Wresting control from the central bureaucracy is key.

More Information about Pacifica

The Pacifica Foundation--the first and foremost community-based, progressive radio network in the United States--is managed by a top-heavy bureaucracy that produces only 1.5 hours a day of programming. Centralized financial controls give the national office a strong power base that foundation management and a board clique used to attempt to shut down and reprogram KPFA this past summer. And while Pacifica has avoided the obvious pitfall of on-air corporate underwriting, funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has proved to be an Achilles heel. As we fight to reclaim free speech radio, we need to take a close look at the way money is handled in the network and how the sources of that money shape Pacifica's direction. Keeping Pacifica stations independent and community-based means keeping the network's financing and governance free of corporate and government control.

Follow the Money

As it stands, all funds, including listener contributions, are collected by the national Pacifica office and then doled out to the five stations. Ousted KPFA general manager Nicole Sawaya told the California legislature's joint legislative audit committee that "the increasing amount of money taken directly and indirectly from the station to support decreasing national programming and inefficient centralized financial and administrative services" is a "misuse of a public trust." She also said that station managers don't even get enough financial information from the national office to adequately plan and manage their spending. This system allows the central office to play a shell game with income and expenses that keeps its own spending unaccounted for.

The oft-mentioned 17 percent of listener contributions siphoned off KPFA are only part of the story. The national office also takes 69 percent of the proceeds from sales of the five Pacifica stations' sideband frequencies (an additional part of the licensed radio signal that can be sold to others for uses such as broadcasting preprogrammed background music or technical data), which amounted to $587,268 in 1998, and 73 percent of the stations' miscellaneous income ($346,586), including 100 percent of the payments made by affiliates for programming services. By Pacifica's own accounting, the national office's $2.6 million total take amounted to a staggering 26 percent of the organization's revenue in 1998. And because some costs hidden in local budgets actually are national office expenses, the true percentage is even higher.

Of the $2.6 million, only about $900,000 made it back to listeners in the form of salaries for Pacifica's two national programs, Democracy Now and Pacifica Network News.

Pacifica has not released its annual report for fiscal year 1999, which ended Sept. 30, but spurred by the threat of subpoena from the legislative audit committee, Pacifica Executive Director Lynne Chadwick has admitted that in 1999, her office authorized the expenditure of an additional $500,000 on the futile attempt to "reprogram" KPFA using armed guards and publicity hacks. Add legal fees for fighting off Local Advisory Board participation, expenses in setting up satellite equipment on the East Coast to take the feed for affiliates away from KPFA, rental of alternate space for the national office, and other costs, and the total cost of the attack on KPFA is likely to be close to $1 million. To put this in perspective, the entire KPFA operation--22.5 hours of programming, seven days a week--spent $2.4 million (including $400, 000 paid to the central office) in 1998.

CPB-Pacifica Bureaucracies:Symbiotic Parasites

In 1998, Pacifica took in more than $1 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. That money theoretically is allocated to each of the stations, but, like all other funds, it is collected by the national office, and its threatened loss was key to this year's drama.

Until recently, Pacifica's board was elected by the five local advisory boards, which then selected up to five additional at-large members. In 1997, national management's proposal to eliminate the local boards' right to elect national board members failed to win a board majority. A "compromise" was agreed upon that upped the at-large membership to nine. After a still-undisclosed series of communications between then–Pacifica Executive Director Pat Scott, the president of the CPB, Robert Coonrod, stepped forward with a new interpretation of a 17-year-old CPB guideline that implied that local advisory board members had a conflict of interest if they simultaneously served on the national board.

As the board debated how to elect its members, Coonrod and his quasi-governmental agency intervened at critical moments in the First Amendment–protected media organization's internal decision-making process with threatening letters and memos. One in the days immediately prior to the board's February meeting threatened that the CPB would immediate withhold its next payment if the board didn't change its form of governance. This threat persuaded some Pacifica board members to drop the last vestige of resistance to disenfranchising the local advisory boards. It also led--at least in part--to the firing of Sawaya, who called the national management's bluff when asked to propose cuts at KPFA in case the CPB funding was lost. Rather than ax local programming, Sawaya proposed that cuts be made to the bloated national administrative budget.

Government Interference

In responding to legislative audit committee chair Scott Wildman's (D–Glendale) request that she testify, Chadwick offered yet another of her brilliant P.R. gems, which went sadly unnoticed in the flood of scandalous material revealed at the hearing. She said she refused to testify because she has always stood against "undue political interference with public broadcasting" and cherishes the KPFA and Pacifica tradition of "independent noncommercial broadcasting, free from unnecessary intrusion by governmental and political bodies." Admirable sentiments, but yet another example of the Orwellian doublespeak for which the current Pacifica management is becoming famous.

