You Heard It First on Pacifica Radio

1949: Lew Hill and a staff of four launch the first listener-supported radio station in the world on April 15, 1949, in a makeshift Berkeley studio. Back then, the station went off the air at 6 PM so the staff could go eat dinner.

The early days at KPFA/Berkeley featured the only adventurous arts programming in Eisenhower’s America including storyteller Josephine Gardener’s macabre Irish folktales, the Buddhist philosophy of Alan Watts and Lew Hill’s poetry.

1954: Four crusading marijuana smokers light up and have a KPFA panel discussion about the virtues of pot. Earning Pacifica Radio its first (but not last!) police raid.

*

1958: Scientists Linus "Vitamin C" Pauling and Edward "Dr. Strangelove" Teller debate nuclear annihilation and the arms race on KPFA. The Cuban Missile Crisis is still 4 years away.

Elsa Knight Thompson hosted an astonishing gay rights documentary and panel discussion at KPFA in 1958, 11 years before the Stonewall riots.

And with that the 60’s had begun………

WBAI in New York broadcasted an interview with former FBI agent Jack Levine in 1962, who labels the J. Edgar Hoover-led agency as "bizarrely cult-like". He didn’t even mention cross-dressing. But to nobody’s surprise, the FBI responded by investigating everyone at Pacifica for years to come, steadily feeding disinformation to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

1962 Citing FBI concerns about "communist affiliations" at Pacifica, the FCC withholds the license renewals of KPFA, KPFB, and KPFK for 3 years. Neither the FBI nor FCC ultimately cites anyone at Pacifica with any violations.

During the early 60’s, programmer Bob Fass at WBAI introduced Free Form Radio. His relaxed format, mixing interviews, music, and theatre, is the precursor of the on-air style of everyone from Howard Stern to (gulp) Rush Limbaugh.

1965: Vietnam Day in April on KPFA, WBAI & KPFK in Los Angeles provides an early national forum for protests against the war. KPFA’s Chris Koch is the first regular radio commentator reporting from Vietnam.

1967 KPFA broadcasts a live interview with Che Guevara months before he is killed in Bolivia. During this period, Pacifica Radio was the lone radio voice for progressives such as I.F. Stone, Bertrand Russell, Malcolm X and Daniel Ellsberg.

The 70’s saw growth in the Pacifica network of stations with the addition of KPFT in Houston & WPFW in Washington, D.C.

1970: Arlo Guthrie’s interminable "Alice’s Restaurant" was playing when KPFT was blown off the air by a dynamite attack on their transmitter…..the first station to be so targeted in the history of broadcast radio. A second attack soon followed; federal agents ultimately arrested a Ku Klux Klansman for the bombings.

WBAI in NYC broadcasted comedian George Carlin’s "Seven Dirty Words" uncensored in 1973 and triggered a ground-breaking Supreme Court battle on obscenity rules for open-air broadcasters.

1973 Pacifica provides gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings.

1980: Ray Hill begins The Prison Show, on KPFT. The lone voice for prison reform and a call-in show to allow families & friends of Texas inmates to talk to their loved ones behind bars. Thanks to Ray’s charisma, tenacity and wide following, The Prison Show is one of the few remaining progressive hours of radio still allowed on KPFT.

Under Ray Hill’s leadership, KPFT became the first public radio station to broadcast programming in 11 different languages, serving all of Houston’s many communities.

1984 The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Pacifica's favor that non-commercial broadcasters have a constitutional right to editorialize.

National programming at Pacifica came into its own in the 80’s. Larry Bensky anchored live coverage of the confirmation hearing of nominee Robert Bork in 1987, the Iran-Contra Hearings, and subsequently the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.

1994: African American journalist & death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal's audio essays, censored on National Public Radio (NPR) because of political pressure from law enforcement groups, are heard regularly on Pacifica Radio.

The 1990’s saw the birth of the hard-hittin’ news show, Democracy Now!, launched by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez in February 1996. The hour-long show features daily investigative journalism including award-winning exposes like that on Chevron Oil’s collaboration with the murderous Nigerian dictatorship.

This is the proud history of Pacifica….so what happened?