Bob McChesney: (moderator) And now we'll turn to our final speaker of this medley, Norman Solomon, columnist, radio commentator and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy…

Norman Solomon: I was asked to talk about Pacifica Radio on this panel, and I want to start out by saying that Pacifica is uniquely important to progressives around the country. It's the closest we have to a national, real-time, instant link and it also is a place where volunteers and contributors and often listeners are often directly involved in making it happen.

The passion that surrounds Pacifica, while in recent years it might have seemed like a negative, is also very clearly and more profoundly a positive. People care about Pacifica…and that's one of its great strengths.

As a media critic, I try the very best I can to be as accurate as I can be when I praise and/or criticize, and/or some combination, media outlets whatever they are. And one of the disturbing things in recent years around the controversies around Pacifica has been that sometimes the facts aren't straight. It's true with the leaflets that are anti-Pacifica sometimes…it's true of the press releases that come out ever more adroitly from Pacifica National headquarters. There's also a lot of truth from both of those sources, as well.

I also try not to engage in anything approaching personal vilification, and I don't want to seem at all righteous about this, there have been quite a few lapses in that regard on both ends of the barricade.

If there's one thing that I can emphasize here about this swirl of controversy that I feel is central, it's the question of accountability. Programmers, volunteers, producers, staff people…they need to be accountable. And they need to be accountable to the management. There is no good old days where we can say, people do their thing and that's cool. You need accountability. There's no written guarantee, or there should be no guarantee that people who have programs should be able to keep them. Right? That as well...there has to be an accountability process.

Accountability to work has to function in both directions. And management has to be accountable. And one of the very disturbing things about dynamics with Pacifica has been that it has been next to impossible, and in many ways impossible to discern accountability.

Who is the governing board accountable to? Who is management accountable to? It's very unclear, and for people who take their politics, if you will seriously, that can be very disturbing…particularly in times of controversy and conflict.

Progressives, as much as anybody else, or more so, should know full well that when there are not avenues for discourse, debate and participation in decision making, your gonna have big, big problems.

In the absence, or abstinence, of substantive mechanisms people get upset. And dissent can explode. We on the Left ought to understand that because sometimes we do our best to make dissent explode.

Dare I say the word "democracy?"

I hear it on the Pacifica airwaves. And usually it's in a terrific program context. But, the word "democracy," …the word "democracy" takes on a dirty word connotation when its brought up and applied to Pacifica. It's been very weird to me. I love KPFA. I listen to it. I've tried to, and sometimes tried not to, follow these controversies the last several years, and it just borders on the bizarre. It's almost as though if you talk about democracy for the Pacifica-owned stations, somehow you're being labeled as "beyond the pale" in terms of how management is concerned. And yet, part of the mission, as it should be, obviously, at Pacifica, and the programs, is to encourage notions of democracy…not as an abstract, rhetorical buzzword, but something far more than that.

All of a sudden, we're "ultra" if we talk about democracy in the concrete here and now with an organization we are in some way involved with. For the most part, I feel that in these controversies in the past few years, Pacifica management has often been its worst enemy. It's undermined itself through secrecy for one thing…secrecy that is indefensible…and I know that in the recent couple of months there have been some moves and some press releases and so forth to say that there will be much more accessibility to meetings and minutes and so forth and I think that's all to the good and it remains to be seen how substantive those changes are.

Accompanying the secrecy, which has gone on for years and years, is frankly, institutional arrogance from the top down … (yeah! from audience members) … can we just hold off on all that "yes" stuff for a while?

And I think it's been experienced by a lot of folks. And I go out of my way to talk about management not as an individual but as management functioning. There are staff people… many, many… (Pat Scott interrupts "let's not talk about me.") … I'm talking about Pacifica management…and I think it's very important to look at issues of morale. Staff, volunteers and so forth. It's really unpleasant to feel that you're dealing with a superstructure that is arrogant and that is often, at least seemingly, Machiavellian.

So, what we need to…I think one of the challenges we have, and I want to be very clear here on what I hope for among other things…I want Pacifica programs to be heard as widely as possible in this country. I want Pacifica Network News to be heard on hundreds of stations. I want Democracy Now! to be heard on hundreds of stations. That should be one of our main goals when we talk about change in radio in this country.

