An Editorial from the San Francisco Bay Guardian

May 21, 1997

Dear Pat Scott
An open letter to the executive director of Pacifica radio network

LAST MONTH the Corporation for Public Broadcasting found that Pacifica, under your leadership, had blatantly violated federal rules requiring all publicly supported radio stations to hold open meetings and maintain independent local advisory boards. The CPB came down hard, suggesting that next year's funding -- totaling about $1 million -- may depend on whether Pacifica complies with federal law.

This comes as no surprise to some of us. For years your critics have complained about Pacifica leadership's secretive and autocratic style. But the scathing CPB audit takes your management problems to a new level. You can no longer dismiss your critics as disgruntled employees or the left-wing "fringe" -- this time you're under fire from the moderate, cautious, non-activist federal agency that happens to provide 15 percent of your budget. You can't complain that it's a political witch-hunt either: the CPB never took issue with your programming, which has become less radical and more mainstream.

The CPB audit should have been a wake-up call -- but you wouldn't listen. Instead of acknowledging that Pacifica has problems, you reacted defiantly, attacking the CPB's inspector general for doing his job.

And your obsession with secrecy continues unchecked. Take for example the agenda for next month's national board meeting, to be held in Oakland (see "Clash of the Titans,"). Amazingly the agenda, released last week, flouts the CPB's open-meetings order. Every substantive policy discussion will be held behind closed doors. Budgets, major governance changes, labor relations, even discussion of the CPB report itself -- all are scheduled for executive session.

Let us remind you, Pat: Every penny shelled out for this weekend of closed meetings -- and every penny spent on your salary, on programming for all five stations, on your expensive antiunion labor consultants, and on everything else your operation does -- comes either directly out of listeners' pockets or from their tax dollars.

Pacifica is not a private club. It's a community-supported institution set up to serve the progressive public. And it's time for you and the Pacifica board to start acting like public servants instead of corporate raiders.

Pacifica needs to clean up its act -- now. Nothing less than a totally open and accountable process will restore the public's trust.

The agenda for next month's meeting is described as "subject to change." Good. Let's start by eliminating most of the eight-and-a-half hours of executive sessions and opening those discussions to Pacifica's real owners -- the progressives who have forked over their hard-earned dollars year after year to build America's most powerful alternative-radio voice.