.War & Peace

The battle for KPFA and the soul of Pacifica is over. Now the damage assessment begins.

It’s over. At long last, after almost three years of the most personal kind of internecine warfare, the great battle between the Pacifica community radio network and its flagship station, KPFA, is over. Sort of.

Calculating the damage of the last 32 months is a heartbreaking chore. The comfortable reserve that had been built up by Pacifica has been wiped out, and the network is now effectively $1.7 million in debt. Pacifica fired dozens of talented reporters, programmers, administrators, and volunteers, and others burned out and quit; all in all, it was an unprecedented brain drain. The trust and goodwill of hundreds of thousands of listeners, both at Pacifica’s five member stations and its sixty affiliate stations, has been sorely tested. While many volunteers and civic-minded bystanders rose to the challenge and fought the good fight, countless others will never again allow themselves to hope that a united, progressive community can make a difference in the world. We had lawsuits, legislative hearings, investigations, mass arrests, and slander — lots and lots of slander.

Now a truce has been declared. Under a settlement agreed to by all parties in an Alameda courtroom last month, four listener lawsuits have been dropped. The Pacifica board of directors has resigned en masse, and an interim board has taken its place, composed of five members from the majority faction of the old board, five members of its dissident faction, and five people elected from the stations’ local advisory boards. The agreement, therefore, has effectively given the dissidents at KPFA and New York station WBAI a nine-to-six majority. Within the next fifteen months, this board will have to figure out how to reform itself in order to guarantee that the local stations will be allowed to elect some of its members.

The dissidents at KPFA can rightly claim all this as a remarkable victory: They stared down a board that held all the cards, from the legal right to hire and fire employees to control of the network’s purse strings and credit line — and they won. But there’s another, sadder fact about the settlement: In essence, what both parties agreed to do was simply to try to go back to the status quo that prevailed immediately before events at Pacifica suddenly, and almost inexplicably, careened out of control. Over nearly three chaotic years, dozens of people went to jail, a lot of newsprint was used to defame a delicate progressive institution, and Pacifica poured millions of precious, hard-earned dollars into the hands of security firms, lawyers, and public relations outfits — and all that was accomplished was a shaky reconstruction of what was there in the first place.

You gotta wonder: what the hell was this fight about, anyway?

Or more to the point, perhaps: what the hell were Pacifica’s leaders thinking? There’s no doubt that the network’s directors and executive staff bear most of the responsibility for this conflict, but what were they trying to accomplish when they set this protracted trauma into motion? Did Pacifica executives have any idea what they were doing? Were there, in fact, good intentions paving this particular expressway to hell?

By now, most readers are surely familiar with the chronology of Pacifica’s detour into fratricide: How, in the spring of 1999, network officials fired popular KPFA General Manager Nicole Sawaya and then announced to staff reporters and programmers who had a problem with the termination that they could either shut their mouths or lose their jobs. After weeks of brinkmanship by both sides, Pacifica sent armed security guards to board up the station, provoking 10,000 listeners to march in protest. Eighteen months later, network leaders followed much the same pattern at New York’s WBAI, with similarly disastrous results.

From the beginning, KPFA supporters have entertained two schools of thought as to what the Pacifica board and then-Executive Director Lynn Chadwick were up to. One interpretation maintains that they had decided the time had come to make a fundamental change in Pacifica’s programming and mission. Depending on your point of view, this change could either be described as an attempt to “professionalize” the broadcasts in the hope of boosting the stations’ dismal Arbitron ratings, or a bold strike to denude the network of its radical politics, thus eliminating the last reliable voice of dissent in American broadcast media.

Peter Franck, who served as president of the Pacifica Foundation in the ’80s, is one who believes that Pacifica leadership was embarked on a campaign to turn Pacifica into “NPR lite.” “These people from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting didn’t want an independent network to raise questions whenever the US bombs the hell out of a third world country,” he says. “It was a fight over the last station in the country that was at all radical. Look how they systematically stripped stations of radical programming. Look at [Pacifica’s embattled syndicated show] Democracy Now! No one can fault the show for its quality, but people high up didn’t want its programming.”

The other school of thought about the origins of the conflict attributes it to more prosaic factors. It asserts that Chadwick and the board majority simply had no idea what they were unleashing; that they were so convinced of their monopoly on common sense, so filled with a visceral hostility to Left Coast progressivism, so consumed with apprehension about what crazy thing KPFA’s “gray ponytailed” supporters might do next, that they were soon helplessly locked into an endless cycle of reaction.