In reality, Chadwick and board chair Mary Frances Berry have repeatedly tried to use government authority to force their agenda on the Pacifica stations. They called on a Justice Department official to pressure the Berkeley police to increase enforcement against peaceful protesters, turned over thousands of email and voicemail messages to the police, and most crucially, aided and abetted the CPB in using its financial leverage to change Pacifica's bylaws to weaken the local advisory boards. Furthermore, Berry is a government appointee whose conflict of interest was brought into sharp relief when KPFA station staff filed civil rights complaints with the government agency she heads, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

While Berry and some of the board members who back her represent a sort of residual Democratic party liberalism that is often more palatable than the Jesse Helms wing of the government (which led earlier attempts to squelch Pacifica), the fact is, they are part of a political current that runs all the executive agencies of the U.S. government. And this current is in no way compatible with a free-speech community radio network founded by pacifists--a network that has opposed every war the United States has ever participated in, including those supported by Democrats.

And based on their professional associations, it's reasonable to believe that some board members are acting from a position farther to the right. Pacifica Board member Ken Ford works for the lobbying group the National Association of Home Builders. At the February 1999 meeting, he invited the board to tour the U.S. Information Agency's propaganda station Radio Free Asia because its digital facilities "are the future of radio." Board member Michael Palmer is a Houston real estate broker whose clients include the notorious polluter Waste Management Inc. and anti-labor firms like Diamond Shamrock and Hormel Foods. He wants to get advice from Wall Street, NPR/CPB, and Microsoft about new directions for Pacifica. He's also the leading public proponent of selling KPFA.

A station sale is the ultimate in undemocratic funding strategies, and despite vague promises by Berry that she won't do it right now, it's still on the table. With $60-100 million (the amount KPFA would probably fetch) to burn, the network would no longer have to rely mainly on listener contributions, and the problem of listeners' ability to shape programming would simply disappear. An unaccountable bureaucracy and board, now self-appointing, could dictate by fiat whatever programming they desired. Stations with grassroots community broadcasting traditions that are difficult to control from a central office would be a thing of the past.

Reclaiming Local Control

Financial accountability and local control of finances will strengthen and diversify local and national programming.

Democratizing the flow of revenue and the power to authorize expenses will be central to reclaiming Pacifica. If the approximately $1.5 million spent in 1998 to support the non-programming portion of the central office were turned over to programmers--in the studios and on the streets--an explosion of quality and diversity would result. This would be far more likely to draw new listeners than the national board's plan to turn the station into jukebox radio, as the current regime has done in Houston, or strip-programming it into predictability so that "drive time" is always delivered by the same host and with a conventional "professional" sound, as the national management has attempted to do at all the Pacifica stations.

With Pacifica's technology base, there is no need to centralize programming in a national office. In a reconstituted Pacifica, cutting the national bureaucracy would not mean cutting off programming such as Democracy Now, which is produced at WBAI in New York and could easily be funded by a revenue-sharing arrangement among the stations. Nor would it mean cutting off Pacifica Network News, which could find a home at WPFW in Washington, D.C. By rooting national programming in the local stations, Pacifica could build capacity at its bases while distributing information to the widest possible audience.

Returning the power of the purse strings to the local stations would make it much more likely that excellent locally produced programming such as KPFA's Flashpoints and John Martinez's documentaries on the Chicano movement for KPFK in Los Angeles could reach the national audience they deserve. It would also mean that a relatively low-budget station such as KPFT in Houston could receive funding to produce regular programming on subjects of national importance--U.S.-Mexico border issues, for example.

As we work to reclaim the Pacifica network, activists should also be laying the groundwork for increasing KPFA and Pacifica's diversity of support. Undertakings such as joint KPFA and community benefits in a wide spectrum of venues, from hip-hop clubs in downtown Oakland to college campuses in Fresno; webcasts of programming that can't be squeezed into the 24 hours available on FM radio; and strengthening the apprenticeship program so that more of its graduates become full-time employees will help engage the loyalties of people who can play the role of listener-sponsors for the next 50 years.

Because if one thing is clear, it's that the difficult economic challenge of doing without CPB funding is on the horizon. As the former head of Radio Marti, a U.S. Information Agency propaganda project that broadcasts anti-Communist Miami Cubans' views into Cuba, CPB President Coonrod is unlikely to support maintenance and development of Pacifica's traditionally oppositional reporting. And the drive to corporatize and privatize public radio is well established within the CPB. Any new Pacifica leadership will need to cut those ties as expeditiously as possible. To do otherwise leaves a very wide door very wide open for future meddling in Pacifica's decision-making processes.

In an email he conveniently sent to Media Alliance which led to the big blow out this summer, Palmer said, "I was under the impression there was support in the proper quarters, and a definite majority, for shutting down that unit [KPFA] and reprogramming immediately." The open question in the conflict between Pacifica national management and free-speech programmers is just which 'quarters' inside and outside of government are lending Palmer and his ilk their support.