Titanic Radio
Time to suit up. Pull your hip boots snugly up as far as they will go. Adjust your goggles and breathing equipment. Don't forget the asbestos gloves.
We're gonna take one more quick dip into the bubbling toxic cesspool known as "people-powered" Pacifica Radio!
Tuesday's L.A. Times carries a report on the latest rebellion at KPFK -- the Los Angeles outlet of the failing listener-sponsored network. Well, rebellion is overstating it a bit. How about the latest whimper of anguish and pain from a dying patient?
I've known about this for a couple of weeks but given my recent cardiac concerns I decided to stay out of this until it became public. Which it did last weekend when a protest petition was presented by 18 programmers fed up with the gross mismanagement of the station and the network.
Seems like some of the more rational programmers (and even some of the crazies and uncleared deadwood) have become alarmed over the even crazier folks running the station -- or better said, running the station into the ground. The tipping point was reached for the petitioners when they learned of several pending and potentially very expensive sex harrassment and anti-discrimination lawsuits lodged against the monstrously reviled and incompetent station manager Eva Georgia. Some of these programmers were dismayed to have to go on the air, once again, and plead for funds in the name of supporting alternative media knowing all the time that hundreds of thousands could be consumed in legal defense of the discredited station manager. That she has also been caught ferrying around in limos and staying for extended sojourns in hotels all on the "people's" tab made things only worse.
Hence, the petition to network management who -- at last weekend's board meeting-- more or less wiped their bottoms with said protest document.
The sad truth, as I've written a few too many times already, is that the current crew that runs the network and the local station are a small group of zealots who make FEMA look like FedEx. They took over the network in late 2001 after a successful campaign of harrassment and intimidation of the prior management who couldn't take any more simply stepped down. (That campaign included the summary firing of then-KPFK- station manager Mark Schubb who later won a $350,000 settlement against the loonies who took over the network).
I don't want to be too self-righteous or self-serving here, but I quit the station (as a paid daily afternoon host) exactly one day after the ding-a-ling crew took over and fired Schubb. It was immediately apparent what they were about and I had no intention of continuing my association with them, nor raising money for them (My independently produced Radio Nation show continued on KPFK's air for another four years but only because KPFK chose to pick it up as part of our free offering to all public radio stations).
Everyday since then has been a Good Day for me -- the farther away I am from that madness, the better as our worst predictions immediately came to pass. The quality of the programming -- intellectually and technically--went into immediate freefall.
The station has -- until recently-- primarily financed itself by hawking tin-foil hat videos of the preposterous "9/11 Truth" movement i.e. those who argue that the Twin Towers were downed as part of a Bush admin inside job.
Problem is with a network like Pacifica, is that no one likes to give up their air time so the default position of most programmers is to go along with flow, co-exist, and just grin and bear it -- no matter how painful and embarrassing. Just squeeze your ankles and try to keep on smilin'.
Looks like some people now finally feel just too violated. The current crop of dissenters include those who still try to produce the few and only respectable shows still left on the air -- most notably Ian Masters' "Background Briefing." Among the signers are also long time friends of mine -- Suzi Weissman and Jon Wiener. I had a role in getting both of them their original shows on KPFK and as always I wish them well.
Unfortunately, the ranks of the dissenters also include some of the very same crazies who make the station so unlistenable and so marginal. One of those quoted as a dissident in the Times story, Christine Blosdale for example, has been one of the station's primary movers in promoting the airing of tin-foil 9/11 conspiracy garbage. What's she complaining about? Another dissenter quoted in the piece, the ossified Roy Tuckman, has done the overnight show for about a thousand years and keeps a proud list on his bulletin board of the 14 or 15 station managers he has survived. His programming is riddled with New Age mumbo-jumbo and conspiracy mongering. Now that the audience has grown weary of the 9/11 conspiracy crud, Tuckman's sorry show has become a pillar of station financial support as his most popular quack guest hawks holistic wrinkle creams and youth potions. Not alternative media but rather alternative friggin' reality.
I could go on, but why bother? The point is this: the current protest at Pacifica comes 5 years too late and is way too little. It comes 5 years after the network was taken over in toto by a group of very sad and very disturbed and disturbing people who had no experience whatsoever in public radio or in running successful non-profits. Their biggest and only achievement was to manufacture a hare-brained propaganda campaign (which they were crazy enough to believe) that the prior management was seeking to sell-out the network to evil corporations. At the time, much of the leftist activist community bought right into the lie and headlessly took up the cause of the so-called Free Pacifica movement which, to the rue of anyone with an IQ above 85, now runs the outfit.