According to this theory, Pacifica board chair Mary Frances Berry, prominent member of the nation’s African-American leadership, chair of the Civil Rights Commission, and a significant inside-the-Beltway player, could never back down or compromise, especially once the conflict became public enough to impugn her vaunted reputation. Most observers agree that there did seem to be a cultural and racial disconnect between the African-American, Eastern-establishment Berry and the mostly white, California constituents of KPFA. Was the whole epic battle a personality conflict rooted in a culture clash?

“Did the [Pacifica] board behave they way they did because they were malevolent and following the dictates of the federal government, or because they were paralyzed by some Byzantine loyalties and did incredibly stupid acts?” asks David Landau, a KPFA freelance programmer and substitute host of the noontime public affairs show Living Room. “I subscribe 100 percent to the latter point of view. Their behavior was idiotic and incomprehensible, and the only way to explain it was because they were tied together by personal loyalty. I think it’s clear that the network of idiocy can be tied to Berry, and all the conspiracies theories to explain what they did are garbage. It was simple, blundering cronyism.”

As the station’s staff and listeners emerge from crisis mode and return to some semblance of normality, they are trying to acquire the distance and perspective necessary to sort out what really happened. It will take a while, however; each chapter in the sagas of KPFA and WBAI is filled with tantalizing detail that can easily be used to support a variety of explanations. At times, Pacifica executives acted with the cool dispassion of Michael Palmer, the Houston-based real estate mogul and board member who furtively shopped KPFA to potential corporate buyers. At other times, they acted with the frantic impulsiveness of Bessie Wash, who, after replacing Chadwick as the network’s executive director, once interrupted the national broadcast of Democracy Now! in order to read a bizarre statement accusing a dissident from the network’s Houston station, KPFT, of assaulting staff members.

Today, most of the actors in this dysfunctional drama talk about their desire to move on and put the events of the last three years behind them. But the task of explanation remains, and may in fact be the key to any final, lasting reconciliation within the Pacifica network at a time when the country needs its unique mission more than ever.

Whatever may have driven Pacifica’s leaders to ratchet this crisis ever higher, it’s certainly true that they walked into the conflict with an articulated plan for reform. At least when it began, this fight was about who was, and who was not, listening to the network’s broadcasts.

The audience who regularly listens to KPFA and its sister stations has always been deep, but never particularly broad; although the combined signal for the five stations reach nearly forty million people, Pacifica’s listenership has always hovered around 800,000. Whether this should be a cause for concern is at the heart of the debate: Should community radio provide intellectual and cultural comfort to a select and intensely loyal audience that is served by no one else, or should it find a way to expand its appeal to the urban, multicultural masses that could be its natural audience? Should it preach to the choir or risk diluting its message to reach out?

Although this question has been around since at least the end of the Vietnam War, the early ’90s brought it to the forefront. For most of the nation, the end of the Cold War removed the sense of urgency from national and international affairs, and KPFA loyalists had a hard time adjusting to life without the sweep of a dynamic, progressive social movement, a sense of community and shared ideals. In addition, the network’s franchise on intelligent public affairs programming (longtime KPFA host Larry Bensky’s historic gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Iran-Contra hearings, for instance) was being steadily eroded by National Public Radio.

Gradually, Pacifica’s leaders decided that its stations’ traditional strengths were no longer substantial enough to sustain quirky weaknesses in programming, production values, and scheduling. When national leaders looked at the offerings of their stations, they found a patchwork of wildly disparate programs with no sense of theme or continuity, tended by a host of programmers who didn’t always care about quality and who often regarded their slots as entitlements (the story of the Los Angeles-based KPFK programmer who tried to leave his show in his will is now legendary). Chadwick herself experienced the irrationality of such scheduling when, as a volunteer programmer at Washington, DC’s WPFW, she found her feminist talk show, Sophie¹s Parlor, sandwiched between a blues music show and a program on Caribbean affairs.

By 1993, KPFA’s then-general manager Pat Scott was aggressively — many would say bluntly — trying to raise the standard of professionalism at the station. “I really want to be able to see KPFA change in terms of the community,” she told a reporter for this paper in 1993. “By community, I actually mean one-third of the state of California, because that’s who we broadcast to: to people in Marin, San Jose, Fresno, all the way up to the Sierra foothills.”

