Planet Pacifica: Growing Pains

Progressive Media’s Fragile Democracy: The original idea was to nurture an open exchange of ideas that could help people come to know each other as human beings, dialogue that demonstrated the possibility of peace in practice. But over 50 years Pacifica evolved into something else: a national progressive radio network, a source of “alternative” news and viewpoints, and a platform for many underserved constituencies.

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Part Two: In this episode, how Pacifica Radio began, WBAI’s legendary “free form” past, and early shots in progressive radio’s civil war. Plus, Dustin Hoffman reading part of War and Peace in 1970, sounds of the 1979 March for Gay Rights, and comedy from Mushroom Cloud Theater.

Confrontation and war, or understanding and reconciliation. Sometimes it’s a tough call. And leaders can make all the difference. It isn’t easy and the country has certainly had all kinds. So has Pacifica Radio, the original listener sponsored network. It has also often been at war with itself. But it didn’t start out that way.

Pacifica Radio’s founder, Lew Hill, was the son of an Oklahoma millionaire. Not that there’s anything wrong with it. He also studied Kierkegaard and Gandhi at Stanford, and then became a conscientious objector. But he came up with the idea for a pacifist-oriented radio station elsewhere, at first while working at a remote, church-funded  Civilian Public Service camp in Coleville, California. It was one of many camps set up for those who refused to fight in World War II.

It was a time of emerging anticommunist fever, known in time as the McCarthy era, after the powerful and unscrupulous Wisconsin Senator. Hollywood screenwriters were jailed for refusing to discuss their political activities. During KPFA’s first months on the air, union leader Harry Bridges was imprisoned for concealing his ties with the Communist Party. A dozen California Communist leaders were convicted for violating the Smith Act, which made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the government. 

KPFA, the first Pacifica station, went on the air in April 1949. Initially it reached relatively few people in the San Francisco Bay Area on the new FM dial. Radio broadcasting had been around for about thirty years. Serious radio news reporting was only a decade old, beginning with coverage of the 1938 Munich agreement and increasing tensions in Europe.

Radio broadcasting had become a hugely profitable enterprise, especially for the two large networks, CBS and NBC, and independent stations in larger markets. They in turn were the guardians of a reactionary, middlebrow national culture. There were only a few main commandments: keep it clean, keep it friendly, and avoid controversy whenever possible.

The Pacifica Foundation would be different. Yet for Hill and early volunteers and hosts, the purpose of the new FM station was dialogue not revolution, and education, not profit. But certainly not Communism. Even pacifism, which had helped inspire its birth, played only a marginal role as KPFA struggled to find a place in Berkeley’s then relatively insular university community.

Hill’s interest in launching a station was further fueled by a job announcing at WINX in Washington DC toward the end of World War II. At first, it brought him together with Joy Cole, a kindred spirit who shared his anti-war sentiments and general desire to create a better world. They married in 1944. But ultimately Hill couldn’t accept the restrictions and distortions that had become commonplace in commercial radio. His qualms ultimately became intolerable in May 1945, when he was handed a story about “the people at Tule Lake.”

He knew what that euphemism really meant. Tule Lake was the site of one of the most infamous internment camps for Japanese Americans during the war, a so-called "segregation camp" in northern California that warehoused more than 18,000 people for several years. It had just closed.  Hill, who knew about it from work nearby as a war resister, refused to read a misleading report and turned in his resignation.

A year later, after moving to San Francisco, he submitted his proposal for a radio station to the Federal Communications Commission and wrote a fundraising prospectus. The idea was that people who were committed to nonviolence could reach beyond the choir, beyond ivory tower intellectuals and war resisters, and reach the “average man” by bonding with the community through a station. 

In what became the single most important document in Pacifica history, he outlined the purposes of a new educational foundation in a series of bold, idealistic statements that remained central to its self-image for six decades.

Hill’s vision was that the foundation’s main project, KPFA, would “engage in any activity that shall contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between individuals of all nations, races, creeds and color.” He wrote that it would “gather and disseminate information on the causes of conflict between any and all such groups, and promote the study of political and economic problems, and the causes of religious, philosophical and racial antagonisms.” 

And how? Through dialogue – through diverse groups and people openly communicating with each other on the air. The objective wasn’t to discover and convey indisputable truths. it was to nurture an open exchange of ideas that could help people come to know each other as human beings, dialogue that demonstrated the possibility of peace in practice.

By the time I became CEO more than half a century later, however, Pacifica had evolved into something else: a national progressive radio network, a source of “alternative” news and viewpoints, a platform for many underserved constituencies, but also for identity politics, and too often for “politically correct” wisdom, as well as angry internal bickering over process, ideology, air-time and assigning blame — all of which prevented the network from making a bigger impact on public discourse. Or, as Hill more modestly hoped, creating constructive connections between people.

