Pacifica Radio: Expanded Profile

By Lowell Ponte
DiscoverTheNetworks.org
2005

Pacifica Radio is a non-commercial network of five "progressive" FM radio stations. Two of these stations are in California: KPFA 94.1 in Berkeley and KPFK 90.7 in Los Angeles. The other three are KPFT 90.1 in Houston, WBAI 99.5 in New York City, and WPFW 89.3 in Washington, D.C. At least some of its programs also air on approximately 48 "Affiliate" and "Associate" stations in the United States.

This network is owned and operated by the Pacifica Radio Foundation, which may or may not be identical to the Pacifica Foundation, a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) entity.

The Pacifica Foundation filed for incorporation in California in August 1946, created by its principal founder anarcho-pacifist Lew Hill to be a "radical war resistance program." Hill had been a conscientious objector during the war against Hitler and a member of the War Resisters League (WRL). Two years later Pacifica's focus was narrowed to radio.

On April 15, 1949 KPFA began broadcasting the views of San Francisco area radicals for a few hours each day. This station was on the FM band, the audience for which was small because few people owned FM radios. Then and for a decade thereafter licenses for FM stations were relatively easy to obtain. A year later the station was broke and went off the air, but a prolonged community fundraising drive revived it.

In its early days Pacifica Radio practiced the radicalism it preached. It was listener-sponsored radio, and the radical community in one of America's most leftward urban areas participated in deciding and providing station content as well as donating its funding. Like many stations of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Pacifica soon began shifting to what is today called listener-supported stations, where the audience is encouraged to give money but not to have a voice in what the stations air.

An old adage holds that if you bring 10 leftists together, they immediately splinter into 11 factions. Leftists soon vied over who would control or be heard on this new media megaphone. While a rapidly-growing audience tuned in to hear alcoholic Zen author Alan Watts discuss Eastern mysticism or beatniks Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti read their poetry, others heard on Pacifica in the 1950s were preaching Soviet apologetics and advocating Marxism. A power struggle for the station's airtime was underway which has continued to the present day.

In 1955 Lew Hill aired an interview with a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent criticizing FBI tactics. KPFA did antagonistic coverage of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings into Communism. HUAC responded by investigating Pacifica and identifying several of its employees as Communists.

In 1957 Hill fired these employees and KPFA's Board of Directors reversed the firings. In August of that same year, the 38-year-old pacifist founder of Pacifica Radio committed suicide.

Across more than half a century, the history of Pacifica Radio has been a political soap opera with a cast of hundreds, a tale of repeated coups, purges, lockouts, sit-ins, provocations, power struggles, greed and petty egos that could fill more pages than Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. One left-activist's condensed overview of this melodrama (up until September 2003) can be found here and here, with his requisite glossary of key players and events here.

A typical episode from the Pacifica story illustrates several facets of this radical melodrama. In June 1997 the Pacifica Foundation named a new chair to head its national board. She was Mary Frances Berry, a black radical activist who was also chair of President Bill Clinton's U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

"White male hippies over 50," is how Berry described the programmers and audience of KPFA in Berkeley. In 1999 she and Pacifica's Executive Director Lynn Chadwick fired the station's manager and issued a gag order, threatening to fire anyone else who worked at the station who spoke of their actions. When one host tried to tell listeners what was happening, Berry had him arrested while he was live on the air. When people gathered peacefully outside the station to protest these firings, Berry used her connections in the Clinton Justice Department to lean on Berkeley police to arrest the protestors, which promptly took place.

Berry ordered a lockout of all KPFA personnel, in violation of station union agreements. To keep the station on air, a digital ISDN telephone connection was quickly installed so that KPFA could simulcast KPFT, the network's Houston affiliate launched in 1970. This was done without permission and approval of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and therefore violated Federal law.

"People who know [Mary Frances Berry] well describe her as a vitriolic brawler who doesn't know when to stop fighting," wrote Judith Coburn in the left webzine Salon.com, "and who turns on anyone who disagrees with her, even African-Americans with civil rights records equal to or more impressive than her own. More than one African-American politician and journalist have suffered a tongue lashing from Berry and been called an 'Uncle Tom' just because they didn't share her agenda."