The current chair of the Pacifica board and one of the former leaders of that "movement," Dave Adelson (quoted amply and quite revealingly in the Times piece), is --in fact-- one of the most disturbing people I've had the misfortune of having to encounter in the last decade. He's a humorless fanatic who believes The People talk to him and that he is Their Chosen Instrument. He knows nothing about radio and even less about politics -- except for what the little voices inside his head whisper to him.
When I still worked at KPFK back around 2000 I was in a staff meeting in which the ENTIRETY of the station employees and paid programmers asked him, please, pretty please, to resign his then-post as head of the local board which he was using as a platform to support a financial boycott of the station! He didn't blush, didn't flinch, didn't blink and simply and calmly said he wasn't going anywhere.
Anyway, who cares? Truth is, almost nobody. At at time when media is more important than ever, when the left whines about the dominance of conservative talk radio, the near half-century old Pacifica network is, frankly, irrelevant. KPFK has a flamethrower signal strength of 110,000 watts buts its audience is dwarfed by the area's other public radio stations. Its direct mail solicitation has collapsed under its inept management. Its public management meetings are shouting matches for enraged factional leaders. Race baiting is the most common tactic for argument. Those who believe that Al Qaeda and not the CIA struck on 9/11 are branded as government flunkies. Incompetence is rewarded in the name of diversity and political correctness. Professionalism is derided as elitism. And, oh yes, four feet good, two feet bad!
Let the dissidents be advised that the current network management will be no more likely to accede to their petition of 18 programmer-signers as Dick Cheney is to step down because Dennis Kucinich has so demanded. This week Pacifica released an aggressive statement (which I won't bother linking to) which, essentially, threatened punitive Slapp suits against those who have publicly disparaged its management. Take that, Wal-Mart!
Not that Pacifica has much to worry about. The small world of lefty publications and media have always shamefully punted on the shipwreck of the Pacifica story. A network whose market value nears a half-billion dollars has been left to slowly rot away because the Left has not shown the courage to stand up to the zealots who have rendered these radio stations pretty much useless and marginal. The exceptions to this code of silence are few. John Dinges did a decent piece 7 years ago in The Nation. Daniel Hernandez had this recent take in L.A. Weekly. Nor will the recent bad publicity in the L.A. Times sway the course of current management. In fact, they will love the negative press -- taking it as one more confirmation of their pathological persecution complex, proof positive of the CIA/MSM/L.A. Times/Big Corporation conspiracy to snuff out the real truth about 9/11! This sort of bad press is what these guys and gals lust for in the middle of their oh-so-lonely and dreary nights.
Every time a factional struggle breaks out at Pacifica that old cliche is dusted off: "It's one more fight for the deck chairs on the Titanic."
This time I beg to differ. This newest episode is but a scramble for the swim fins and masks. Glug. Glug.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:43 am
Wow. Such a tale of woe.
I can see why you’d want to keep a vendetta going against leftwingnuts.
But leftwing radio’s a hard sell anywhere, anytime. Most sane liberals want straight news and interviews, etc. They just don’t need a lefty counterpart to the kind of rhetorical krumping you get on Rush Limbaugh, etc. It’s just a different market.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:01 am
Let’s see BB, it’s I who have a “vendetta?” It was me and my friends who were driven out by a false vendetta that played perfectly among folks just like you. By the way, is that vermicelli or tagliatelle leaking out your ears?
You bet it’s a different market. One has threads that screw to the right. The other has threads that screw to the left. Same difference.
August 7th, 2007 at 5:14 am
I just happen to have gotten an email as a Dissent subscriber (a magazine I’ve got problems with, but fewer than I’ve had with Pacifica for at least three decades) and Jon Wiener has a featured article in the current issue. Gotta give the guy credit - or something - for being able to navigate ancient institutions of “The Left” at its farthest reaches in any direction.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:05 am
reg, is Wiener’s Dissent piece on Pacifica or other topic? I would be interested in seeing it either way.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:07 am
“Same difference.”
