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THE LONG, SLOW SLIDE TOWARDS CORPORATE RADIO AT PACIFICA
It would be shortsighted to consider the changes at KPFT and Pacifica without linking
them to the sweeping changes occurring in broadcast radio over the last 25 years.
Below, we give a short summary of some of the most important developments. We
hope, in future issues, to explore these and other changes, in greater detail.
Lowly FM Radio Becomes Big Bucks
One of the founding tenets of Pacifica was complete reliance on listener sponsorship
for support. Founder Lew Hill had experience in commercial broadcasting and
understood that corporate underwriting would make it impossible for a station
to be critical of corporate power.
Although early pioneers of community broadcasting (like Lorenzo Milam) had proven
that high-quality radio stations could be run on limited funding, Pacifica was
always hunting for funds to keep it afloat. The Hill model of financial independence
began to crumble in 1976, when Pacifica first accepted federal funds from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). That decision set in motion all of
the changes at Pacifica over the ensuing 25 years.
Coincident with the influx of government money, the market value of all FM stations
including Pacifica began to soar in the late 1970s. Since the beginnings of
radio, FM outlets had been marginalized by broadcasters and advertisers alike
in favor of AM stations. This was largely due to a concerted campaign by the
national AM radio networks (principally NBC and CBS) to thwart the development
of FM. CBS even used bogus fear of sunspot interference to lobby the FCC into
moving the FM spectrum in 1947 to create room for its TV stations (and make
obsolete every FM radio in the US). This situation began to change in the late
1960s with the decline of syndicated radio and the rise in popularity of (local)
rock music stations.
So as the value of FM signals soared, two of Pacifica’s stations, KPFA/Berkeley and WBAI/New York, were located within the coveted middle
of the spectrum, not
in the non-commercial ghetto at the end of the dial. WBAI and KPFK, in particular, also had well-placed antennae
and strong broadcast signals. This type of reach, in 5 of America’s most populist
metropolitan areas, meant that Pacifica had a potential listenership of millions.
Furthermore, in a Reagan-era deregulation, the FCC began allowing noncommercial
stations to rent out two non-broadcast frequencies (known as side bands) to
commercial subcarriers for data transmission. Overnight, this created a large
new revenue stream for the cash-strapped network. For administrative reasons,
the national office handled the rental of side bands for all five stations,
shifting tremendous financial resources to Pacifica central management. These
subcarrier fees, currently close to a million dollars per year, have been recently
used by the National Office of Pacifica to pay its lawyers and public relations firm used for its crackdown on the autonomy of its local stations.
National Public Radio Goes Upscale
We all know the story of how some in the 1960s generation of college radicals were transformed into avaricious corporate raiders in the 1980s. A similar "maturation" process occurred among many of the radio
broadcasters at National Public Radio. The origins of NPR in the early 1970s
were in progressive politics and community activism, But by the 1980s, NPR was
flush with federal dollars and the salaries and ambitions of NPR staffers were
on the rise. NPR needed mass audiences to justify their burgeoning budgets.
NPR turned to its consultants who in 1986 generated the "Audience-Building Task
Force Report”. This analysis recommended changes including nationalization and
“professionalization” of programming across the country. This trend was further
exacerbated by a coordinated campaign by the government-run CPB to require public
stations to hire full staff and aggressively fundraise in order to qualify for
matching grants. A circular logic was created for community radio in which to
receive funds they had to hire full-time people meaning that ever more funds were required to
maintain the staff. The administrators of public stations, large and small,
were encouraged to act aggressively to remove volunteers and community programmers
from any meaningful say in what those stations aired, and how they would be
run.
These changes were directed by the CPB and encouraged by NPR, which needed paying
station subscribers for its marquee news programs, All Things Considered
and Morning Edition. The rules for community radio had now changed; civic
responsibility became secondary to the market standard, as in commercial radio.
As a result, the goal of encouraging diverse programming was abandoned at many
public radio stations across the country.
The CPB and Pacifica Managers Tag Team the Listeners
Pacifica Radio had been slow to adopt the NPR model of targeting affluent audiences.
But beginning in the 1990s, Pat Scott & a small group in the national leadership
of Pacifica Radio caught the professionalism bug. During 1991-1992, Pacifica
developed a plan to create a NPR - like National Program Service funded with
donations from corporate foundations. Local Pacifica stations & affiliates were
encouraged to carry these programs in place of locally produced material. Nationalization
of content was sold as the path to a "modern, relevant, effective radio network.”