In 1995, Scott implemented sweeping changes to KPFA’s programming, getting rid of beloved but anachronistic hosts such as Mama O’Shea and Sovietologist Bill Mandel. Her changes, as well as the undiplomatic style she employed to make them, prompted the creation of “Take Back KPFA,” an ad hoc group of disaffected loyalists dedicated to opposing what they saw as a corporate takeover. But other listeners — and most of the paid staff — quietly supported her ideas, and a strange, grudging sense of peace and harmony was prevailing at the station in the weeks leading up to the showdown of 1999.

That’s not to say that KPFA’s staff and supporters were at ease with their parent organization. In 1975, only one-half of one percent of the station’s budget went to finance Pacifica’s work, but by 1999, fully 17.25 percent of KPFA’s budget was filling Pacifica’s coffers. In addition, the network’s leaders had sporadically tried to force stations to broadcast its “must carry” national programs, which angered many who still valued KPFA’s tradition of local programming. There were many worries that Pacifica’s empire-building ambitions might eventually not only threaten KPFA’s independence, but also the carefully nourished vision of its founder, Lew Hill.

No one articulated these reservations in the national arena better than station manager Nicole Sawaya. She seemed to be the only member of KPFA’s contentious universe who could simultaneously execute Pacifica directives and zealously advocate the interests of her station. In the fifteen months she ran the station, she had managed to mollify the critics of Take Back KPFA and calm the atmosphere at the station, bridging the gap between professional standards and progressive values.

In the end, however, Sawaya may have articulated KPFA’s position too well for her own good. It was at a fateful Pacifica board meeting held on February 27 and 28, 1999, that the profound crisis we know so well was set in motion. The big issue on the agenda of that meeting was a controversial plan to reconstitute how the board would be selected, a plan which, critics asserted, would wipe out all semblance of democracy and accountability on the board. The plan was drafted in response to a ruling issued by officials of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Arguing that the network could not put at risk the $650,000 it receives from the CPB every year, the board majority ignored the protests of dozens of protesters and moved to implement a plan to make the board self-appointing.

(The clause at issue was violated by Pacifica’s tradition of allowing its board members to simultaneously sit on its national board and the local advisory boards of individual stations. Pacifica officials insisted that the only way of coming into compliance with CPB regulations was to suspend direct election of the board. The flimsiness of this reasoning was recently dramatized by Pacifica’s new leadership which took exactly two seconds to figure out how to comply with the CPB and retain democracy in the network: once the local advisory board elects a national board member, he or she simply resigns from the local advisory board.)

The episode that was to spell the end for Nicole Sawaya at KPFA happened quietly at that very meeting, unnoticed by almost anyone at the time. Pacifica had requested that station managers prepare budgets that took seriously CPB’s threat to remove funding; if the network were to lose $650,000, how did each station manager propose to get by with less? While every other manager listed cuts in local programming and services, Sawaya said she would respond by yanking KPFA’s contribution to Pacifica’s national budget. With this gesture, she essentially declared her belief that Pacifica’ bureaucracy inappropriately bloated. Less than a month later, Chadwick fired her.

Was Sawaya’s ouster — the spark that set everything else in motion — part of an ideological plan to crush dissent from the stations, or a result of a petty dispute between Chadwick and Sawaya against whom the former had nurtured a grudge for years? According to Peter Franck, the answer can be found in a close examination of a little-known initiative called the “Healthy Station Project.” Launched in the early ’90s by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (and, interestingly, run by Chadwick’s ex-husband), the Healthy Station Project was ostensibly an effort to professionalize the production values of community radio stations around the country. Franck points out that the CPB is led by one Robert Coonrod, who began his career running the Voice of America and Radio Marti, the Cold War antitheses of the pacifist KPFA. He claims that the project was in fact an attempt by the CPB to reconfigure community-run, listener-sponsored stations along the lines of public radio stations, and that the first item on that effort’s to-do list was to get rid of the stations’ volunteers and other forms of community involvement. Franck claims that there is a seamless continuity between the CPB’s efforts to “reprogram” community radio stations and its providing the all-too-convenient pretext for Pacifica to eliminate directly elected board members.