Well then, you tell me why leftwing talkradio has but a fraction of the listeners of the right’s moronic rhetorical krumpers?
Do you really think it’s because Pacifica and Air America–another venue for which you have much disdain–have the wrong attitude?
Or do you believe the rightwing ideology is just that much more popular in the U.S.?
I think polls pretty consistently show widespread support for the liberal side of most issues. At least half in almost every issue, save perhaps the death penalty. Yet there has yet to be–ever–a popular liberal talkradio host.
Left talkradio fails for the same reason rightwing news journalism fails: rightwingers are much more interested in fundamentalist cheerleading. Their resentment is insatiable. The left has it’s resentments and emotional needs as well, but they are far better met by more factual news and analysis.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:07 am
Now Marc will be attacked for being in cahoots with Rush Limbaugh.
This radio station seems to be an exaggeration of everything wrong with left-wing broadcasting. One thing that conservative talk show hosts provide is entertainment going beyond politics. That is a missing ingredient that not even wacko Al Franken could mix into his hate talk. Mac summed up the problem with his description of Pacifica’s chairman: “He’s a humorless fanatic….”
Come to think of it, so are a lot of commenters here.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:22 am
MB - actually it’s an online-only interview with an author, Saul Friedlander, of a book on the holocaust.
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=882
August 7th, 2007 at 6:29 am
One thing you can say about the above mentioned (there have been, I guess, many) purge of K.P.F.K……it was great radio! Admittedly apauling and twisted great radio, but unbeatable entertainment. How did Larry Benski get off the hook? I thought he was the evil puppetmaster behind it all….. We might also add that, on the surface, that sexual harrassment charges at KPFK should be viewed very, very carefully.
BB, I wouldn’t write off left talk radio just yet… Air America is starting to pull mainstream advertisers in the market I hear it in. I know they have a sugerdaddy, but so did right wing radio when it was starting out.
The market, I think, has more to do with selling outrage and resentment than than anything else. CNN does that better than Air America ever could in the Bush Age, with that guy they drag out Wolf Blitzer’s show who never says much but does a sort of general gripe about everything and looks prune faced.
The diffence between the crazies of KPFK and Rush Limbaugh is that no listens to the former, and the leaders of the free world appear the latter. If Marc Cooper is suggesting that Al Franken, say, is a left wing Micheal Savage, it tells you all you need to know about Marc Cooper’s understanding of the left and right in this country.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:36 am
Since someone sequed into the subject of the humor and political fanaticism, has anyone seen one of these FOX blowjob sessions recently where former comedian Dennis Miller does tricks with his tongue on BillO’s balls ? It’s pretty sad.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:53 am
With the occasional exception, tolerated because they raise money, KPFK is Marat/Sade.
Air America can be shrill and predictable. Pacifica is psychotic, with a few lingering exceptions, such as Ian Masters. You can get him by podcast.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:09 am
Al Franken is a centrist Al Franken.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Pacifica’s soap opera has been Sirius Radio’s gain, at least in New York, where they picked up Pacifica refugees Lynn Samuels (bat shit crazy but often funny and entertaining) and Mike Feder.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:55 am
LOL, jcummings.
Marc, this an excellent post. The only thing missing, IMHO, is the fact that such a large per centage of us car-commute in the L.A. area and are thus a ripe ‘captive-like’ audience. It’s a sad commentary on the ability of the ‘left’ (of whatever degree to the left) to stand up coherent radio. I haven’t listened to KPFK in years. They make the ‘play-it-down the middle’ NPR substations like KPCC & KCRW sound like audio-Murrow.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:00 am
Opps, Murrow WAS radio! Duh! Don’t know why I thinking of him as a print guy.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:22 am
Murrow was radio and TV, Rob, although by the time he got to the screen he was interviewing celebrities.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:41 am
“although by the time he got to the screen he was interviewing celebrities”
Yeah, but check out “Harvest of Shame” - still one of the best documentaries ever done by a television news crew. Murrow had various sides to his TV work - everything from attacking McCarthy to celebrating Louis Armstrong.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:43 am
Before I discuss Pacifica I’d like to inform Woody that Air America is doing a lot better. That Al Franken is outraising Norm Coleman and gaining on him in the polls (from 20 down to five down in latest) and that all this is done on AM stations with pipsqueak signals.
