Marc Cooper writes at length today about The Squandering of Pacifica Radio, a potentially invaluable resource for the left -- whose frequences Cooper estimates are worth between $300-$500 billion, but which (Cooper says) is being run into the ground.
Cooper's thesis:
The potentially biggest media resource - and really one of the largest institutions of any sort--on the American Left has taken one more giant and voluntary step toward oblivion.
continued
The impetus for Cooper's piece is that:
The five-station, listener-sponsored, half-billion dollar Pacifica Radio network has just named a new executive director. Predictable enough that the new guy, Greg Guma, comes straight out of the pwogwessive bubble of Burlington. But what catches the eye is how Guma - who will now oversee the five stations--has written with enthusiasm about truly off-kilter conspiracy theorists like David Ray Griffin who argue that 9/11 was NOT caused by the four Al Qaeda--commandeered planes. Instead, Guma asks us to take seriously the proposition that the attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were the product of a Reichstag-like plot engineered by the Bush Administration.
That proposition was described as "monstrous" by former CIA agent Bob Baer writing in The Nation magazine a couple of years ago (Baer's story was the basis of the movie Syriana). Baer's reaction to the same loon praised by Guma is the proper one: The Bushies may be liars but that is no reason to lie to ourselves and swoon over preposterous conspiracy theories.Unless, of course you are the new Executive Director of the Pacifica network. To be frank, for those of us who actually pay some attention to this matter, the selection of a non-credible fringie like Guma is hardly a surprise. Pacifica has been in accelerating decline for two decades - especially in the last five years (disclaimer: I did a daily drive-time show on Pacifica's KPFK in Los Angeles from 1998-2001. I quit when an extreme know-nothing faction who believed that I and others were engaged in a dark "corporatist" conspiract to -gasp!- "mainstream" the programming took over the entire organization. My Radio Nation show, which was made available for free to hundreds of public radio stations and therefore to Pacifica, was also carried on KPFK until last month when the program moved -without me--to Air America).
As Cooper notes, Pacifica's problems are not new:
Five years ago, also writing in The Nation, veteran journalist and former NPR news manager John Dinges came the closest to best explaining the downward spiral of Pacifica. Since then, things have only gotten worse. Much worse.
Why care? Because Pacifica is such a potentially great resource for the left.
I don't think anyone would or should care very much about any of this, if it were not for the gross squandering of an historic opportunity. Started by Bay Area pacifists, anarchists and liberals in 1949, Pacifica eventually opened stations in L.A., New York, Washington D.C. and Houston.
Are you ready for this? The estimated value of those frequencies today - that is to say the market value of the five Pacifica stations operating today--is conservatively estimated to be $300-$500 million. You read that right. A half-billion dollars? Do you know of any other institution on the American Left that can compare in value?
Cooper goes on to discuss the specifics of the five Pacifica stations. Not living within their listening areas, I cannot evaluate his opinions. But I'm sure many others here can. Here's what Cooper has to say:
The "flagship" New York station, WBAI, which in the 70's was a hothouse that produced a generation of able journalists who later took their skills and their liberal or lefty politics into the mainstream media, is today an irrelevancy that teeters on bankruptcy. The programming is domianted by a toxic brew of crude race-politics.
The Pacifica outlet in Washington D.C., WPFW,, which, in the age of Bush, ought to be a mighty bastion of on-air political pushback, continues to be - as has been the case for two decades--primarily a black jazz station. White guilt, and a veritable PC-cult that permeates the internal Pacifica culture, has constrained the network from turning that station into what it ought to be - a powerful and massively listened-to alternative in the heart of the nation's capital.
The Houston outlet, KPFT, remains a peanut-whistle station. KPFA, in Berkeley, whose core paid staff has been the same for 25 years, is but an echo-chamber of its pony-tailed, core community. Listening to the station for more than five minutes is like tuning into a clandestine ethnic radio narrow-casting in an obscure tongue to some tiny Balkan enclave.
The Los Angeles station, KPFK, whose drive-time is dominated by an combination of screamers and, believe it or not, a couple of followers of the maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, finds itself in a similar sorry state. With a signal area that encompasses 25 million people, its average listenership during any given quarter hour is under 10,000. Over a seven day period, the 110,000 watt station collects a cumulative audience of barely 175,000. That's less than the number of unique visitors that a big blog - like Daily Kos--gets in one single day.
How did Pacifica get this way? Cooper's explanation is that a hard core, more willing to stay late and meetings and shout down competitors than anyone else, has a "death grip" on the network:
When Pacifica was once a magical place that taught you how to think it is now a dreary drumbeat telling you what to think. Its air is filled with shrill, clumsy and dogmatic denunciations of "fascism." Any trace of high culture, meanwhile, has been ruthlessly rooted out and expunged. The program schedule is divvied up among self-appointed "community leaders" and paid staff who - for the most part--could never dream of earning a paycheck from any other media entity in the world. What paid and volunteer programmers have in common is a death-grip on their personal slice of air time. Try to take it away and you became the target of a virulent campaign accusing you of being a sexist, racist, and corporatist nazi.
For more than a decade now the rickety internal structure of Pacifica has been wholly dominated by a small ultra-activist crust that knows little to nothing about journalism, radio programming or non-profit management. After they took over the network in 2001 and proceeded to fire three of the five sitting General Managers, they did so in such a blatantly abusive and improper manner that, in any other circumstance, it would have elicited cries of anti-labor policies from its own constituencies. Resulting successful lawsuits cost the network literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial settlements - a dirty little detail that has never been fully disclosed to an audience that is regularly milked for donations. And that would be shocked if it ever learned the truth.
The success the current management group had in taking over the organization derives not at all from talent or intelligence but principally from its immeasurable tenacity - a super-human capacity to outlast everyone else in endless rounds of meetings and to shout down its opponents. That, along with a fervent belief that they, alone and against all odds, are saving the world by making sure air time is given to only fellow true-believers who meet some sort of bizarre political litmus test.
What is to be done? Cooper offers little hope, except perhaps that the first step forward is to recognize fully and honestly where we are. Cooper says that he begrudges the Pacifica leadership nothing:
They perform exactly as one would expect. Instead, our recriminations should center on those who know better, or at least, ought to know better. Whether it is in Los Angeles, or New York or Washington, serious, otherwise intelligent liberals and progressives have sat back and quietly watched this half-billion dollar network slowly slip into the sea. In their worst moments, these liberals and lefties have signed onto idiotic crusades aimed at "saving" Pacifica by cleansing it of any trace of nuance, ideological diversity and, for that matter, debate and dialogue. And even in their better moments, these same supposed political grown-ups, even when they can sense that the network is being squandered, and after the umpteenth time that they have heard their local station raise money by pitching crank videos "exposing" 911 as a White House-engineered hoax, they bite their tongues, shrug their shoulders and remain silent lest they be publicly heard criticizing "our own side."
Well, nice work, folks. The nesting chickies have indeed come home to roost. Your network, as you would have it, is now officially run by someone who thinks we ought to seriously consider that something other than those airplanes took down the towers. Look forward, if you can, to more programming and fund-raising that would be better suited for a UFO cult than for a serious or credible political and cultural opposition. And all at the cost of only a cool half-billion.