“[Chadwick’s ex-husband] went around to community stations, Pacifica stations and others. dangling money and saying, ‘You’ve got to professionalize.'” Franck wrote in a recent article. “‘You’ve got to have less volunteers. You’ve got to take the power of the volunteer away. You’ve got to be slicker and go for a wealthier audience.’ A lot of stations felt that pressure and, in some stations, the distinction between listener-sponsored radio and public radio got blurred…. Nicole Sawaya, alone among the managers, presented a plan saying she would cut that seventeen percent to make up for lost CPB funds, if Coonrod carried out his threat. Because Nicole Sawaya would cut the Pacifica share (rather than staff in that revised budget) she was fired. So what we have is a close collusion with the current Pacifica leadership and CPB, the resistance of one courageous station manager, and the present crisis.”

Pacifica representatives have never officially commented on Sawaya’s firing beyond a vague intimation that she was “not a team player.” But according to one Pacifica official, who asked not to named, Chadwick did not renew Sawaya’s contract because she thought Sawaya was a an obstructionist drama queen, and she just wanted to get rid of her. “Nicole did a good job of setting things up with KPFA staff and volunteers to make them feel that she was being set up for a fall, and she did that for many months,” the official says. “But with the national board and staff, she was a constant voice of conflict. She was never trying to find solutions, she would only complain and focus on negativity. We could have four station managers in agreement about something, and it seemed as though she would stay in opposition and be deliberately contrarian. In hindsight, it almost seems as though she was on a subconscious level setting herself up to be fired and pushed out.”

Whatever the reasons for Sawaya’s firing, Chadwick’s handling of the subsequent outrage on the part of listeners and staff turned increasingly, disastrously irrational — and lent credence to the notion that far from executing a premeditated plan, she was handling everything off the cuff. Minutes after Sawaya and other staffers got the news, a group of programmers and reporters marched to Chadwick’s office and demanded to talk to her. Remarkably, Chadwick refused to let them into her office; in a surreal moment, staff members were forced to argue with her as she held her office door open only a crack.

Later that day, learning that the newsroom planned to report Sawaya’s firing on the air, Chadwick first announced the existence of the “dirty laundry” rule — which quickly became known as the gag rule. “I am directing you not to air a story about Nicole’s termination,” Chadwick wrote in a memo to news director Aileen Alfandary. “Airing this story would be a violation of Pacifica policy.” It was a remarkable public relations blunder, but mistakes don’t preclude premeditation; organizations plan terribly misguided policies all the time. The greatest evidence that Chadwick was simply clueless about effect of her actions — and thus had not the faintest idea about how to weather the storm she had unleashed — was the inconsistency with which she applied the gag order. For weeks, programmers played a recorded disclaimer denouncing Pacifica at the beginning of every single show, without a word from Chadwick. Then out of the blue, she would came down like gangbusters, removing Larry Bensky and programmer Robbie Osman from the air. Overall, she seemed undisciplined and impulsive, unable to decide whether to wait for the crisis to blow over or to crack the whip. And all the while, she consistently refused to talk with KPFA supporters — or even her own colleagues — hiding instead behind her office door.

“My greatest frustration was that [Chadwick] was always reactive,” says a Pacifica official. “Whenever we tried to suggest a proactive initiative to calm things down, Lynn resisted. Because she was always in crisis mode, she was never in a place to stop long enough to refocus.”

In fairness, most KPFA supporters probably never really appreciated the sense of physical danger and stress that Chadwick must have been feeling. The night of Sawaya’s firing, someone drove by Pacifica’s office and shot at it with a .38-caliber pistol. A few days later, Media Alliance Executive Director Andrea Buffa led a contingent of supporters, including Berkeley City Councilmember Maudelle Shirek, on a surprise confrontation in Chadwick’s office. Picket lines outside the studio were becoming a daily occurrence, and protesters heaped vitriol on Chadwick whenever she walked the gauntlet. One common epithet, a reference to the color of Chadwick’s hair, was “the pink rat.”

According to sources within Pacifica, the endless protests and tension — and, specifically, the unfocused, variegated nature of the dissent — created significant confusion among the corporate staff. KPFA has a lot of passionate supporters, and not all of them expressed themselves responsibly. Some people were content to wear symbolic gags or file grievances with their shop stewards, but other people threatened to kill Chadwick and her staff. Because there was, in the beginning, no clear organizational structure among the dissidents, Chadwick never knew which voices were marginal and whose were credible. All too often, she and her colleagues took seriously the most hyperbolic rants from the station’s staff and supporters, and let the most crazed insults set the tone of all future negotiations.