One of the things that bothers me about recent developments is where the momentum has taken us. Management is hurting that very possibility, and our chances to move effectively to that goal with this whole issue of the new agreement with stations that are airing the Pacifica Nightly News. I don't want to go into the minutiae but here's the nutshell of it:

Stations are being told that they can only air the Pacifica Network News if they agree to broadcast it in an acceptable setting that is not - and I asked for the wording and didn't get it from Pacifica headquarters, is not in some way defamatory or derogatory towards Pacifica as a programming source. And as you may know, at least a station in Austin -- and others have been talking about it - have aired disclaimers bracketing the half hour news…OK…saying that Pacifica has been accused of unfair treatment of labor and the union at some of the stations and so forth…and it's been a bracketed disclaimer. I've seen earlier versions of the language and it wasn't over the top…some people may feel it shouldn't be done, people may disagree with the wording, but the fact is that if you are in Austin or Portland or Madison, Wisconsin…and you're at a community station, you're now faced with a choice that you shouldn't have to face: either you sign this agreement which curtails your own freedom to operate your station outside the boundaries of that 29 minutes of the nightly feed of the Pacifica News…either you abrogate your autonomy around… exclusive of that 29 minutes, as a station…or you don't get access to air that broadcast.

And, whether literally that means one or two or three or four stations end up not airing Pacifica nightly news because of this essentially, ultimatum…the damage is far worse because you need a trust level…you need a relationship, not just with the five stations you own, or the 50 or 70 that are airing your program, but potentially what we used to call "good vibes." Trust…not bad vibes, not mistrust, not resentment, not increased alienation. So I think it's in all of our interests, not to simply talk about how we can do damage control, but also talk about how we can generally improve the atmosphere and relationships that exist.

We should strive to widen listenership…improving production values, yes, absolutely. We want to have a better on-air sound, we want to have stronger more effective messages and politics. That doesn't mean watering down…that shouldn't mean watering down. It shouldn't mean that we're going to exclude messages that seem too anti-establishment or too anti-corporate…and I know Pat just mentioned the term "agitprop journalism," saying she doesn't want it on Pacifica. I don't want it on Pacifica, either. I want journalism, and I want a lot of it!

And I want the funding priorities to reflect the priorities that say the institution supports the producers and journalists, investigative reporters doing the work… we can talk all we want about human needs, but whether it's the Federal budget or our own budget, our priorities, when push comes to shove, is how we're spending our money. And my own impression is that the hard, nitty-gritty journalistic work, not just on-air, but the producing, the investigative reporting is not getting the share of the pie that it deserves, given the enunciated goals that Pacifica has.

We need the stations, and this is not just Pacifica stations…we need to be less rhetorical and we need to be more radical. And often we are given what…we internalize a false choice, we want to be less rhetorical therefore we need to modulate the message…I mean, that's absolutely wrong! Those are false dichotomies we shouldn't buy into in any way.

In the Bay Area, and throughout California, and of course throughout the country, one of the big battles has been over affirmative action. And, its ironic to me that when the technology is now easiest and cheapest to do on-the-scene live remotes at historic events, there's very little of it, including on Pacifica airwaves.

When the Regents of the University of California are at an historic meeting going on all day, with testimony and voting about whether to kill affirmative action, that should be on the airwaves. And if no one else is gonna do it, and probably no one will, Pacifica stations and other independent stations should be doing it.

As a media critic, when I pick up the issue of Mother Jones Magazine, and I see an attack on affirmative action assigned by an all-white hierarchy written by five white people, and I'm told this is a progressive magazine, as a media critic I'm not gonna just be silent about it…I'm gonna criticize that institution, because as we all know, talking the talk is one thing.

Well, I feel very similarly about Pacifica Radio in terms of democracy. We want to hold ourselves and each other to standards … we always fall short… but we wanna keep pushing. And, arrogance that comes out of just too much centralized power is corrosive to the spirit as well as the process that we wanna create. again, dare I say it? …some forms of democracy in our midst.

Whether it's done in the name of widening audience, or professionalism, it's no more acceptable … it's no more acceptable to have this corporatized, in effect, top-down, anti-democratic spirit…it's no more acceptable than if it was done in the name of the international proletariat or anything else.

We can't separate means and ends. It keeps coming back to that. In real life it's not a platitude, it's reality. We separate means and ends, we're in deep shit.

So I hope, just to kind of wind down here, I hope that in retrospect we'll look at this autumn for any combination of reasons, as a turning point. We want to help each other move forward. There are real disagreements but there are also even more profound possibilities for pulling together.

(applause)