After Its Rebellions, a New KPFK

By Michael Hiltzik

July 14, 2003 12 AM PT

Among the hallmarks of truly independent thinkers is that they’re impossible to manage. This is why productive research labs are often hives of unkempt corporate rebels and why conferences of anarchist political parties invariably deteriorate into, well, anarchy.

It’s also one explanation for the long and contentious history of Pacifica Radio, the radical-progressive broadcast network that is parent to five FM stations around the country, including Southern California’s KPFK.

“Pacifica is at the heart of conflict and conflict is at the heart of Pacifica,” says David Fertig, the KPFK local board’s representative to the Pacifica network board, rather proudly.

The harvest of the network’s latest internal war, which ended with a legal settlement in late 2001 and the subsequent purge of the defeated cadre at the national and local levels, is about to be reaped locally: On Tuesday, KPFK will launch a heavily revamped programming schedule, reflecting the choices of a management installed by the victorious party over the last year.

The new schedule is heavier than the old on public affairs programming, but it’s also more fragmented, with small blocks of airtime turned over haphazardly to community and special interest groups on the left that are seen as Pacifica’s core constituency. Some of the station’s oldest and most broadly popular programs (read: not overtly political) have been sharply cut back or axed outright.

These include “Heartfelt Music,” a highly informal mix of bluegrass and folk that has been a Saturday morning fixture on KPFK for 32 years. “Heartfelt” hosts, John and Deanne Davis of Sierra Madre, broadcast their final program a week ago. “I don’t think the current management understood what we did,” John Davis says. “Their thinking was that it was a Mickey Mouse show with no political significance of any kind.”

These changes reflect the issues underlying the recent power struggle, which was generally framed by participants as a revolt by independent-minded local stations against the authoritarian national managing board, but was really about something else: the inevitable tension between the desire to give even the most marginal community a voice, no matter how faint, and the natural impulse to bring one’s political principles to a larger audience.

Two Camps at KPFK

At KPFK and the other Pacifica stations, this came down to a battle between one camp that regarded the stations as sort of electronic community megaphones, and another that believed they needed to broaden their appeal to attract and keep listeners. Among the weapons were different interpretations of the network’s mission, set down in 1949 when flagship KPFA was founded by a group of Berkeley radical pacifists. But the debate also involved disagreements over how best to operate a publicly funded radio network. When the smoke cleared in December 2001, the community-megaphone camp were the victors.

Their opponents believe the new policies will make the stations increasingly irrelevant in national politics.

“I accept the premise that the Pacifica radio mission is political, and it’s the only true left-wing voice out there,” John Dinges, a Columbia University broadcast journalism professor who has followed the Pacifica wars closely, told me last week. “But as a radio person I have to ask, is it going to be successful radio by accepting the notion of its political constituency as infinitely split segments of small constituencies? From a radio point of view, that’s destined to lower the audience. You listen when your political hobbyhorse is on the air, and when it’s not, you’re not listening.”

It may seem odd to hear radio people arguing over whether they should even be concerned about building an audience on a national scale. But the worldview of KPFK and the other Pacifica stations has seldom resembled anything else on the dial or for that matter, anywhere in the mainstream media.

When a news organization such as NPR, ABC or the Los Angeles Times produces an investigative piece uncovering some misbehavior by U.S. troops overseas or corrupt dealing by a major corporation, the unspoken context is that they’ve documented a regrettable, but anomalous, departure from civilized capitalist norms. When a similar story appears on Pacifica’s “Democracy Now!” program, the implication is that they’ve lifted a corner on the depravity and rot that inevitably underlies the political and economic system.

Both of these mindsets are, at some level, poses. But as long as either one exists the other is essential, because political and economic truth lies somewhere in between.

From the Left

The question whether Pacifica has marginalized itself out of the national spectrum of debate is important because America may never have needed a strong voice from the left as much as it does now.

Today’s airwaves are anchored on the right by outfits with huge cable audiences such as News Corp.’s Fox News Channel, which seems to spend half its time on the Laci Peterson case and the rest promoting demented reactionaries like Ann Coulter. What passes for the left is represented by NPR, a “liberal” network chiefly in the sense that it cherishes “balance,” which generally means a spectrum of opinion that stretches from conservative Southern Democrats on one end all the way over to centrist New England Republicans on the other. That’s a pretty scrawny slice of American apple pie.