“We had been shot at. Molotov cocktails were thrown at us,” says one Pacifica source. “Protesters were marching on Lynn’s house; she had to stay in the hotel. Had we not been shot at, we might have just said ‘Oh it’s just the wackos.’ But it had really escalated to such a level, I was feeling so threatened and so attacked, I was no longer in a position to determine which threat was phony and which was credible.”

On the other hand, there is no shortage of evidence to indicate that Pacifica had been preparing all along for the possibility of a lockout. The smoking gun came in the form of an infamous July 1999 memo from Michael Palmer, a real estate executive and board member from Houston station KPFT, to Mary Frances Berry. When Palmer accidentally sent the memo to Media Alliance Executive Director Andrea Buffa, he gave the world a glimpse into what, despite repeated assurances to the contrary, at least some of Pacifica’s directors were really thinking all along.

In his memo, Palmer explicitly stated that he had met with a radio broker and had been advised that KPFA and its sister station KPFB would bring up to $76 million on the open market. He mused upon how long it would take to buy a less valuable frequency on the FM band in the Bay Area, and urged Berry to begin planning how to “best undertake the effort… with the least amount of tax, legal and social disruption.” In addition, Palmer clearly indicated that he and Berry had been in the midst of an ongoing discussion about which station, KPFA or WBAI, would be the most disorganized and thus the least able to resist such a sale. In prose dripping with contempt for “the beloved Bay Area,” Palmer argued that Pacifica should sell KPFA because the New York station was too fraught with disjunction to effectively challenge Pacifica’s plan to remake its programming: “The New York [station has] a smaller subscriber base without the long and emotional history as the Bay Area, far more associated value, a similarly dysfunctional staff though far less effective, and an overall better opportunity to redefine Pacifica going forward.” Finally, Palmer indicated that Pacifica had been plotting the wholesale termination of the staff at KPFA for weeks, if not months. “I was under the impression there was support in the proper quarters, and a definite majority, for shutting down that unit and reprogramming immediately,” he wrote. “Has that changed?”

Indeed, although Pacifica representatives have insisted over the years that Palmer never had any support from the rest of the board for the sale of one of the stations, they have never denied the implications of his remarks about “reprogramming” KPFA. In fact, when Pacifica needed someone to do the dirty work of orchestrating the lockout, they picked one of Palmer’s own colleagues. It was KPFT General Manager Garland Ganter, who actually pulled the plug on the KPFA’s live programming. Ganter’s own tenure at KPFT was infamous for the speed with which he systematically removed most of that station’s public affairs programming and replaced it with tepid, twangy folk music that station reps breathlessly call “the sound of Texas!”

In the weeks leading up to the lockout, Pacifica officials hired a host of special consultants. In June, Chadwick hired Gene Edwards, a “human resource consultant” for the consulting firm Lee Hecht Harrison, a subsidiary of the temp giant Adecco, who specialized in laying off employees. She also secured armed security guards from IPSA International, an Oakland-based firm that specialized in labor trouble (“During hostile terminations, our protection specialists provide a virtual safety net,” boasted the company’s Web site), and retained lawyers from the legal firm Mitchell, Siberberg, and Knupp, whose Web site proudly listed its accomplishments in “extensive union avoidance work.” Finally, just ten days before the lockout, archivists from KPFK were ordered to ship tapes of old music and interviews up to KPFA — the same tapes that were later broadcast when Pacifica shut down live programming at the station.

In the end, of course, the public outcry and nearly unanimous disapproval of the national press forced Berry and Chadwick to back down — a relatively novel experience for the imperious Berry, who, by most accounts, is used to getting her own way. The scope of their defeat cannot be underestimated. It is, for instance, virtually unheard of for the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle to take Berkeley’s side in any conflict; it required blunders of incalculable proportions on the part of Pacifica to turn KPFA staffers and their noisy army of supporters into underdogs in the eyes of the local press. That Pacifica executives managed to pull off such blunders with remarkable regularity is yet another argument against the theory that their actions were carefully calculated in advance. If the board’s actions amounted to a calculated attempt at a bloodless coup, did its calculations take into account Berry’s capacity to piss off the entire national progressive left?

