Andropov And Chernenko Could Fix It

Interesting post about the decline and fall of Pacifica Radio (which I used to listen to when I was a commie).

excerpt:

Instead of producing, as it should and could, a satellite or web-fed daily schedule of 12, 18 or even 24 hrs of solid, listenable national programming, the “network” remains, instead, a rag-tag hodgepodge of stations with tiny listenerships and all held hostage to self-serving programmers more interested in hearing themselves talk than in building a real audience. It’s a half-billion dollars rotting away.

The “flagship” New York station, WBAI, which in the 70’s was a hothouse that produced a generation of able journalists who later took their skills and their liberal or lefty politics into the mainstream media, is today an irrelevancy that teeters on bankruptcy. The programming is domianted by a toxic brew of crude race-politics.

The Pacifica outlet in Washington D.C., WPFW, which, in the age of Bush, ought to be a mighty bastion of on-air political pushback, continues to be – as has been the case for two decades—primarily a black jazz station. White guilt, and a veritable PC-cult that permeates the internal Pacifica culture, has constrained the network from turning that station into what it ought to be – a powerful and massively listened-to alternative in the heart of the nation’s capital.

The Houston outlet, KPFT, remains a peanut-whistle station. KPFA in Berkeley, whose core paid staff has been the same for 25 years, is but an echo-chamber of its pony-tailed, core community. Listening to the station for more than five minutes is like tuning into a clandestine ethnic radio narrow-casting in an obscure tongue to some tiny Balkan enclave.

The Los Angeles station, KPFK, whose drive-time is dominated by an combination of screamers and, believe it or not, a couple of followers of the maoist Revolutionary Communist Party, finds itself in a similar sorry state. With a signal area that encompasses 25 million people, its average listenership during any given quarter hour is under 10,000. Over a seven day period, the 110,000 watt station collects a cumulative audience of barely 175,000. That’s less than the number of unique visitors that a big blog – like Daily Kos—gets in one single day.

This is a long, long, long way from the origins of the network. In its heyday – from the late 60’s and into the early 80’s—the bigger Pacifica stations were exciting and refreshing meeting points for artists, poets, musicians and free-thinkers. The air would be filled with live drama performances, poetry happenings, literary readings, world-class public affairs interviews, and quality music that ranged from the avant-garde to classical. While the programming always leaned decidedly left, you’d nevertheless find libertarians and Buddhists mixed in back to back with Communists, radicals, and liberals and even some odd conservatives (Caspar Weinberger was once a Pacifica commentator. Pauline Kael got her start reviewing movies for KPFA).

When Pacifica was once a magical place that taught you how to think it is now a dreary drumbeat telling you what to think. Its air is filled with shrill, clumsy and dogmatic denunciations of “fascism.” Any trace of high culture, meanwhile, has been ruthlessly rooted out and expunged. The program schedule is divvied up among self-appointed “community leaders” and paid staff who – for the most part—could never dream of earning a paycheck from any other media entity in the world. What paid and volunteer programmers have in common is a death-grip on their personal slice of air time. Try to take it away and you became the target of a virulent campaign accusing you of being a sexist, racist, and corporatist nazi.