both audiences and listener donations. Armed with this information, many station managers and program directors at Pacifica and the nation's 200 National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) stations realigned their program schedules, offering public affairs shows that were aimed at general audiences instead of specific groups or communities.

Indeed, in its move to change programming, Pacifica management has run into opposition from programmers who have historically felt they owned their shows and time slots. (An extreme example came in the '80s, when Mike Hodell, a programmer at KPFK in Los Angeles, died and tried to leave his time slot to his wife.) "Many displaced programmers and others at the stations were outraged that these decisions [to change programming] were being made," Lynn Chadwick, the acting general manager of KPFA and the CEO of the NFCB, told the Media & Democracy Congress in October. "The politics of self-interest came into direct conflict with the politics of community service."

Kathy Lo, KPFK's programming director, says she has been demanding "credibility, research, better produced programming, higher technical standards and intelligent discussions" from the station's public affairs programmers. "I am trying to get the radio to talk about the news that affects listeners," she says.

Gerry at Free Pacifica maintains that KPFK management is removing programmers who do "militant African-American or Latino programming, or programming dealing with hemp issues." Lo's station manager, Mark Schubb, says this is nonsense. "They scream ideology as if that were the conflict, when it is not about ideology, it is about effectiveness," he says. "You had the strongest transmitter in Southern California being squandered for faction fights and ideological masturbation."

Schubb is particularly proud of "Up for Air," KPFK's drive-time morning show hosted by Marcos Frommer and Kathy Gori. The two-hour program begins with the headline news, and then moves into a banter period where the two hosts discuss and joke about politics and their own lives. This is followed by a series of 10, 15, or 20 minute segments that focus on either political issues or arts and culture. "They bring some irreverence to the air, instead of dour hand-wringing," says Schubb. "They break the mold of public radio, and they really compete in drive time."

At the same time that Pacifica has been remixing its programming, the radio network's management has been negotiating new contracts with the stations' unions. In 1995, Scott hired American Consulting Group (ACG), a notorious union-busting firm, to negotiate contracts with KPFK. Frommer recalls, "We sat in a meeting with this guy Glen Haynes from American Consulting Group, who said, 'This is the '90s. This is reality. Get used to it.' And then they offered us a contract in which the largest section was management rights." Pacifica later broke relations with ACG and hired a firm recommended by California unionists. Last October, after six years with-out a contract, Pacifica and KPFK finally reached an agreement.

"The management doesn't deal with the human resources very well," says a worker at KPFK, who asked to remain anonymous. "Most of the decisions are made without a whole lot of input from staff, listeners and volunteers." According to the employee, "There has to be a political space in which we can talk about programming decisions and differences in programming philosophy." While KPFK workers got the wage increases they wanted in the new agreement, they gave up some control of the station's personnel operations.

Pacifica is having an even harder time coming to an agreement at WBAI in New York, where the barricades are up over who is to be included in the bargaining unit. The WBAI union currently includes 200 members, about 30 of whom are paid staff The other 170 are volunteers, or "unpaid staff," as they prefer to be called. Pacifica wants to reconfigure the WBAI bargaining unit to include only paid staff. The union is adamantly resisting that move. The outcome of the dispute is now in the hands of the National Labor Relations Board.

This time, control of programming is the crucial issue. Scott believes that WBAI is due for some major changes. "You look at the audience for WBAI and the station is underperforming," she says. "You have a listenership of 170,000 or 180,000 in a listening area of 20 million. It is criminal to waste this valuable resource."

Having 170 volunteers, all of whom have the rights of paid staff, in the union makes it much harder for station management to institute changes that would enable the station to attract more listeners. Her critics, like Errol Maitland, a shop steward for WBAI workers, agree that control over programming is at the heart of the labor dispute. "Scott would like the ability to make, without notice, radical or fundamental changes in the programming and format of the various Pacifica stations," he says. "Right now, there is a constraint at WBAI, and that is the union. She would prefer to have people who she could fire at will."

Scott admits she has made mistakes, like hiring ACG without checking out the firm's bonafides. "I guess to some extent I have been awfully disagreeable and self-righteous," Scott says. But she bristles at the suggestion that she is anti-union and insists that she is squarely in the tradition of "people who want social and economic equality and justice and who are working to make that happen."

She makes no apologies for the changes that she is determined to bring to Pacifica. "Pacifica is not leading a political movement," she says, "but we are arming people in our country with information so that they can lead their own movement and take whatever action they deem necessary."