“Berry made all the decisions,” says one Pacifica source. “Lynn was just kind of a puppet. I’m sure she had many strengths as an administrator, but she was in awe of Dr. Berry. She was a little saucer-eyed. And Berry thought, goddammit, she was Mary Frances Berry, and once she got her side of the story out, everything would be okay. She was confident in the credibility that she thought she brought to the table.”

One of Pacifica’s most profound missteps may have been its failure to prepare Berry for the fact that her inside-the-Beltway cachet would mean so little out west. Her personal outrage and frustration was apparent in almost every gesture she made during the crisis. From the day in April 1998 when she told Current magazine, “I do not intend for this organization to destroy my reputation” to the day she resigned, every moment in the Pacifica-KPFA fight was really a drama about Berry’s legacy and prestige. Such narcissism invariably rendered all negotiations impossible, and in fact no progress was made until she resigned.

Still, many KPFA supporters see a method even in Berry’s madness. They point out that she was offered the chair of Pacifica not because of her extensive broadcasting experience — in fact, she has none — but because of her renown in liberal activist circles. She is one of the intellectual stalwarts of the left wing of the Democratic Party, but her partisan loyalty simply didn’t fit with Pacifica’s traditions. Larry Bensky, who also is a contributor to the East Bay Express, claims that from the day she assumed leadership of Pacifica, Berry wanted to transform the network into a mouthpiece for the left within the Democratic Party, a liberal equivalent to the lowbrow conservative shoutfests on the AM side of the dial.

“I think it’s no accident that I was fired on the first day of the impeachment proceedings,” says Bensky, who intended to give the impeachment trial the same independent coverage he gave Iran-Contra. “Even though I thought the impeachment was foolish, I had no illusions about what Clinton was doing. Berry listened to me during the Reagan-Bush years and thought I would be a partisan Democrat. But I’m not, and there is no coincidence that I was fired as a result. I don’t think Berry and her friends understood radio at all. She certainly didn’t understand community radio. When Pacifica is operating right, is has a completely different style than Rush Limbaugh. It’s not supposed to match in vitriol and ignorance the right-wing radio networks. I don’t think she was well advised about winning formats for alternative approaches to politics and culture.”

There has been continuing speculation that Berry dreamed of using the proceeds from the sale of KPFA to build a string of radio stations aimed at African-American communities throughout the Southeast, thus transforming Pacifica into the nation’s first black broadcast franchise. This theory grew even stronger during the lockout, as a defensive Berry tried to justify the board majority’s actions as an attempt to “diversify KPFA’s airwaves.”

Egotist or strategist, blunderer or schemer, during her tenure as its leader, Pacifica set a new low in vindictiveness. If Pacifica executives were ever motivated by a genuine desire to change the network’s destiny, by the time Berry had resigned after stacking the board with her loyalists, they seemed solely motivated by an all-consuming hatred of the dissidents at KPFA, who had dared to embarrass them on a national scale. So it was that when Pacifica turned its attention to WBAI in December 2000, there would be no talk of professionalism or reforming the way radio serves people — just naked threats and intimidation.

It’s hard to tell what precipitated the fight for the soul of WBAI. Maybe it was the time when Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman brought Ralph Nader onto the floor of the Republican National Convention, which prompted Pacifica leaders to pull Goodman’s press credentials and order her to inform them of all guests a week in advance. Maybe it was WBAI’s September 23 report on a Washington, DC march by Palestinian activists. Maybe it was the time when, on the eve of the 2000 elections, Goodman grilled Bill Clinton on the air. Whatever may have been the final straw, Pacifica Executive Director Bessie Wash first struck on November 28, 2000. Flying up for what WBAI General Manager Valerie Van Isler thought was a routine performance evaluation, Wash announced out of the blue that Van Isler would be reassigned to a new position at Pacifica — a position that did not actually exist at the time. When Van Isler refused the new post, Wash told her that she would be out of a job by the end of the year.

