Leftwing Pacifica Radio affiliates enter death spiral

Veteran broadcasters accuse the board of promoting bizarre conspiracy theories as network puts pressure on staff to reduce their hours and pay

Ian Masters and Sonali Kolhatkar, hosts of the Los Angeles-based KPFK, said its parent network Pacifica Radio, the country’s oldest public radio network, was putting pressure on staff to reduce their hours and pay, leave or work for free, alienating listeners and approaching a point of no return.

“This is the end. They’re running out of road,” Masters told the Guardian. He accused managers and board members of promoting conspiracy theories – including those related to the “truth” about 9/11 and claims about cancer and HIV. “They’ve run this place into the ground.”

Observers trace the travails to 2001 when a group of rebellious listeners and broadcasters took control and instituted an elaborate governance structure of multiple boards, sub-committees and painstaking elections.

The result, according to Matthew Lasar, author of the 2005 book Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War, was continuous feuding between rival factions. In a Nation article earlier this year, he compared the network to the “late Ottoman Empire of public broadcasting” and urged progressive outsiders to step in and save it before it was too late.

Kolhatkar, who executive-produces and hosts her daily show, said the “fantasy” of utopian, democratic decision-making was killing the network. “We are reaching the point of death by democracy.”

Mounting debt and dwindling membership has left stations close to bankruptcy, yet at a station where there is a high turnover of staff and acrimony between factions Masters claims board members focus on purging perceived ideological foes and installing friends.

“Occasionally you get decent people on these boards, but they quickly get driven out because of the insanity.”

As long as these onerous Local Station Boards and Pacifica National Boards dominate the operation, management and programming of what used to be a public radio network, Pacifica will continue its slide into irrelevance and oblivion.

Only a handful of people at Pacifica actually provide the public service of providing programs that listeners enjoy that in turn inspire them to financially support the stations. Most of the time and energy of the staff and employees is taken up by staff and board meetings which are the result of the impositions of elections and overlapping boards.

Not only has the public boycotted these election that do not reach the 10% required quorum, because its enough to ask listeners for money without expecting them to vote for candidates about whom they do not have a clue (except that they are all against racism and sexism) in a kind of random electoral roulette.

And because it only requires a dozen or so votes from a stealth candidate's family, friends or fellow "activists", we end up scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of who gets elected. Meaning the furthest fringe of the 10% permanent Pacifica political groupies, who tend not to have a life and are often the walking wounded of delusional causes, determine who get elected. So absent participation from 90% of our listener/sponsors, we end up with people like Summer Reese in charge of Pacifica.

But mercifully the PNB finally did look into the fact that Summer Reese does not have a Social Security number or pay taxes. Given that she was initiated into activism by the John Birch Society's fluoride conspiracy, and comes from a right-wing anti-government Libertarian background, we are left to wonder whether this was an attempt at a "stealth" takeover of Pacifica or just politically illiterate leftists not recognizing the Left wants a government that serves social needs, not no government at all as Ron Paul (to whom Summer Reese donated money) advocates, leaving us to the mercy of the Koch brothers.

Now that she has been belatedly fired for not providing the requisite documentation for a background check, she has just discovered religion and a biblical justification for not having a Social Security number, presumably following the Book of Revelation's reference to the mark of the beast. This while occupying the Pacifica national office in Berkeley, Bible in hand, after having broken in with bolt-cutters. Recent reports from Berkeley indicate Reese is attempting to shred incriminating documents in contravention of Pacifica's document retention policy.

Clearly her rise through the dysfunctional board system, is both indicative of the disastrous failure of the destructive "Free Pacifica" governance experiment, and an indictment of Pacifica's professional management's lack of resolve in standing up against insanity. Although it was clear from the outset she was totally unqualified for the job, I had hoped we could have avoided a public humiliation of her and I begged John Cromshow the swing vote on the polarized board not to vote her in as ED, as did Sonali Kolhatkar.