---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 28 Mar 2002 13:31:36 -0800
From: radtimes <resist@best.com>
Subject: The left eats its own at KPFK
Family Feud
<http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/18/cover-taylor.shtml>
The left eats its own at KPFK
by Ella Taylor
March 22 - 28, 2002
WORD IS OUT THAT I'M WORKING ON A STORY about the latest coup at KPFK, and
troops
from both sides are massing on my voice mail, my e-mail, my editors' voice
mail in varying tones
of panic, paranoia and PR.
The radio station's interim manager, Steven Starr, worries that the
opposition is giving me a distorted picture of what's going on.
A woman who had pitched a KPFK story to the L.A. Weekly a year ago leaves
me precise instructions on how my piece should be written. A member of the
newly rejuvenated Local Advisory Board, fondly or otherwise known as the
LAB, wants to set me straight about the "antics" of Marc Cooper, host of
the station's most popular drive-time talk show, who was suspended by Starr
for refusing to raise funds for the new KPFK because he didn't like the
direction in which it was headed. And my in-box is buried under an
avalanche of variously furious, anguished or waggish electronic mail from
the dispossessed, who have taken to calling the LAB and the national board
"the Branch Pacificans."
Going in, I imagined I would write a wry, detached account of yet another
brawl at KPFK, yet another palace coup in the long history of Pacifica
radio wars. My piece would be about two camps of battle-scarred lefty
partisans fighting over very little, yet convinced that the Earth was at
stake. I'd seen such futile wrangles elsewhere, notably in my years as a
college professor, when people of allegedly higher intelligence fought to
the death over the protocol of office supplies. It's an old story in any
hermetically sealed organization where no one outside the zone of combat
gives much of a damn about the issues or the outcome. But on the
marginalized far left, whose history is pocked with struggles over
minuscule differences of policy or procedure, distractions from the task of
playing gadfly to the powers that be, infighting is second nature. Over the
years I've taught myself to knit, crochet, and sleep with my eyes open at
meetings where the agenda was the agenda.
Except that as I sank into the thick of things, the battle at KPFK began to
matter, to reveal itself as more than an internal power play, more even
than a struggle about what counts as good alternative radio. Can it really
be that the left in Southern California, which apparently helped fuel the
station's highly successful February pledge drive, is willing to have its
agenda set by people who give airtime to black separatists who refer to
other blacks as "paint jobs" and "Uncle Toms," or to a nutball conspiracy
theorist who got ample airtime in the closing hours of the fund drive to
persuade us that the CIA plotted the attack on the World Trade Center?
KPFK's troubles, which stretch back over the years since the station was
founded in 1959, offer a case study in the widening abyss between two wings
of the aging American left over the question of whether to go forth into
the world speaking truth to power, or languish in splendid, and
increasingly irrelevant, isolation. On one side are the ^A'60s activists who
have become intellectuals and argue that the left must work from within
society and refine itself through dialogue and debate. On the other are the
'60s activists, mostly hard-line Marxists or self-appointed guardians of
minority identity, who believe that any contact with corporate capitalism
and white elites contaminates and dilutes the cause.
A BUNDLE OF BRIGHT-ORANGE PEACE STICKERS adorns the coffee
table in the lobby of KPFK's offices in North Hollywood. Outside the
studio, two musicians with exotic-looking instruments wait to begin a live
performance on the daily music show Global Village. In January, KPFK
station manager Mark Schubb, along with four other managers at sister
stations around the country, was placed on administrative leave and then
fired without formal reason, though various LAB members charge that he has
separated the station from them and from its "true" audience. In the weeks
since, the station has raised a record $914,000 in its fund drive -- and
watched helplessly as its staffing fell apart. Several key staffers and
volunteer programmers have resigned or been dismissed, while those who
chose to hang in fire off memos protesting iniquitous decisions on the part
of the interim management. Meanwhile, much of the dwindling programming
schedule is plugged with canned local and national reruns, as the
public-affairs directors scramble to find guest hosts to fill in for the
departed.
