from
z magazine's "znet"
Pacifica's
Future?
By Clare Spark
The weekend of Feb. 26th-28th will
mark a watershed event in the history of Pacifica Radio, the largest and
most powerful public broadcasting outlet in the United States. The Pacifica
Foundation Board of Governors will be meeting in Berkeley, CA, and will
be voting to alter the by-laws of the foundation that determine how Governors
are selected. Although it may appear to be a mere administrative detail,
in reality this change will have a decisive influence on who, in the future,
will have influence over the disposition of over $200 million in unique
broadcast assets. The important specifics of this change and the context
for understanding the trajectory have been published in the Jan 15-31 issue
of CounterPunch(http://www.counterpunch.org). Of course, Pacifica leadership
does not agree with Alexander Cockburn that Pacifica has been neutered.
As articulated by the Chair of the Governing Board, Dr. Mary Frances Berry,
"…our main goals, according to the plan, are to mobilize listeners toward
positive social change and to reach the largest possible audience." In
a related public statement, Dr. Berry was disturbed by those aspects of
Pacifica that resemble "a dysfunctional family that's lived together too
long and [in which] everybody has ancient grievances and memories about
things that somebody did years ago." In her search for a new Executive
Director she wants "a good administrator and manager, who's good with people,
and sensitive to the public image of the organization. And who can in a
collegial way work with station managers and volunteers to make progress
with a minimum of conflict." The same criteria have been emphasized in
the job posting for a National Program Director. In brief, the impending
changes will etch in stone dramatic changes in the structure and uses of
Pacifica. This article suggests the present impact and future directions
in which these changes lead us. My focus here is the significantly modified
language with which the goals of Pacifica are now presented to prospective
listener-sponsors as well as to applicants for the most powerful jobs in
the Foundation. Top-down management techniques will reconstruct the happy
Pacifica family.
The Pacifica Mission Statement
as posted on the current Pacifica website banishes any open-ended, multi-sourced
original investigation of our political culture whatsoever, contrary to
the explicit specifications as formulated in the late 1940s by founder
Lewis Hill. However, his name is invoked as if he had in fact approved
of the new dispensation. Here is how the Pacifica website presents its
revised Mission to the unwary:
Pacifica Mission Statement:
To Lew Hill, the Quaker conscientious objector and Washington, D.C. news
broadcaster, the biased and myopic clutter of commercial radio was the
driving force behind the establishment of KPFA and Pacifica Radio-- born
in 1949 with a mission which to this day remains unique in radio broadcasting:
· To promote cultural diversity and pluralistic community expression
· To contribute to a lasting understanding between individuals of
all nations, races, creeds and colors · To promote freedom of the
press and serve as a forum for various viewpoints and · To maintain
an independent funding base
As revised, the Pacifica Mission
submerges the liberties and qualities of individuals in a series of (peacefully
co-existing) imagined communities, racially or ethnically defined. The
original Mission Statement declares that programming shall strive to study
the causes of conflict, i.e. political, economic, philosophical and religious
antagonisms, in the interests of course, of world peace. It also states
that news gathering is to strive for accuracy and objectivity by bringing
information not found elsewhere to the listeners, so that news analysis
can be presented with each subject considered with maximum comprehensiveness,
no embarrassing facts suppressed. The
systematic study of conflict that would facilitate cooperation (where possible)
between previously antagonistic individuals and groups, past and present,
has disappeared. Present management introduces terms found nowhere in Lewis
Hill's original statement: "cultural diversity" and "pluralistic community
expression." Doubtlessly included to conform to the recommendations and
guidelines of public broadcasting after the 1960s, and specifically, to
qualify Pacifica as a minority radio network eligible for CPB funding,
the multicultural objective, presented first, is immediately followed by
the second that mentions "a lasting understanding between individuals,"
then the item on free speech. Hence, the reader may believe that "cultural
diversity and pluralistic community expression" inevitably protect the
free speech and interests of "individuals" against all forms of illegitimate
authority. Not surprisingly,
the new Mission has also eliminated from the original statement the encouragement
of experimental, vanguard artists from the local community--presumably
creators of high and challenging (but now "elitist") culture, given the
well-known interests of Lew Hill, his poet-anarchist-libertarian supporters
in the Bay Area, and the arts programming celebrated for decades on Pacifica
stations in SF, Los Angeles, and NYC.
