Turnover but no retreat at Pacifica
Board's consultant sees 'irrelevance' because audience is small

Mary Frances Berry chairs the Pacifica Board, flanked by successor David Acosta and resigning Executive Director Lynn Chadwick. (Photos: Current.)

Originally published in Current, March 6, 2000

By Steve Behrens

The chairman and executive director of the Pacifica Foundation are leaving, but the remainder of its national leaders seem to have clenched their jaws in determination to pursue its strategy of audience building.

Mary Frances Berry, chairman since 1997, announced at a board meeting Feb. 27 that she'll leave the board when her term expires in September, and she introduced Vice Chairman David Acosta, of Houston, as her successor.

Berry also said that Lynn Chadwick would resign as executive direcctor as of March 1 and would be replaced for the next year by Bessie Wash, g.m. of WPFW in Washington. Berry and Chadwick did not return Current's calls seeking comments.

The board sat generally still and quiet for two hours as several dozen activists took turns hotly condemning their policies during a public comment session at the end of the board's meeting last week in Arlington, Va.

Acknowledging her disrespect for the Pacifica Board, angry Los Angeles activist Lyn Gerry speaks with her back to the board during an extended public comment session.

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"I can only think it must be the power of evil acting through you," said Alice Chan, the first speaker, and only a few speakers were more conciliatory. "Pacifica's job is not to succeed in the radio business," commented a Washington activist. "I need assurances that free thought didn't get high ratings and it's gone," said a teenager from San Francisco.

Berry, who said she would focus on "healing" the rift in Pacifica during her last months in office, told the critics, "I will try to listen more carefully to you and other people."

But the board earlier declined to consider rescinding the "dirty laundry rule" under which Chadwick had fired longtime correspondent Larry Bensky last year, and which has raised fervent criticism of censorship in Pacifica's newsroom. Tomas Moran, the only board member allied with the critics, asked the board to rescind the rule against discussing internal Pacifica disputes on the air, but there was no second to his motion.

The activists' anger reflected the deepening rift between Pacifica and its critics, who are producing a weekly alternative newscast in competition with Pacifica Network News.

Audience: growing, but too small

Pacifica released ratings data for its five public radio stations, quoting double-edged remarks by audience analyst David Giovannoni.

The chain has more listeners than ever; its average audience is up 33 percent in one year; its weekly cume audience is up 28 percent in five years; and its listener-hours were up nearly 50 percent in five years, according to data given to the board.

But in Giovannoni's written statement he stressed the negative: Pacifica's audience is relatively small in the massive metro areas where it owns stations. It has a weekly cume of 800,000 and an average audience of 40,000 at any moment, but the listening areas have a combined population of 40 million. His conclusion: "Pacifica has crossed the line from 'under-performance' to 'irrelevance.'"

In the context of the larger population, Pacifica's audience was not enough to have significant impact, Giovannoni said. "For most Americans, Pacifica simply does not exist. In fact, for most of Pacifica's listeners, it is not a lifeline of ideas and information. It is merely an hour-or-two per week add-on to their NPR and commercial radio listening," he wrote.

The audience analyst went beyond numbers to comment that Pacifica "is a faded reflection of its proud history . . . an anachronism on the FM band, arrested in its development by a small group of people who are similarly stuck in time."

He praised Pacifica's national leaders who "have attempted to rejuvenate its grand mission by applying proven broadcasting practices."

For Tomas Moran, a Pacifica Board member who ordinarily focuses his activism on homeless issues in the Bay Area, "proven broadcasting practices" are the problem, not the solution.

At a "teach-in" in a Washington church basement the previous night, Moran urged activists to look critically at Pacifica's use of ratings as a key measure of success "because it's very easy to find non-progressive programming to meet that narrow goal."

Pacifica also released its own analysis of the Arbitrons. A press release said its Washington and Houston stations, which have the reputation of working most harmoniously with the national management, "have the highest shares in the network and have experience the strongest growth." Indeed, the Washington and Houston shares were 1.3 and 1.1 percent of listeners last fall, but the rebellious KPFA in Berkeley was close at 0.9 percent, according to Pacifica's numbers.

Of the five stations, the ones in Washington and Houston also showed the fastest cume growth over the last five years, in part because they were the newest stations of the five, and they had the most to gain. But over the latest year, fall 1998 to fall 1999, the less obedient stations KPFA and WBAI grew about as fast as the Houston station in average audience. And that was fast: 39 percent in Berkeley, 45 percent in New York and 44 percent in Houston.

Altogether, the five stations added 33 percent to their average audience during that year and 9 percent to their cumes. In time spent listening, the audience of standout WBAI spent 36 percent more time with it last fall than in fall 1998.

Hand-to-hand combat

Though the board took criticism stoically, two members said they're resigning before their terms expire. June Makela, who was not present, left a statement endorsing Pacifica's goal of audience building and comparing the critics' tactics to those of "right-wing hate groups." William Lucy said he did not have time for "hand-to-hand combat and trench warfare."

Board member Ken Ford, of Washington, will succeed Acosta as vice chairman, and the board elected five new board members, including Washington broadcasting investor Bertram M. Lee; John M. Murdock, a Washington attorney; Valerie Chambers of Houston; and two New Yorkers, Leslie Cagan and Beth S. Lyons.

These days, Pacifica is embattled at every turn. Several lawsuits are pending. Some 40 stringers are striking against Pacifica Network News in protest of the dirty-laundry policy. A weekly alternative broadcast, Free Speech Radio will send out its fifth edition this week in competition with PNN. Some 20 stations are carrying the substitute instead. In Santa Barbara, Calif., KCSB cancelled PNN in support of the stringers' strike.

Observers are witnessing the critics' relentless Internet outreach campaign, which Makela called "the great Northern California e-mail machine."

Teams of prominent progressives are taking sides--and therefore, flak--for and against Pacifica. Last August, a list including Alice Walker, Jerry Brown, Angela Davis, Joan Baez, Noam Chomsky and Pete Seeger objected to Pacifica's lockout of KPFA staff, saying it has "abandoned and betrayed" its mission. They urged Berry and Chadwick to quit.

Then, last month, prominent leftist Saul Landau, a professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, came back with an "Appeal to All Progressives," asserting that "the honest debate over Pacifica has degenerated into an ugly spectacle of Pacifica-bashing and defamation." He collected signatures from many progressives, including Ed Asner, Jerry Brown, Marcus Raskin, former Sen. James Abourezk, and former Twin Cities pubcaster Jack Willis.

The Landau appeal was hardly a ringing defense of Pacifica. "I have little good to say about the Pacifica Board or executive director," he wrote, "but the war against it may lead to the death of our only alternative radio."

Within days, a chastising reply was on the Internet, signed by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen, former Pacifica host Jim Hightower, producer David Barsamian, poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others. They concluded: "It's too easy to dismiss as 'Pacifica-bashing' what is truly a grassroots effort to return community control and shared institutional power to a progressive institution that was founded to preserve both."

 

	.	To Current's home page
	.	Earlier news: Freelancers strike Pacifica, and anchor departs in protest, January 2000.
	.	Outside links: Pacifica Foundation and Save Pacifica web sites.

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