What's left of the permanent staff signs off on morning duties, while the
afternoon program director, Dan Pavlich, contemplates the alarming white
expanse of his board as he scrapes to fill Cooper's critical 4 p.m. slot
with guest hosts for the rest of the week. A calm, business-as-usual
atmosphere prevails after the frenzy of the fund drive, whose volunteers
were heavily peopled with the "banned and the fired" under Schubb's watch,
now hoping to get their old slots back. Interim manager Starr, an affable
man in jeans and sweatshirt who talks with the bushy-tailed bonhomie of one
who has been dishing out PR for years (he was once an agent), breaks off
from a meeting with interim part-time troubleshooter Andrea Buffa, who's
down from the Berkeley station, to tell me that the fund drive exceeded all
expectations and everything is terrific. When I ask for specifics on the
projected changes at KPFK and on increased community outreach, the pair
expand on plans for a slew of "programming collectives," two of which are
already in the works: a West South-Asian collective, to include Kurds,
Afghans, Israelis and others ("some experts, some not"), and a youth
collective. I mention that in several conversations with members of the
LAB, I've been able to elicit no concrete plans for the future. "Forget the
LAB," Starr says, and on hearing who I've talked to at the station, he
intimates that they're the wrong people. He personally escorts me to the
offices of two employees who are understandably so anxious to hold on to
their jobs that they witter on generally about "regrouping" and
"redistributing responsibilities." A third, an African-American who is
filling in as interim operations director, is torn between real regret at
the departure of Cooper and others, and fury at Schubb for failing to
include "a broad range of voices" in programming.
Meanwhile, the wrong people are telling me that the staff, paid and
volunteer, is beaten down and barely functioning. The money from the pledge
drive, even though it was earmarked for the exclusive use of KPFK and is
supposedly sitting in a local bank account, has yet to filter down to the
station. So short is ready cash that there's no money for colored markers;
recently the phones were cut off for a day. More than one employee
expresses weary frustration at the endless internal sniping on and off the
air. One predicts that in six months the audience will dwindle into "the
banned and the fired" and their supporters, the LAB's "true" audience.
THIS IS THE KIND OF BATTLE THAT HAS MORE THAN once threatened
to destroy Pacifica, a tiny network of five stations nationwide that for
the last 50 years has been the sole broadcast voice of the left, a radio
equivalent of and collaborator with The Nation magazine. Founded after
World War II by a group of Bay Area conscientious objectors as a
listener-sponsored alternative to commercial radio, Pacifica was designed
to offer a forum for the free exchange of views between diverse groups. The
network's highs have been high indeed, mostly when competing factions have
united against a common enemy, McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, Iran-contra.
Time was when the network also boasted some of the richest cultural
programming in radio: Film critic Pauline Kael cut her teeth at KPFA in
Berkeley, which also aired guru-philosopher Alan Watts, and the Beats; the
network was the first to air Allen Ginsberg's Howl. But in the late ^A'70s,
as movements on the left grew more fragmented and identity politics
displaced class struggle on the left agenda, sectarian programming crept
in, carving up the audience by ethnicity, gender or ideological tendency.
Listener-sponsored radio was reborn as "community radio," with airtime
allocated to those mostly unpaid volunteers who could shout the loudest on
behalf of their ethnic, political or spiritual groups. One KPFK activist,
according to a piece by John Dinges in The Nation two years ago, actually
tried to bequeath his air slot in his will.
In the late ^A'80s, with audience numbers in free fall and many so-called
loyal listeners tuning in for as little as minutes a week, Pacifica's
national board began to enact reforms designed to professionalize the
stations and increase their audiences. This brought loud protests from
local programmers passionately attached to their soapboxes. Since 1998,
both the board and its detractors have squandered time, energy and scads of
money squabbling over the practice of its mission, with one side claiming
the other was stuck in the ^A'60s while the other accused the board of
trying to water down Pacifica and turn it into NPR, which had lured away
not only many of the network's listeners, but some of its liveliest
broadcasters. Thousands of dollars were spent on lawsuits, public
relations, and even on security when the brawling became physical. For a
while, Schubb, who was committed to reform, managed to keep KPFK out of the
fray. The station doubled its audience, tripled its fund-raising, and
rebuilt its studio and its transmitters. Though even some of his
supporters say Schubb's diplomatic skills were not what they might have
been, he did replace some of the ghettoized programming favored by the LAB
and its supporters with more cerebral fare that brought the station some
much-needed sophistication without abandoning its critical edge. The jewel
in the crown was drive-time public affairs: Cooper's daily show, plus Radio
Nation, his weekly collaboration with The Nation magazine (He also writes a
column for L.A. Weekly.); Jon Wiener's, Suzi Weissman's and Joe Domanick's
early-evening drive-time shows. (Full disclosure: I occasionally contribute
film commentary on Wiener's show.) And though, aside from the music
programming, arts coverage remained inexplicably weak for a network that
once boasted the likes of Kael, Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jon
Beaupré's early-morning magazine lent the programming a certain urbanity
and elegance.