There was ambiguity from the start. The goals, when Hill put them in writing, tended to shift with his audience. In pitches to the Ford Foundation and a 1952 book, for instance, he dropped words like “pacifism” and “peace” and replaced them with “personal freedom” and “imagination.” 

Rather than bonding with the community by discussing the local and familiar, the station offered “serious cultural broadcasting” to secure the support of two percent of the area’s total FM audience. Just two percent. This “two percent” formula became central to his theory of sustainable listener sponsorship through voluntary subscriptions. For the first five years, however, not enough listeners sent in money and the station depended on wealthy benefactors and major foundations.

Matthew Lazar noted years later in Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network, early announcers would often boast that as an advertisement-free station, KPFA didn’t need to appease commercial influences. True. On the other hand, Lazar added, “this freedom did not protect Lew Hill and his band of utopians from the strict ideological requirements of the liberal corporate state.” 

Birth of a Network

In January 1960, Harold Winkler, Pacifica Radio’s president and also KPFA station manager, received an unusual phone call from New York. A former political science professor at the University of California, Winkler had resigned in protest over a required loyalty oath for faculty members. Luckily, he was independently wealthy. 

On the other end of the line was Louis Schweitzer, a Russian-born millionaire, radio station owner, and also a president – in his case president of the Peter Schweitzer Division of Kimberly-Clark. He knew about Pacifica and he had a radical proposition. 

     

A few years before, Schweitzer, an eccentric radio enthusiast, had bought a station for $34,000, subsequently offering New York City the latest music and intellectual programs. But he found the choice between losing money on quality and making a profit by going commercial personally frustrating and philosophically untenable. The station’s greatest success had come during a New York newspaper strike. “That was not what I wanted at all,” he told Winkler. “I saw that if the station ever succeeded, it would be a failure." So, he asked, did Pacifica want it?

     

For a decade, KPFA in Berkeley had been the only listener-sponsored radio station in the country. But after planning for four years and raising $200,000, the Pacifica Foundation had just launched a second station – KPFK in Los Angeles – an independent operation with its own board, station manager, and local base of supporters. Pacifica had obtained the best site on Mt. Wilson to run over 110 kilowatts of power, enough to reach six million people from Santa Barbara and Los Angeles to the Mexican border and San Bernadino mountains.

Now, without paying anything, it could own a completely equipped FM station in New York, the Big Apple, smack dab in the middle of the FM dial. It was a no-brainer. And it was happening, largely, because of two wealthy men.  

     

The station that ultimately became WBAI began lower on the dial in 1941 as WABF, a commercial station, but moved to the 99.5 frequency in 1948. In the early 1950s it was off the air for two years, but came back in 1955 with call letters that reflected the name of its current owner, Broadcast Associates, Inc. WBAI. By the time Schweitzer made his donation, it was worth about $200,000.

      

With KPFK and WBAI joining the flagship station, KPFA Pacifica expanded rapidly from a station to a network reaching three major metropolitan areas — with a potential audience of sixty million people. But along with growth came challenges, and for too long the organization remained oblivious and unprepared.

The fourth station added was KPFT, a full-power station in Houston with a signal that reached far beyond the boundaries of the sprawling Texas city, beaming talk and music to multi-ethnic communities along the Gulf Coast. There were two KKK-backed bomb attacks on its transmitter in 1970. But it recovered and went on to become the first public radio station to broadcast programs in 11 different languages. For a while it had one of the most eclectic FM formats in the country.

     

The youngest of the five sister stations, WPFW, was launched in 1977 as a source of alternative programming in the nation’s capital. But the alternative differed from the formula at the older stations. News and public affairs were part of the mix, but most of the airtime was devoted to music. The mission statement, while acknowledging the purposes of the Pacifica Foundation, reflected this local priority.

“Jazz, a major American art form which grows from the African American experience, will be the major music programming,” it announced. “WPFW will act as archivist, educator, and entertainer on behalf of this under served national culture resource.” Over the years it became one of the leading jazz stations in the country, along the way adding blues, reggae, hip hop, world music and other forms that reflected the evolving taste of its primarily African American audience.

But the most legendary station was WBAI. In 1965, it sent the first American reporter to cover the war from North Vietnam. Joining resources with the other Pacifica stations, it broadcast live anti-war teach-ins. At a time when even the underground press wasn’t receptive to feminism, it put groundbreaking shows like “CR” on the air. When Columbia students seized the campus in 1968, it covered the occupation uninterrupted.