Already notorious for her 1991 statement that "Civil Rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them" (so much for the Fourteenth Amendment's 'equal protection'), Berry proceeded to demand the imposition of racial preferences across the board at KPFA. On the other hand, Berry refused to meet with minority staff people at KPFA, who mostly disagreed with her actions.

"Maybe the most bizarre episode yet is Berry's appearance at Pacifica station WBAI in New York in late August," wrote Coburn in the October 12, 1999 Salon.com. "She lectured the staffers about 'diversity,' apparently not noticing that most people in the room were black, Latino or Asian." Said one staffer: "We were amazed how little she knows about radio or what programming we do."

"Berry then flabbergasted her listeners by suggesting the network sell WBAI and/or KPFA and buy a string of small, black radio stations in the South. 'A kind of black NPR,' one staffer described it," wrote Coburn. "Laudable, but to cannibalize Pacifica with its own 50-year history and listeners? She should go out and build that network on her own and see how hard it is!"

[Three of Pacifica's stations have frequencies on the low 'non-commercial' end of the FM band, where college radio stations reside. But its stations in Berkeley and New York City are licensed on higher frequencies where broadcast advertising is permitted. WBAI was bequeathed to Pacifica in its deceased owner's will as an existing commercial station in 1960. If offered for sale, these two major-market stations easily could fetch $60 million or more.]

Mary Frances Berry, wrote Coburn, "always seemed determined to use Pacifica for her own ends." One policy of the partisan Berry was to stifle criticism, from left or right, on Pacifica's airwaves of Democratic President Bill Clinton's Administration or of the Democratic Party, the bases of Berry's own power, position and politics. As was true from the outset with the so-called 'liberal' radio network devoted to electing Democrats, Air America Radio, leftwing critics accused Berry of reprogramming Pacifica Radio to make it a propaganda tool to help elect candidates of the Democratic Party.

Berry apparently was recruited to head Pacifica's board because of her political connections, which could benefit the network. Almost from its inception, Pacifica's government broadcast licenses have been threatened by political opponents and protected by political friends.

The once-independent Pacifica has looked increasingly to government for money and help. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) provided a sizeable grant of taxpayer dollars, for example, to upgrade transmitter equipment for KPFK, the station Pacifica started in 1959 in Los Angeles. (Much of that NTIA grant money mysteriously got lost in accounting).

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the private non-profit corporation created by the Federal Government in 1967 as a political buffer to distribute government largesse to the left-leaning Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR), has also been a huge source of taxpayer dollars for Pacifica Radio. Those CPB taxpayer dollars are Pacifica's second-biggest source of funds, after listener donations. In its 2004 budget, Pacifica lists grants from CPB totaling $1,079,988. Pacifica's 2005 budget lists direct and Community Service Grants (CSGs) from CPB adding up to $1,377,211. The individual Pacifica stations also receive taxpayer money from arts, cultural and other local government commissions.

These are taxpayer dollars provided to subsidize the broadcasting of leftwing programming in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Washington, D.C. as well as in nearly 50 other American cities and towns. But, as left critics of Pacifica have argued, these dollars come with strings attached. Because this taxpayer money can be increased, reduced or withdrawn, some Pacifica executives have moved to mute the most extreme kinds of programs and opinions that would offend politicians and CPB bureaucrats.

During its history Pacifica Radio has done plenty to offend people. To cite a handful of examples out of thousands, it aired regular programs by Communist Party USA members such as Dorothy Healey. In 1969, while American soldiers were being killed in Vietnam, KPFA broadcast a memorial service honoring North Vietnamese Communist dictator and mass murderer Ho Chi Minh. It has provided airtime to virulent anti-Semites, anti-white racists, advocates of the anti-Israel Intifada, apologists for terrorism and supporters of convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

CPB executives, say left critics, secretly colluded with Pacifica executives to make the network more uniform, orderly and homogenized “pushing it to become "NPR lite," to sound more and more like National Public Radio. CPB prefers such uniformity and requires Pacifica to provide something like ratings to demonstrate that it appeals to a large and growing audience in order to justify the grants CPB provides.