Depending on who's talking, KPFK has either sailed into a glorious new era
of free speech and accountability to its listeners, or slunk back to a
chaotic and politically byzantine past. Starr and the LAB are promising to
reopen the station to community participation, especially minorities, which
they accuse Schubb and those he nurtured of neglecting. "Mark Schubb, with
the blessing of the prior Pacifica administration, simply refused to
fulfill his duty to work with the LAB," says Dave Fertig, the LAB's
representative to the interim national board. "With resumed community
involvement and openness at KPFK and Pacifica, I believe the recent
reckless mismanagement, and the enforced silence about it, is unlikely to
recur." This line of argument maddens Schubb, who says he hired more people
of color during his tenure than had ever been hired during the station's
history, though he freely admits that it's hard to find talented black,
Latino, Asian or other minority journalists when the pay at Pacifica is so
lousy. Which goes to the heart of the degree to which identity politics has
displaced the less sexy but more useful category of economic inequality on
the far left. Is ethnic inequality redressed, as Schubb interprets it, by
affirmative action or, as the episode of the black separatists amply
illustrates, by doling out airtime to anyone ä who happens to have dark
skin? Schubb is infuriated by the thought that the balkanized programming
he so painstakingly dismantled will return to KPFK as a result of such
woolly and condescending thinking about how ethnic minorities use radio.
"I'm sure," he says dryly, "that if you're a janitor working a 10-hour job
and then another in some fast-food place, you want to come home and listen
to the Marxist Struggle Hour or the Latvian Accordion Hour on KPFK."
Pacifica has allowed such programming to go on, he says, "out of some bogus
liberalism, some bullshit permissiveness that I think is one of the core
problems of the left in America. Whoever yells the loudest gets whatever
they want. At a certain point the smart people just leave, and the angry
ones run it until it's dead."
Right now there are gifted haters on both sides of the KPFK dispute. Cooper
calls the LAB "an unelected, unrepresentative lump group of eight people
whose opinions are no more valid than the opinions of the first eight
people you get out of the phone book." In turn, he and Schubb are held
primarily responsible for KPFK's perceived ills and dismissed as agents of
corporate capital. Cooper has received hundreds of e-mails insinuating that
he survived the coup in Chile because he's a CIA agent who plotted the
murder of his own boss, Salvador Allende. And during Schubb's tenure, his
car sustained $3,500 worth of vandalism when protesters picketed the
station. The vilification has been mirrored at Pacifica stations around the
country in lockouts, death threats and letter campaigns on both sides. But
a casual trawl of the Web sites shows that it's the activists who have the
edge when it comes to crafting a hate campaign. While Schubb was running
KPFK, the LAB and ousted programmers constantly disrupted the daily conduct
of business at the station and held meetings in which Schubb and his staff
were shouted down and harassed.
If there's one thing activists know how to do, it's organize. During the
February fund drive, for the first time KPFK's sister stations banded
together for a day of fund-raising to save the station's powerful but
ailing transmitter, and this without the efforts of Cooper, the station's
most talented fund-raiser. But try to get Starr or the LAB to articulate a
philosophy of radio and a vision of future programming at KPFK, and you get
a lot of vague predictions of greater community involvement, increased
sensitivity to people of color, and apprenticeship programs.
It seems the antagonism and mistrust between activists and intellectuals
that has always bedeviled the left never dies. On almost any issue, Cooper,
Schubb and their volunteer allies at the station, among them Weissman,
Wiener and Barbara Osborn, who hosts the weekly show Deadline L.A.can think
and talk the LAB people into a cocked hat. They have a grasp of how radio
is made and used. They're willing to entertain new ideas and debate those
who disagree with them, on and off the air. They're witty, irreverent, and
brimming with ideas and a sense of fun, something that's always been in
short supply on the Marxist left. Schubb recalls a meeting about cultural
programming early on in his tenure in which he noted that KPFK had given
birth to Fireside Theater, Harry Shearer and a whole new world of political
satire. One protester sprang to her feet and yelled that there were
horrible things going on in the world and the last thing that was needed
was more jokes. The activists don't want for sincerity or commitment, but
as a group they come off as anti-intellectual, dull, humorless and
hidebound. The new Pacifica board held its meetings in Los Angeles two
weeks ago, and for sheer lumbering, procedural tedium, the live broadcasts
out-snored even KCRW's Santa Monica City Council meetings.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO I WENT HIKING IN Anza-Borrego with a group
of middle-aged leftist women like myself, or so I fondly imagined. When we
stopped to rest, I produced a copy of The New Republic, and was immediately
hauled over the coals by a woman who professed herself shocked that I would
lower myself to read such a right-wing rag. I told her I didn't see how I
could expand my critical thinking if I only read stuff I already agreed
with. Off she flounced in a huff, leaving me to imagine her reaction had I
brought along the National Review.
