KPFA, the nation’s first listener-sponsored radio station, is used to raising other people’s hackles.
In 1955, the radio station outraged authorities when it broadcast Allen Ginsburg’s poem, “Howl,” which had been banned because it was considered obscene. In 1965, KPFA broadcast the first reports of the Vietnam War from the North Vietnamese perspective. And, in 1991, it became one of the few media outlets to oppose the Persian Gulf War and to explore how the U.S. government benefited from the conflict.
But now the tables have turned on the station, whose 50,000-watt signal reaches a third of California. It has been accused of selling out, of turning corporate and of spurning the philosophy of the late Lew Hill, the Stanford student-turned-pacifist who created the station in 1949. Some people have even called it boring.
“It was supposed to be a `voice to the voiceless,’ ” said Curt Gray, a member of the dissident listener group Save KPFA. “It was formed by pacifists because they couldn’t get their views aired in the postwar era. But it’s gotten more mainstream.”
KPFA always has flourished during times of political upheaval. Its audience shot up during the Gulf War, for example. But without a major crisis to cover, managers at the station are attempting to use new formats to capture broader audiences.
The station is trying to appeal to a younger, ethnically diverse audience, but its critics think KPFA will lose its character in the process. Gray and others are upset by what they call the “National Public Radio-ization” of KPFA-specifically, the moves by the Berkeley-based Pacifica Foundation, which owns KPFA and four other stations across the country, to seek money from foundations to create more national programs.
The Save KPFA group-which has drawn large numbers of listeners, programmers and former staff members to its meetings-fears Pacifica will have to water down its progressive message to attract money and to create a national newscast appropriate for all its stations. And forcing the stations in Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and Washington, D.C., to carry Pacifica national programming would reduce the autonomy of each local station, critics claim.
Save KPFA is trying to stop this trend by gaining some control of the station, whose funding still comes mostly from listener pledges. After several heated community meetings, the group persuaded KPFA management to add three elected positions to its 13-member local advisory board, which mostly oversees budgetary matters.
For radio listeners without a leftist political perspective, assertions that the station is becoming mainstream may be difficult to detect. In a recent week, the station aired several programs on the CIA’s history of deceiving the American people, on how the Clinton administration knows that Haiti’s leaders are involved in drug trafficking, on indigenous people’s music and on the mysteries of menstruation.
KPFA and Pacifica officials say they want to change the station to make it more relevant for the 1990s. But that doesn’t mean a leap into the mainstream, said Marci Lockwood, the station’s acting general manager.
“We’ve always been the `doom and gloom, look what they’re doing to us’ station,” said Lockwood from her office in Pacifica’s new $3.5 million, Mediterranean-style building in downtown Berkeley. “Now we have this perceived friend in the White House. We don’t have Reagan or Bush. The Soviet Union is no longer an enemy. It’s time for us to re-evaluate what we’re doing. We’re having a midlife crisis.”
One way to become more relevant in today’s multicultural society, Lockwood argues, is to open up the airwaves to women and people of color. But making the change has been a problem at KPFA, despite its professed goal of being a “voice for the voiceless,” she said.
The station historically has been considered a “public access” station, where anyone with any message could get on the air, Lockwood said. Air time was considered inviolable-once there, always there. As a result, many of the prime-time slots are occupied by volunteer programmers who came to the station in the 1960s and have never left, Lockwood said.
“The issues they’re covering may not be as relevant in 1993 as in 1963,” she said. “Once they’re on, they never get off. But the air time belongs to Pacifica. It’s not your time to do whatever you want with it.”
The station’s former general manager tried unsuccessfully to open up the airwaves by informing many longtime programmers they couldn’t automatically continue their shows, a move that created an uproar among many staff members who saw it not as an attempt to diversify, but to force out people critical of management. Some of them went on to form Save KPFA.
“If you’re not with their program, they’re going to abuse you and eventually show you the door,” said Gray, a longtime listener.
Some observers think the station can’t flourish in the ’90s without clarifying its mission.
Said Leon Collins, a former general manager of Pacifica’s Washington station: “Is it a political organization that uses broadcast, as opposed to a broadcast organization with a political slant to it?”