There was also Bob Fass’s “Radio Unnameable,” a weekend collage of music, poetry and talk, a radio’ version of the underground press. Identifying with the counterculture and anti-war movement, Fass took his mike to demonstrations and invited movement leaders into the studio to discuss their plans. He ran the show like a switchboard, connecting people and getting them involved. He broke the mold and invented something new – freeform radio. 

By the early 1980s ideological splits were emerging. One came when Pacifica’s first executive director, Sharon Maeda tried to secure corporate underwriting from Exxon. In response Clare Spark, KPFK’s scholarly program director, fired back by reading a resolution, drafted by herself and other Program Directors, on the air. The network and its stations should focus on "people who write books," she announced, not "people who write bumper stickers." The argument foreshadowed the struggles ahead over control of programming and the direction of the network.

A decade later the match was clearly lit after Pat Scott became KPFA General Manager, then Executive Director. Joining forces with National Federation of Community Broadcaster President Lynn Chadwick on a Corporation for Public Broadcasting task force, she backed the idea that community radio should be more ratings-driven. For many Pacifica people, that was bad enough. But Scott went further. On behalf on herself and the national board, she issued a communique. It said that anyone who wasn’t ready to help the board change local programming to increase audiences was “advised to resign.” It became known as the “my way or the highway” memo.

Two weeks later, the broadcast schedule at KPFA was dramatically changed. This included cancellation of established shows. The fight in Berkeley climaxed four years later in a lockout and massive protests. Before that happened, however, Scott’s next move was a surprise takeover of KPFK and changes in it station management. This came to be called the “Wednesday Night Massacre.” 

A central figure in the struggle was KPFK General Manager Mark Schubb, who head the job from 1995 to 2002. Considering the volatility of the period it was a remarkably long tenure. Schubb was both respected and feared, and became known for slamming doors and imposing programming changes. His loyal cadre – known as the “Schubbistas,” and also by their preferred label, “The Third Faction.”

In 1996, Schubb issued a directive ordering programmers and board operators to immediately cut the feed if anyone discussed “dirty linen” on the air. Noncompliance would result in “permanently being removed from the station.” The phrase dated back to the 1960s, when “abusing the air” to discuss internal disputes was first prohibited. Two decades earlier the manager of KPFK had been fired for violating the “dirty linen” rule. But until Schubb the policy hadn’t been much enforced.

Disgruntled members of the growing Pacifica community saw it as a virtual Gag Rule. Anyone – employee or volunteer – who said anything about an internal disagreement would be automatically and promptly shown the door. For the next six years Schubb’s rule remained in place, with especially dire results at KPFK and WBAI. It took a revolution and a court order to end the practice. After a while Schubb got a nickname – The Gagmaster.

Driving into New York City in February 2006, on the first leg of my orientation tour as Pacifica’s new Executive Director, I thought about WBAI’s past. Once one of the most innovative stations in broadcast history, it had won awards for civil rights coverage and helping to define the counterculture. With a transmitter at the top of the Empire State Building, a signal that reached far beyond the city limits and a roster of on-air voices second to none, the station’s influence was profound in its day. 

But now it was at war with itself. It was like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, programmer Ibrahim Gonzales told me, “complete with endless debates over the right of return, over who held the rights to a time slot.” As managers and hosts came at one another with lawsuits, purges, and fights over race and ideology, its audience was drifting away.

A key player was Bernard White. Like many others with influence, he had been with Pacifica for decades. Raised in Harlem, White studied at Queens College and held a variety of jobs, including New York school teacher, before turning to radio journalism in 1978. For several years he shared the mike weekday mornings with Amy Goodman on “Wake Up Call,” then became WBAI’s Interim Program Director in 1999. The following year, in a controversial move, General Manager Valerie Van Isler chose him to be permanent Program Director. By the end of ther year, however, White was fired, a casualty of Pacifica’s “Christmas Coup.” 

As happened again recently, central network management and the National Board had taken over the station. They changed the locks, installed an interim manager, and gave a list of “banned” employees to the security guards.

     

White and two dozen others fired during this period ultimately returned to WBAI in 2002. But his next decade as program director was stormy. He had solid backing from the Justice and Unity Coalition (JUC), the strongest faction on the local board. The black nationalist group embraced him as a determined anti-racist who put “activist” voices on the air. Amy Goodman considered him a comrade and friend. To his opponents, however, he was a Tammany Hall-style demagogue who abused his position, dismissed popular hosts like investigative journalist Robert Knight and health guru Gary Null, commandeered the airwaves to criticize his opponents, and frequently played the “race card” himself. 

Fairly or not, they blamed him for the station’s listener and financial decline. As I said at the start, leading a media democracy isn’t easy. 

Part One: Managing Chaos

Next: Being ED, signs of decline, and what can still be done.