The old Pacifica was five stations, each of which created its own distinctive programs “including programs that might air only once a month. Many hosts worked for free to create unique programs, but they retained ownership rights to their programs. Being non-commercial, the old Pacifica never bothered with ratings to determine audience size or demographics. Its aim was not to seek a maximum "lowest common denominator" mass audience, but to attract listeners by offering a wide diversity of exotic shows that discussed folk music, science fiction and a hundred other offbeat niche topics.

The new Pacifica issues "must carry" directives that require all five of its stations to air many of the same programs. Like other networks, its stations sound more and more alike, less individualistic, less innovative and less local. The old community participatory spirit and diversity of Pacifica's infancy has been replaced by closed door meetings, secret budgets, authoritarian policies, political uniformity and ways to boost listenership.

At the new Pacifica, even when hosts work for free, the network's "Y2K Rule" implemented in 2000 requires that part of the rights to their programs be signed over to Pacifica. One significant source of revenue for Pacifica is sales of copies of its unique archived recordings of music, interviews and other material.

With the dawning age of satellite radio services such as XM and Sirius, a portion of the monthly fees paid by subscribers worldwide could be kicked back to program providers such as Pacifica. This is a potential gold mine on the broadcast horizon now that Pacifica insists on owning a piece of the shows it airs, and its profitability increases if listenership is large and growing.

One notable exception to this Pacifica-ownership rule is Democracy Now!, a morning news program created in 1996 at Pacifica station WBAI in New York City by current co-host Amy Goodman and others. Goodman extricated the popular hour-long weekday program from Pacifica at the time of Mary Frances Berry's reign and began producing it at separate facilities funded in part by eccentric billionaire George Soros' Open Society Institute and other foundations. Democracy Now! is at present distributed via satellite both by Pacifica, whose stations continue to air the show, and by a taxpayer-subsidized transponder of National Public Radio to many of its affiliate stations.

Although developed by Pacifica Radio when Goodman was its WBAI News Director, Democracy Now! (along with its trademark rights and archives) was given to Goodman. Pacifica officially budgets $500,000 a year to air the show on its stations, but critics on the left have charged that Goodman secretly receives $1 million annually from the Pacifica Foundation, which these critics say should not have given her this valuable foundation property without recompense.

Goodman is not the only millionaire created by Pacifica. Several of its executives have left or retired after allocating large golden parachutes for themselves.

Pacifica has demonstrated hypocrisy in many other ways. Once dedicated to pushing the envelope of provocation, its airings of indecent words by comedian George Carlin beginning in 1973 led to one of the landmark cases in broadcast history, FCC v. Pacifica Foundation (1978). Pacifica stations will allow its hosts to voice nearly limitless verbal abuse against Republican politicians. But this network has made it an immediate firing offense for any of its employees on air to discuss the 'dirty laundry' of fired employees or policy decisions by Pacifica executives. This and similar gag orders at times have been enforced with ruthless efficiency, literally dragging programmers out of studios and terminating their shows for the tiniest infractions of these rules. Free speech on Pacifica Radio does not extend to free speech about Pacifica Radio.

Awash from its birth with the socialist-Marxist rhetoric of class warfare, hatred for capitalism and corporations, and professed love for unions and workers, Pacifica Radio fought tooth and nail against its own workers' attempts to unionize. To thwart unionization, Pacifica used threats, intimidation, gag orders, lawyers and lockouts.

In May 1999, during Berry's reign, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a complaint against Pacifica for firing union employees at WBAI and converting their positions to management, effectively moving these jobs out of the union contract. Berry approved the hiring of what critics describe as a 'union-busting' law firm to expedite such Pacifica policies. In 1999, with Berry's apparent approval, the ISDN link that allowed KPFA to remain on air during Pacifica's lockout of unionized workers was installed by private contractors after the telephone company's unionized installers refused to do so and set up a picket line around the station.

Chair of the recent Interim Board of Directors of Pacifica Foundation elected in 2001 has been Leslie Cagan, head of the anti-Iraq war Coalition for Peace and Justice and strong supporter of Cuba's Marxist dictator Fidel Castro.

Other members of the Pacifica Board have included radical comic Dick Gregory and former Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry.

The general manager of Pacifica's station WPFW, started in 1977 in Washington, D.C., is Tony Regusters, the former press secretary to the Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-California).