And let’s not even talk about commercial radio, which more and more consists of pre-chewed pap distributed by such national conglomerates as Clear Channel Communications Inc. and Cumulus Media Inc.

The people who control KPFK today don’t believe it’s their responsibility to rebalance the airwaves, especially if that means compromising on its mission to give individual communities a voice. “I don’t think Pacifica has to spread progressive politics or to be the organ of the left,” Fertig says. “Pacifica’s above the left or the right.”

For all that, there’s little question that Pacifica has benefited from the polarization of national politics resulting from the presidential election of 2000 and the Iraq war.

KPFK recorded two record-breaking fund drives in the last year, a phenomenon the station’s programming director, Armando Gudino, concedes had less to do with its programming than with “political fervor in the world.”

Access to Airwaves

But while its Mt. Wilson transmitter potentially can reach a much larger population than that of big public FM stations such as KPCC or KCRW, the KPFK audience is, by all accounts, a tiny fraction of those National Public Radio affiliates. (Concrete figures aren’t available because the station doesn’t subscribe to the audience-measurement service Arbitron.) KPFK’s new managers, unlike the recently departed group, don’t talk as though closing the gap with NPR is an important goal compared with enfranchising communities that don’t have any other access to the airwaves.

“When I came here, I realized that a good portion of the programming did not reflect the needs and concerns at a local level,” says Gudino, a burly 30-year-old former community organizer and TV producer who became program director last year. “The station wasn’t covering a lot of issues that affect people south of the 10 Freeway” -- that is, minorities. His solution is to give local communities snatches of airtime on an almost ad hoc basis over the next few weeks and then “have the audience respond.”

“We’re going to take the concept of public radio and involve the public in a decision-making context,” he explains.

The seeds of this idea were planted decades ago. Pacifica listenership probably reached its high-water mark during the counterculture ‘60s and ‘70s. With the Vietnam War’s end, however, Pacifica was beset by the same anomie and disarray as every other leftist institution suddenly deprived of unifying issues and concrete political goals. What filled the vacuum was the identity politics of the ‘80s, in which every splinter community claimed the same right to the airwaves. When Mark Schubb, WPFK’s former general manager, arrived at the station in 1995, he found it operating like “a bad public access station.”

“They believed that the more people they gave a radio show to, the more people they served,” he recalls. “The airtime got cut into too many pieces.”

Rather than give everyone an altar from which to preach to his or her own choir, Schubb opted for a “magazine” approach featuring shows with broad points of view covering a wide range of topics. They were hosted by individuals such as Marc Cooper, a local political journalist, who could develop their own personalities and followings.

This strategy mirrored some of what was being tried at KPFA and other Pacifica stations, but it also deviated from Pacifica orthodoxy.

The conflict came to a head in the late ‘90s, when a newly appointed network administration tried to impose a centralized management over the stations. Their ham-fisted methods and dictatorial manner only further undermined the credibility of the audience-building principles they were trying to spread.

They hired consultants to instruct the stations in traditional radio programming policies such as “consistency,” which means giving listeners a regular daily schedule so they can easily find a show on Tuesday that they enjoyed on Monday, and therefore evolve from occasional listeners into devotees and contributors. Opponents accused them of attempting to turn Pacifica into “NPR-lite” by serving middle-class listeners while abandoning the disenfranchised.

The resulting rebellion took the form of years of sit-ins, lockouts, boycotts and lawsuits, as well as numerous allegations of corruption, deception and counterrevolution.

The conflict almost sank the organization financially (at one point it had nine law firms on retainer) and may have done lasting damage to its national standing.

Whether the programming changes beginning this week will further reduce Pacifica’s stature is anyone’s guess.

Those in control suggest there will always be a place on the dial for a wholly uncompromising radio service. “We don’t represent ourselves to the world as the ‘other’ KCRW,” Gudino says. “We are an entity of our own. That’s why we’re different.”

Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. Michael Hiltzik can be reached at [email protected].