To me her response was dispiritingly emblematic of the defensive maneuvers
of a far left that has been spinning its wheels on vulgar-Marxist doctrine
of the oppressors and the oppressed since the '60s. Cocooned in monastic
disengagement, its adherents are hanging on for dear life to a set of rigid
and often obsolete principles so as to avoid contamination by the evil
corporate empire. Some have embraced a crude identity politics that ends up
not only condescending to the very people they champion, but perpetuating a
culture of the victim that includes their own privileged selves. And while
the intellectual left engages with the establishment, not to say the right,
Robert McNamara and Pat Robertson have both been guests on Cooper's show,
and both gave great radio, this group is interested in talking only to
itself as it relives, over and over, the unexamined life.
Marginalization has the virtue of keeping the marginalized honest, in a
limited way. But it can also cramp the mind and narrow the spirit, creating
a siege mentality that's defensive, sanctimonious, mistrustful of change
and suspicious of political maturity. If there's one Pacifica radio show
that exemplifies the best and worst of the American far left, it's Amy
Goodman's popular Democracy Now, which is broadcast nationally out of WBAI
in New York. Goodman is unflagging in her pursuit of corporate and
political malfeasance at home and abroad. She is incorruptible, unimpressed
and unintimidated by power or authority, which is why she's one of the few
interviewers who've ever been able to fluster Bill Clinton. And she's
excellent at providing a voice for the wretched of the Earth, from Ohio to
Afghanistan. But one doesn't turn to her show for open debate about leftist
thought. On almost any issue, she will trot out verbatim speeches of a
small circle of like-minded friends, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael
Parenti, Cornel West. During KPFK's fund drive, Goodman rebroadcast a
tortuous speech by West in which he contrived to read into the bombing of
the World Trade Center a parallel with the oppression of blacks in America.
Admittedly, this is more dotty than harmful. More seriously, when Goodman
rightly scolds the commercial media for their distortions, she's not above
replacing those distortions with others of her own. As the conflict in the
Middle East escalates, she routinely reports Palestinian casualties, which
the mainstream media have also been doing for some time, while
ostentatiously omitting those on the Israeli side.
So diligently has Goodman internalized her identification with the
oppressed that she has come to believe herself to be one of them. When it
comes to the Pacifica wars, Goodman is hobbled by a whopping martyr complex
that plays on the air as the irritating whine of the career victim. Thus
WBAI, from which she was exiled for five months in a dispute with the old
Pacifica board, became "the station of the banned and the fired." This
continued throughout KPFK's mid-February fund drive, when her show (which
had not been broadcast here while she was fighting with the board)
sometimes aired three times a day, in which she peppered her energetic
pitches with requests for cash to help restore a "plundered network."
Goodman has played a key role in shaping the on-air narrative of oppression
worked up by KPFK's new regime during the fund drive. If that wasn't dreary
enough to listen to, the station also saw fit to boost the fund drive's
final hour by peddling the video of Mike Ruppert, a defrocked cop who
sought to convince us that the CIA was behind the attack on the World Trade
Center. Dave Adelson, a LAB member who told me he saw no reason to condemn
the hateful rhetoric of the black separatists on the air even though it
made him "cringe," nonetheless leaped to interrupt a Grateful Dead show and
excoriate programmer Barbara Osborn for the crime of paying tribute to
Cooper and asking listeners to call in their response to his suspension.
Starr, who was initially seen by the opposition as a nice fellow who was in
over his head, is by now so thoroughly in the pockets of the LAB that he
allowed this intrusion. When the public-affairs programmers, led by Beneath
the Surface's Suzi Weissman, handed him a forthright letter of outrage over
the Mike Ruppert debacle, he responded that, in the context of a rebuttal,
the program made "compelling radio." Thus does the loony left come full
circle and join hands with the meshuggeneh right. If confirmation were
needed of what Christopher Hitchens has called the "ardent confusion" of
the ultraleft, this is it.
The sad part of all this is that there is nothing visibly new about the new
regime at KPFK. It's a classic and possibly terminal case of the divorce of
thought from action in that part of the left that refuses to grow up. All
the signs are that, now the first flush of victory is over, the station is
sliding back to the vapid populism that distinguished it before Schubb
arrived, when programming was carved up by putative interest groups and any
nut or bigot with a grievance could grab the airwaves if he or she yelled
loud enough. Programming collectives, which bring people together solely on
the basis of their ethnicity, age or gender, can only aggravate such
separatism. Someone has to be responsible for making good radio that won't
bore listeners to death. In the unlikely event that a new manager with
vigor and vision is hired, he or she will have his hands tied behind his
back if he tries to lift things out of the uncertainty and confusion that
already prevail at the station. "We were here for the listeners," says one
employee sadly. "Now we're here for us."
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