Things were already tense at WBAI. In addition to watching the KPFA battle from afar, the station’s staff had been grappling with ugly personal divisions among themselves, and there was a nasty racial edge to the schism. Much of the controversy swirled around Utrice Leid, a longtime staff person who had nurtured a grudge against Bernard White, the veteran host of the station’s morning drive time show, Wake-up Call, who, she felt, had been promoted over her to the post of program director. Van Isler had drawn her share of criticism in ten years as general manager, mostly due to her reputation as a Pacifica loyalist. But in the months leading up to her termination, she had begun to take up the cause of the dissidents. “Toward the end of 2000, Valerie Van Isler moved from being a compliant Pacifica soldier to being more sympathetic to voices of dissent,” says David Landau. “Not favoring them, but saying they have a right to be heard.” The pace of events in the subsequent month was startling. Wash appointed Utrice Leid to replace Van Isler as general manager, and the two of them went to work eliminating their enemies. The first heads to roll belonged to Sharan Harper, the station’s union shop steward, and program director Bernard White. On December 22, Leid sent a courier to the homes of White and Harper. The courier carried two items: a severance paycheck and a letter informing each of them that they were fired, and if they tried to return to the station, they would be trespassing. Their personal belongings would be delivered to them at a later date. Meanwhile, Wash changed the locks on the station’s doors and posted an employee at the entrance with a list of those staff members who would be allowed on the premises. Dissidents would later refer to these events as the “Christmas coup.”

Again the question arises: Were these actions part of a calculated effort to blunt the station’s politics, or just a the ugly denouement of a decade of personal animosity? Landau seems to think it’s a little of each. “When Leid got the general manager position, White became public enemy number one. He was immediately fired, just because Leid despised him. It was that simple. Leid had been passed over for a position that was given to White. It was a case of personal animosity and personal loyalty ruling the day. People can say, well, there were these political differences, but hey, they all fundamentally agreed with each other’s politics. The main thing is these people just hated each other’s guts.

“At that point, Pacifica was doing a better job in enforcing its regime than it had at KPFA. They were determined to look for someone on the staff who could be a turncoat, so they could exploit the [pre-existing] internal division, which was Byzantine and went way back. They found Utrice Leid, and all these old divisions were inflamed.”

Soon, pickets outside the station and Leid’s house were a common sight. The New York press filed numerous embarrassing stories on the crisis, but Leid seemed to determined to weather the storm. The crisis could be experienced every morning on the air, as Leid loyalist Clayton Riley was picked to replace White. In addition to hosting Democracy Now!, Goodman co-hosted Wake-up Call and during the two months after Riley’s arrival the tension between the two anchors was a palpable subtext.

By February, life at the station had gotten too tense for Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez, who announced on the air that he was resigning and starting a campaign of pickets and boycotts aimed at forcing Pacifica to back down. Over the next few months, the pickets would be very effective, and several members of the Pacifica board of directors resigned under the pressure.

Pressure was mounting on Leid’s shoulders as well. In early March, US Representative Major Owens appeared on the WBAI program Building Bridges. While being interviewed on the air by program host Ken Nash, Owens began decrying the shake-up at the station. Leid barged into the studio, grabbed the microphone, declared over the airwaves that “lies have been told,” and cut the show off. A few days later, Leid canceled Nash’s show, and a furious Owens told Newsday that Leid’s management resembled “some totalitarian country where some great minister of information was dispensing the truth.”

Although Leid insisted that she was merely enforcing Pacifica’s gag rule, such standards didn’t apply to her own conduct. Over the next few months, Leid would openly race-bait dissidents on the air, claiming that they simply couldn’t accept the leadership of a black woman (conveniently omitting the fact that Valerie Van Isler was African American). During a pledge drive over the summer, Leid went on the air and accused the dissidents of waging a war against African Americans. “We’re talking here today about the European psychological warfare against Africans,” she said, “and that’s what the whole thing is about. I need you stalwart soldiers out there. Pick up the phone, make your call, and put an end to white supremacist thinking. This is a call to arms. I told you, this is a war!”

It’s hard to find any premeditation in such erratic behavior; far from executing a carefully thought-out plan, Leid seems, like Lynn Chadwick, to be a manager overwhelmed by events as they spun out of control. But according to dissident organizer Dennis Moynihan, the premeditation can be found in Pacifica officials’ decision to appoint Leid in the first place. “It’s a combination of communities being cut out of management with the bylaw change [in 1999], and then installing truly bizarre people up as managers.” If you want to destroy local resistance to selling a station, what better way to undermine morale than appointing someone so apparently self-destructive as Leid?