The rights to differ with official
authority and to control the government that rules with the consent of
the governed adorn our world-inspiring Declaration of Independence. Anyone
alert to the strategies of groupthink folkishness driving public broadcasting
policy today as promoted by the so-called multiculturalists or "ethnopluralists"
will recognize the buzz words that have erased the very concepts of the
dissenting individual, the original artist or scientist, or the possibility
of objective knowledge uncovered in the search for universally verifiable
truths. But then, CPB funding is responsible for 20% of the Pacifica "independent
funding base." And in its efforts for "outreach" and audience building
(ostensibly at the behest of the CPB that requires minimum levels of listener
support to bestow its largesse), Pacifica management has been subjecting
the work of volunteer artists and experts in the sciences and the humanities
to the judgments, not of their peers and the subscribers, but to persons
who have been instructed in the techniques that disturb the demanding processes
of critical thought and the full expression of developed artists--all because
there is, in my view at least, the notion among some professional managers
within Pacifica that "the people" [workers? persons of color?] who are
to enlarge the audience will not support rational, critical processes unless
"managed" with the methods of commercial advertising and soundbite news.
By both inference and experience with the changes at KPFK, I have concluded
that the sought-after "diverse" "communities" must be irrational and resistant
to education, why, they themselves prefer indoctrination; for ---they have
a very short attention span; ---they are to be mobilized to give money
with the predictable appearance of charismatic, morally outraged (Pacifica)
celebrity programmers at the same time every day, with whom they will bond;
---they respond primarily to the often shallow, repetitious and primitive
appeals of "indigenous" popular culture and have no interest in "hegemonic"
"Eurocentric" high culture (the source of their oppression); ---they, in
their piebald "cultural diversity," are capable of understanding only their
own "rooted" "cultures" and "community" to the exclusion of all others.
Sociologists and political scientists recognize such pseudo-pluralist ploys
as the favored elite strategy in micromanaging group conflict in a putative
democracy. However, this famously manipulative and deceptive social psychology
as developed by "moderate" upper-class Progressives is being peddled by
Pacifica today as Lew Hill's insightful and objective ethos for listener-supported
radio, indeed as the very essence of "grass-roots" progressivism.
What follows is my e-mail letter
to Dr. Berry after I saw the job posting for a National Program Director
in early January.
"Dear Dr. Berry, I don't know
if you remember the letters I wrote to you when you assumed the Chair of
the Governing Board of the Pacifica Foundation, an organization with which
I had been so long associated as volunteer programmer, department head,
then Program Director of KPFK (Feb.1981-August 1982). I was concerned then
about the increasingly commercial direction of the organization (a problem
intertwined with the question of governance). At that time I appealed to
you as a fellow scholar and public intellectual and you were reassuring
about your determination to bring more honesty and openness to Pacifica.
I am writing to you today because I am disturbed about the job posting
pertaining to the open position of National Program Director. According
to the Pacifica website, the applicants are to have extensive experience
in management as such, including the ability to conduct and read audience
surveys. There is no highlighting or emphasis given to actual experience
in evaluating the intellectual content and artistic quality and originality
(in an educational sense) of the programming broadcast by Pacifica. Nor
is there any emphasis given to vision of the kind necessary to fulfill
the tremendous demands of the Pacifica Mission Statement, let alone the
mature emotional qualities necessary to oversee and maintain a cooperative
working environment inhabited by a highly contentious group of programmers
and listener-sponsors with varied political agendas and social experience.
For years now, those of us who
have built the organization have been watching, helplessly and with diminishing
morale, the transformation of an invaluable cultural resource (unlike any
other) into just another institution controlled by the same values and
goals as profit-driven establishment media. How can Pacifica justify its
educational non-profit status if marketing strategies trump independent
radio production--controversial, bold, challenging, and unfundable by other
means than diffuse listener support? What shall Pacifica say to the autodidacts
who look to it as the only educational institution that cares about their
needs, and, at its best, can provide a range of debate, cultural production,
and cutting-edge research in humanistic and scientific thought superior
or equal to that of the very best universities?
The present job description for
National Program Director bodes ill for Pacifica. I am not opposed to management
skills as a necessary prerequisite for leadership in a non-profit organization
as my letter must already have indicated, but management in programming
should not be about luring or seducing a target audience with the methods
perfected by commercial media; rather management skills should arise from
familiarity with the particular work processes that make a Pacifica radio
program potentially vibrant and meaningful to everyone in a democratic
society. Managers must first of all have been successful producers themselves;
they must also understand the technical and social environment that facilitates
good work and motivates loyalty and commitment. It is a question of objectives
and outlook. If Pacifica at its best has been a unique organization (as
I believe to be the case), then leadership should be chosen from those
with Pacifica experience encompassing those critical, artistic, and emotional
skills I have outlined above.
Please tell me where you stand
on this question."
Dr. Berry's response to my letter
reiterated her statement of goals as quoted above, adding the need for
"increasing progressive news oriented programming." While aligning herself
with my values and concerns, she saw no contradiction between audience
building under the supervision of professional managers and the stringent
demands of education for democratic participation--an education which,
in my view, intellectual conflict is inevitable and desirable; with competent
leadership and listener participation, likely to be productive. More than
ever, I am alarmed for the future of the Pacifica Foundation.