These programming changes were presented as the only solution that would preserve
Pacifica’s CPB funding in the face of a threat by Senate Republicans in 1992
to defund the network because of supposed liberal bias. Following this episode,
a handful of administrators at Pacifica began to wrest overall control of operations
away from the 5 stations. The most deceitful & damaging episode occurred in
1997-98 when National Board Chair Mary Frances Berry & Exec dir. Lynn Chadwick
enlisted the help of the CPB in forcing a change in the governance structure
of the national board. Chadwick solicited, and received, several letters from
CPB officials threatening to withhold disbursements from Pacifica unless the
by-laws were altered. Until then, local advisory boards at the member stations
had a say in the selection of two-thirds of the national board, giving the locals
majority control over its own composition. Using an immediate cut-off of funding
as a weapon, Berry forced a change so that the board would become self-selecting.
With that change, Ms. Berry hoped to assert complete control of Pacifica operations.
But she didn’t count on the opposition of thousands of Pacifica listeners across
the country. Read pages 10 and 12 of this issue for a chronology of what happened
next.
Radio Oligopolies, Media Synergy and the Failure of the Web
While Pacifica listeners have been fighting to maintain local input, commercial
radio has taken a turn for the worse. Radio companies used to be constrained
from dominating a market by federal law; limited to two stations in any one
market and no more than 28 outlets nationwide. However, the revised Telecommunications
Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton, eliminated effective ownership restrictions.
Within the last 6 years, that has lead to almost complete domination of commercial radio
broadcasting by 3 companies, Clear Channel/Jacor, Chancellor Media and Infinity
Broadcasting. The monster of the bunch, Clear Channel, owns nearly 1,200 radio
stations; representing 10% of all US outlets and an astonishing 60% of rock
radio outlets. Using its dominant presence in concert promotion/touring, billboard
advertising and its 20 TV stations, Clear Channel can often dictate both programming
and advertising content on commercial radio in many cities. Houston is no exception,
Clear Channel owns the both of the AM talk radio big boys (KTRH, KPRC) and 5
of the 8 big FM pop music stations.
It has been no surprise that local content on our commercial outlets has been
steadily disappearing. AM radio is once again dominated by nationally syndicated
broadcasting, mostly supplied by Premiere Radio Networks, owned by (you guessed
it) Clear Channel. This company has fed American an almost exclusive diet
of talk radio limited to sports (Jim Rome), right-wing politics (Michael Reagan,
Rush Limbaugh) and moralizing (Dr. Laura). On many smaller FM stations, apparently
local DJs are nothing more than cyber-jocks; national DJs playing the same songs
with digital editing of local references and weather to make it appear live.
This dearth of local content of any sort would seem to leave an obvious opening
for non-commercial radio to fill. Indeed for a city this large, Houston has
a stunning lack of commercially produced news, community-affairs, consumer or
local talk. But with a virtual monopoly on the high-dollar upscale listener,
NPR and Public Radio International (PRI) now wield tremendous demographic power.
They have used this power to push syndicated news & entertainment
programming on their local affiliates KUHF & KTSU. With no local for the last
5 years, KPFT has bought completely into the plan of such prepackaged scheduling,
now carrying 6 hours/day of PRI & NPR shows.
The final piece in the puzzle is the failure of new media, like the World Wide
Web, to deliver on the promise of media democratization. The ease of web publishing
led to an early flowering of alternative media. But the last year has seen the
collapse of many free or alternative web publications and a reassertion of the
dominance of big media conglomerates, particularly Time-Warner/CNN/AOL. Up to
two thirds of all web surfers now get most of their news content from 5 large
media groups. NPR’s strategy has been to market its content directly to its
high-dollar audience, through websites like audible.com and soon through fee-based
satellite radio broadcasting. In the near future, it will be possible for NPR
to completely bypass local radio to broadcast directly to its affluent (paying)
listeners.
These are surely worrying trends for the future of broadcast radio. But they
also present a great opportunity for KPFT to go back to their roots in true
community radio. We believe that Pacifica should seek out that huge audience
that has been abandoned by NPR and the corporate media.
Free radio, free for all.
The editors acknowledge lifting material for this article from Jesse Walker’s
essay “With Friends Like These: Why Community Radio Does not Need the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting” (available online at www.cato.org),
Lorenzo Milam’s article “National Private Radio” (available at www.salon.com),
Matthew Lasar’s book, “Pacifica Radio: the Rise of an Alternative Network (Temple
University Press), Eric Boehlert’s analysis of ClearChannel “Radio’s Big Bully”
(online at salon.com) and Ken Burns’ PBS
series “Empire of the Air”, available everywhere PBS has colonized. (yeah, OK,
Ken Burns ruined Jazz & Baseball but he got early radio right).
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