Now Pacifica. So its KPFK’s turn in the barrelo now. Seems like all this recent coup with the “Great” WBAI wars with “Martyrs” like Amy Goodman and the “Revolt” at KPFA and the aforementioned Larry Benski. There is a part of the Left that likes nothing better than eating its own - hey see the the way that thread went the other day on various sectarian strains here. Anyone else get confused by Michael Pugliese’s strolls down memory lane? Where have you gone Claire Spark? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.
Right now I’m surprised that Ian Masters, Suze Weissman, and Jon Weiner are still on the air. Especially Masters who regularly seems to have to prove he’s not a “CIA Plant.”
I Can’t complain about Roy Tuckman. Sure he’s weird. So is Art Bell.
And that gets me to the real issue. I started listening to KPFK in the sixties. Boy what a different place! The Firesign Theatre was born there! Remember “Radio Free OZ?” And before Elliot Mintz was flack to the stars he was on Pacifica. Want Conspiracy theories? How about Mort Sahl and his crusade to show that the Warren Report was a pack of lies!
Pacifica had a tradition of great cultural programming. How many here know that Paulene Kael started out at KPFA? That Anthony Boucher discussed SF and Mysteries there when he wasn’t reviewing the same for the NY TIMES?
And there was great music. And in the seventies there was the late Mike Hodel and “Hour 25″ - the weekly SF show for non-geeks with frequent guest Harlan Ellison. And as a highlight a rare and wonderful interview with Philip K. Dick. And other critics - Robert Peters on Poetry, Lawerence Christon on theatre, Dean Cohen on film. An d once a month a call in show where the listeners could argue reviews with the above!
All that is gone now. You can hear something like it at KPCC. And a natural - “Le Show” b y Harry Shearer over at KCRW.
But the humourless functionaries that run the place now seem to have Goebbel’s attitude toward culture - when they hear it they reach for their rhetorical guns!
I listen to Ian and Suze and Jon. And that is about it. I believe Marc. I sure don’t believe those at the station who claim the former regime lied about fundraising and listener base. If they were so strong why all the appeals for dough?
Sadly, no one really cares. We all have busy lives and going to those interminable meetings (broadcast on Pacifica) was for the iron bottomed apparatcheks. Actuall good historical lessons - that’s how it must have been when the Bolshiveks seized the party apparatus! They had nothing better to do and outlasted everyone else.
Well, lets see what comes next.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:48 am
Here’s something to think about. Murrow was a Speech Major at U Minn who was hired by CBS to organize a series of talks. He sort of drifted into News. Doubt that would happen today - no Journalism training!
Murrow said that his “Person to Person” celebrity shows allowed him to do “See it Now” and “CBS Reports”.
“Harvest of Shame” was great. But the same year, as Joe Benti once pointed out to me, he did “The year of the Polaris” as puffy a piece on the SLBM as the Pentagon could want.
August 7th, 2007 at 9:54 am
I think I called it quits–more or less–with KPFK while listening to Roy’s show one evening(I work graveyard)in 2002, and the “Radio Alchemy” section hosts confidently declared that The Beatles were part of a millenia-long conspiracy by Ancient Egyptian proto-Illuminati to subjugate mankind; they offered the pharaohs’ symbolic use of the !*SCARAB BEETLE*! (Beetle=Beatle–Get it?Get it?as PROOF of the conspiracy. And they seemed like such _nice_kids, too…
August 7th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Marc writes, “It was immediately apparent what they were about and I had no intention of continuing my association with them, nor raising money for them…”
Now I don’t care much for rehashing this, but that statement stands in pretty stark contrast to Marc’s previous protestations that his affiliation with Pajamas Media doesn’t reflect on his work or promote their lunacy. It seemed too glaring not to mentinon.
Also, RLC, I don’t think Keith Olbermann had any training outside of sports, for what that’s worth.
August 7th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I think that KPFK should be called the West Bank/Gaza Occupation Station. I have a game I play. I’ll be in the car and I’ll tune in KPFK to see how long it will be before the Israeli persecution of the Palestinians is brought up. Usually, it takes a few minutes at most.
Sometimes it’s a very quick score and it happens immediately. I make a note of the time it took and then punch out to listen to anything else but that whacko station.
