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Leftist Pacifica Radio Sliding Into the Abyss
Lots of inside baseball here, but the gist is that the machinations and personal profiteering inside this organization would be at home in Goldman Sachs.Or Lehman Brothers... Pacifica has a long and storied history, and still features such leading liberals as Amy Goodman, the widely known host of Democracy Now! (on which journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill are frequent guests), but it has fallen on hard times of late. During an average 15-minute period, just 700 people listen to its Los Angeles station, 90.7 FM KPFK, for at least five minutes, according to Nielsen Audio, which monitors radio ratings. For L.A.'s other public radio stations, KCRW and KPCC, that number is 8,000 and 20,000, respectively. KPFK draws roughly one one-thousandth of all radio listeners in the Metro Los Angeles area. Pacifica's New York station, WBAI, is even worse off, with too few listeners to register on the Arbitron rankings, and is all but bankrupt. Last year, most of the staff was laid off, including the entire news department. Ever since a string of protests and lawsuits led to a new set of bylaws establishing democratic elections for the boards of each of Pacifica's five stations and the national board, a parade of top managers have filed in and out of Pacifica, staying for a year or two before being forced out by whatever bloc happens to have taken power. Voters don't seem to have any clue who they're voting for, and turnout is low. Termed-out and retiring board members were replaced by the runner-up candidates in the most previous vote, leading, rather perversely, to the board majority flipping to the minority. The national board is dominated by two factions: the new majority, the "Radio Havana crowd," and the new minority, the "conspiracy and quackery crowd" -- the latter group in 2010 approved a motion calling for all KPFK programs to question the "official story" of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Board elections cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000 -- no small price for a network with a $13 million annual budget. The meetings themselves cost about $20,000 each to fly in 20-plus people and put them up for the weekend, and they're dominated by bickering. Members regularly invoke Robert's Rules of Order, and can take half an hour simply to approve the minutes of a previous meeting. Unlike NPR, Pacifica doesn't have corporate sponsorship (or underwriting, in public-radio speak). Making matters worse, the federal government, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is withholding Pacifica's grant money, thanks to the network's "failure to provide documentation" for a 2012 audit. While listener sponsorship counts for not quite 40 percent of NPR's funding, it counts for about 80 percent of Pacifica's. While KCRW holds two nine-day-long fund drives each year, KPFK holds a month-long fund drive every three months -- meaning one out of every three days is a pledge drive, days full of DVDs and nutritional supplements and get-rich-quick schemes such as the "Wealth Propulsion Challenge," an online course that promotes "how to get rich holistically" -- and quickly -- via "subconscious reprogramming." The station's legal bills are prodigious. According to former board member Tracy Rosenberg, so many wrongful-termination claims have been filed against Pacifica over the last two decades that it pays $250,000 a year to insure against them, a staggering amount for an entity with just 130 employees. And then there's WBAI, whose transmitter sits high atop the Empire State Building's spire, at a cost of $50,000 a month. Yet opportunities abound for Pacifica, probably the single most valuable asset the left has. Its five broadcasting licenses alone could be worth $50 million to $100 million, according to Lasar, and it owns a studio in Berkeley and another on an increasingly pricey stretch of Cahuenga Boulevard in Studio City. WBAI's license is said to be particularly valuable, since it sits smack dab in the center of the dial at 99.5 FM -- choice real estate in the radio industry. Pacifica is still far to the left of anything else in mass media, and still gives voice to beliefs and ideas found outside the mainstream. It hasn't changed; the world has. Decades ago, the left called for Lyndon Johnson's head. It was against Nixon, but also against Hubert Humphrey. Today, those to the left of the Democratic Party have been relegated to the fringes -- or perhaps they've relegated themselves, favoring new-age beliefs over science, seemingly invested in the idea that society is as bad off as it's ever been. Pacifica is only a reflection of that shift. It's still far to the left of anything else in mass media, and still gives voice to beliefs and ideas found outside the mainstream (way outside). That core ideology hasn't changed; America has. Posted by: Pappy 2014-03-24 |
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