Amy Goodman, for one, is confident that Leid’s destructive tenure was part of Pacifica’s plan. “This is about pushing back the force of corporatization, and a corporate takeover of the board of Pacifica,” she says. Even as Pacifica representatives insisted over and over that she was the jewel in the network’s crown, citing her award-winning shows on human rights abuses in East Timor and Chevron’s collaboration with Nigeria’s military dictatorship, Goodman felt that she was the victim of a meticulous year-long plan by Leid to drive her out of WBAI by making the workplace climate too tense for her to continue. As two dozen employees and volunteers were fired or banned for mentioning the crisis on the air, Goodman took to ending her broadcast with “from the embattled studios of WBAI, the studios of the banned and the fired.” Management told her to drop the tag or be fired; when she refused, Leid moved her show to a bargain-basement studio with inadequate equipment. Claiming that this was merely the latest in a campaign of harassment and intimidation at the station, Goodman, in August, began producing her show from an independent studio a few blocks away. WBAI management claimed this was unacceptable and refused to broadcast her show until she returned to the studio they had picked for her.

Goodman claims that all of this was the result of much more than a simple personality conflict. “I wouldn’t say it was catty — I’d say it was an extremely abusive atmosphere,” she says. “Any of those who stood up for the banned and fired would then become one of the banned and fired. It was very political. It was not a matter of personalities. What happened was a political purge. I don’t see personality issues in this at all.”

Whatever the cause, much of this crisis is now at least tentatively resolved. Ground down by the pickets of the Pacifica campaign, increasingly worried by the four listener lawsuits, and broke after years of escalating security, public relations, and legal fees, Pacifica starting crying uncle in November. Utrice Leid has resigned from WBAI, and Bessie Wash is gone — reports are inconsistent, but the latter appears to have been fired after the board of directors realized how much debt had been racked up by the conflict. And as of January 7, all of Pacifica’s member stations have resumed broadcasting Democracy Now! What happens next will depend on the amount of good faith Pacifica’s leaders can summon, but in the cacophonous world of free speech radio, consensus is at best an elusive goal.

And so, after almost three years of combat, the question still maddeningly looms: Was this conflict the work of a band of inside-the-Beltway Democrats intent upon mainstreaming the last undiluted voice of the left? Or was it the work of vindictive jerks who were so consumed by hatred of their opponents that they couldn’t see that they were destroying what they were trying to save? Perhaps the one sentiment everyone can agree on is this: Pacifica’s leaders may have begun by fighting about the future of the network, but in the end the battle had simply taken on a life of its own. “Early on, if Pacifica had talked to any of us about their need to diversify their audience, they might have had some takers,” reflects Susan Stone, the director of KPFA’s drama and literature department. “They might have found it to be a dialogue worth having. But they didn’t, and we got noisy really fast and galvanized a community that they had underestimated. I think Pacifica became a series of reactions without a plan.”

Of course, the tragedy is that this fight occurred at precisely the time when Pacifica’s voice is most needed. KPFA’s brightest moments occurred during the Vietnam conflict. As the nation went to war with the passive consensus of a people convinced of the good faith of its leaders, it took a threadbare radio outlet to keep the dying embers of principled opposition alive until a new generation of protesters could come to the rescue. When Lew Hill first conceived of a radio network devoted to pacifism, free speech, and public affairs, he was imprisoned in a World War II concentration camp that the federal government built for conscientious objectors. The courage and conviction with which he held onto his convictions can still be found on KPFA’s airwaves today, and inopportune dissent is still a bracing tonic.

But to Amy Goodman and many other Pacifica stakeholders, that dissenting voice — the one intellectual franchise Pacifica is guaranteed — is still embattled even as untold tens of thousands are suddenly realizing how much they need it. On September 11, and in the days following that terrible event, Goodman could be heard live on KPFA, broadcasting for eight hours at a stretch, from her studio-in-exile in the heart of Manhattan’s evacuation zone. Meanwhile, over at WBAI, station executives refused to report a single word of the attack, instead broadcasting dirges and healing prayers. Any programmer who dared to speak about the attack was suspended.

Perhaps nothing sums up the competing visions for Pacifica radio better than that. And perhaps nothing better sums up the delicate ideological schizophrenia of contemporary progressivism. Caught between McWorld and jihad, between quarterly reports and hot-blooded fanaticism, the denizens of Pacifica are still searching for their ideological corner of the world. The sneers of the mainstream press aside, the battle for KPFA was not just another case of the left eating itself. It was the sad spectacle of a community in search of its lost relevance.

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