KPFT is winding down its fall fund-drive. Here Houston Radio Report presents a brief post-mortem.

KPFT isn't Community Radio no matter how many times they say it

Our most lasting conclusion is that the current on-air staff at KPFT is incapable of being honest and truthful about the station's actual mission. The airtime during the past10-day October marathon was saturated with smarmy and self-congratulatory promos proclaiming the great progressive tradition of KPFT.

But today's KPFT is not upholding that proud tradition. Instead KPFT's management exploits Pacifica's history to create an aura of "community" while moving inexorably towards a commerical radio model of full-time DJs targeting middle-aged affluent Americana music fans.

But the casual listener wouldn't know that from the pledge promos. They were filled with pious assertions of KPFT as a paragon of alternative media and how because of this the station is under constant attack from the evil forces of commerical and corporate America. Our favorite spots were those that tried to use the bogeyman of the US Republican Congress poised to shut-down public radio as a scare tactic. Quite a dishonest manipulation.

This strategy attempts to revive ancient history when in 1991-92 (at the instigation of Senator Bob Dole and others) there was a congressional attack on public radio funding. Nothing could further from the mind of Congress at the moment.

The truth is that Congress & the US Gov't LOVES National Public Radio now because it has become practically state-controlled media. The current upper management of NPR (and the CPB) were recruited from Voice of America & Radio Marti broadcasters in 1997-98. The current NPR news programs are often less critical of US government positions than commercial media. And, as evidenced by the events following 9/11, almost all of NPR's experts and commentators are drawn from the ranks of Pentagon officials, consultants, intelligence operatives and Washington think-tanks. Anybody listening to NPR during the 9/11 crisis hear unedited Pentagon press briefings and uncritical analysis.

The shallow nature of KPFT's programming and lack of community support were nowhere more evident than in the dearth of people on-air doing the hawking during the fund drive. For nearly the entire week, there were only 5 people pitching for donations. Three of them- General Manger Garland Ganter, Programming Director Mary Ramirez and triple-shift DJ Roark Smith, are paid employees and the other two, DJs Rick Heysquierdo and Sandy Wienmann, are widely regarded as management lackeys who crave airtime and a paid position. A well-functioning, well-supported station would have had 20-30 different people from the community pitching & pledging.

In fact, KPFT has largely been reduced to Roark Smith as a one-man radio station since Ganter has fired the most recent midday DJ hire (The poor guy apparently failed Ganter's 'Loyalty Test'). Roark and his braying sidekick Sandy were a non-stop two-man disinformation team who blathered on about how great they were, giggled over their little inside-jokes like schoolgirls and expressed contempt for Pacifica's mission. The only things either of them appear to know about the network's proud legacy came from our last issue of Houston Radio Report.

Roark, in particular, appears to have a greatly impaired sense of reality testing. He spent hours bragging on his ability to play whatever he wants at the same time he was pumping the usual scripted playlist.

Yes, gentle readers the daytime music shows & Crossroads are playlisted radio-you weren't fooled were you? The Crossroads hosts are so in control of the music that they spin that Tracy announces her set, 'tonite you'll be hearing Lyle Lovett, Bob Dylan and Loudon Wainwright II, or somethin....I can't read it cause the printout is cut off at the edge' It would be funny if it weren't so pathetic. But, hey, it does remind of Wainwright the Third's great self-diss, T.S.M.N.W.A ('They spelled my name wrong, again'). All of us out here wish that KPFT had even a teensy weensy bit of Loudon's self-mockey.

Some of the worst offenders in the propaganda-battle-disguised-as-a -fund-drive were two of KPFT's old guard. Both Larry Winters and Ray Hill droned on about how the station was manned by "95%" volunteer programming (actually the entire daylight Monday-Friday programming is now two full-time paid DJs or & paid syndicated content). Both went on about how a variety of "communities" make up KPFT. Come again, Ray? How do you figure that exactly?

I can forgive these old timers desperate to believe that they still belong to a caring and relevant station. But Roark & Garland's cynical manipulation of their audience is unforgivable.

One of the saddest developments of this fund drive has been Garland Ganter's use of phone volunteers as pawns in his savage campaign to discredit, harass (and even arrest) KPFT's reformers. This reached its nadir on Saturday evening when Garland's wife (not an employee of KPFT) barred entrance to the station of KPFT LAB member Teresa Allen. Ms Allen's arrest for "trespass" was then pressed by Garland when he arrived at the station almost an hour later. While this episode is awful enough in its misuse of police power and violation of Ms Allen's federally-protected rights to oversight of KPFT, it is also reprehensible that once again Garland has put his employees (like membership directorKathy White) and station volunteers in the middle of an unnecessary and costly legal battle. Personally, I don't think Dante has a circle low enough for Mr. Ganter.

But then there is Garland's lying to volunteers about the reasons why KPFT is no longer broadcasting Democracy Now! In my conversations with around 20 phone volunteers, all told me that KPFT management had informated them that Amy Goodman & DN! was not on the air because of a "contract dispute." Of course, as any reader of these pages knows, this is a lie. In fact, DN! was censored off the air at KPFT. Ganter and volunteer DJ Sandy Wienmann on 8/17/01 accomplished this when they made a mid-broadcast switch to an old archival show. Far from having "technical difficulties" as Sandy claimed to listeners, the switch was an overt act of censorship by Ganter that deprived the listeners of Houston of a great national news show.

Of course, DN! continues to do great shows (but not on KPFT) and can be heard on the internet at KPFA.org or WBIX.org as well as over 30 community radio stations across the country. More recently, several weeks ago, Ganter & Roark censored an entire broadcast of Pacifica Network News because it contained a short "peace initiative" from the new Pacifica National Board Chair ,Bob Farrell.

Well, KPFT will no longer release the official results of its fund drives so we can't know for sure. But a semi-scientific sampling of pledges suggests certain trends:

1. Support within Houston itself is dwindling; many of the current supporters are drawn from outlying areas like Conroe & Galveston. This likely reflects KPFT's complete inability to reach & address the issues of city dwellers in favor of pandering to the "country cowboy" stereotype of its AAA format.
2. New members predominate (including a large proportion of listeners of less than one year's duration). Normally this would be a good development for any station, but at KPFT it belies a big problem; the established base is no longer donating (and perhaps not listening anymore), The station is drawing its audience from Houston's many transient professional workers and not from a stable base of listeners.
3. Big donors predominate.

Nuri-Nuri was fundraising on his Sunday blues show when the US began its bombing of Afghanistan and not a word was spoken about it for over 2 hours. Finally, somebody at KPFT made the decision to cut to Pacifica's shallow special "Pacifica Report" on the war. But that didn't stop Joe Montes of Joe's Roadhouse from apologizing profusely to his red-blooded audience for breaking away from his head-banging air-guitar fest to cover the fact that….um…we were at war.

And it is bad enough that KPFT is now running the watered-down drivel of Pacifica Report instead of the hard-hitting Democracy Now! (which has reached new heights during this crisis). But after each segment last week, Garland would break in to fundraise with rank apologies to KPFT's listeners for the "left-wing" perspective of Pacifica's discussion. Every day, either he or Mary Ramirez would back away stating "you may not agree with what you just heard, but it is important for you to be exposed to it."

"Exposed" to it? I see, nothing like a dose of some extreme commie politics to get any true American fighting mad, huh Garland?

What was that about KPFT's proud legacy, again? Never mind, let's go to the promo….and then back to the music.