August 7th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Mavis, excuse me while I yawn. I was actually one of the founders of Pajamas so I dint have to guess what “they” were about. I was one of them. I made an attempt, mostly unsuccessfully, to infuse it with a political pluralism. Results were limited, in part, because liberal bloggers are just as dumb as conservative bloggers and didnt want to mix in impure company. When it was clear to me that things were not going the way I wanted, I left. I have zero regrets and quite frankly believe the two situations are not comparable.
August 7th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Xenophon, I have never listened to KPFK, and don’t doubt the stories of its bonkerism but there is nothing wrong with frequently mentioning the Israeli oppression and apartheid policeis against Palestinians. You imply that this is whacko. Now if they’re talking as does James Petras, of the “Jewish Lobby” (nto the Israel lobby - big difference!) and looking at the Jewish background of poltiicians as does Petras, Blankfort, others, that is another deal. But frequent coverage of Palestine is a great thing.
August 7th, 2007 at 11:50 am
OT/FYI:
NY Post is reporting the NY Times will be discontinuing its Times Select feed. Via: Matt Yglesias http://tinyurl.com/2akm97
August 7th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Thanks jcummings, if KPFK is making a priority of this then that is indeed at least one thing they are doing right.
btw everyone needs to read Ilan Pappe’s “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” if they have not already.
August 7th, 2007 at 11:54 am
I was glad when they finally got Dennis Miller off of Monday Night Football. He hasn’t been funny since his days at SNL. Come to think of it, the same thing applies to Al Franken.
At least conservative talk radio has a lot of other fun and interesting people on the air, who mix politics with entertainment. The only laughter coming from Air America is from their own talk show hosts who only think that they are being humorous when the still bring up Dan Quayle not being able to spell potato. I haven’t heard Pacifica and would have no reason to want to.
The only funny liberal talk show host that I remember was from years ago, but I don’t remember his name. He moved from Atlanta to S.F. and was good because of the humorous way that he sparred with conservative callers, which are in greater abundance in Atlanta than S.F.
If left-wingers quit running off conservative callers, liberal shows would be entertaining enough from both sides to get sponsors, but I’ll never hold my breath that left-wingers would actually be tolerant and open-minded. The liberal stations will just keep failing and liberals will keep screaming for the obsolete Fairness Doctrine.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
I’ve read Pappe’s comprehensive history of Palestine, but not that one. His history is polemical insofar as it concentrates on the entire post-Napoleonic period from an anti-colonial standpoint, but is basically the hsitory of the vairety of communities living in historic Palestine until the present day.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
Gentlemen: I agree that neither the Israelis nor their lobbies should be untouchable. I was simply noting that it seemed to me that anytime I tuned into KPFK the Israelis were getting the once over. One must be aware of what Bertrand Russell termed “the fallacy of the superior virtue of the oppressed.” I think that what I was getting at was that this is a concept that KPFK doesn’t get.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
If you think the Israelis are getting the once over, Xenophon, you would be shocked to learn what they are doing to George W. Bush.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
“I’d like to inform Woody…”
And I’d like to help pigs learn to fly.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Absolutely. There isn’t anything that you can tell me that I don’t already know.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:36 pm
- he did “The year of the Polaris†as puffy a piece on the SLBM as the Pentagon could want -
And well-timed to JFK’s running on the “missile gap”. That era’s news guys’ enthusiasm for rockets and missiles was so palpable, one wonders if they looked at them and saw…”cigars”.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Xenophon…..
What do the Israelis do right? What positive can be said? The reason Israel gets the once over is that with US backing they are a serial human rights absuer and ethnic cleanser. I agree with Russel’s dictum, which doesn ot at all have the corrolloray that one must give due respect the opressor. I am not impressed with much Palestinian leadership o nany “side”….my interest is that Israelis stop opressing them regardless of their virute or lack thereof.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I couldn’t take any more of KPFA’s swill after they ran a disgusting puff piece on the “Hamas Men’s Choir” after Hamas’s victory in Gaza. So while Hamas was tossing people off of rooftops, assassinating and burning alive entire familes in Gaza, and calling for the extermination of the Jews, KPFA mindlessly and admiringly played the droning fascist chants (the same kind featured on all those al Qaida videos…) from this hate spewing group of Jihadi “singers”
KPFA spoke in glowing terms about this slimy group as if they were covering the latest Vienna Boys Choir tryouts — At that exact point KPFA reached rock bottom for me — and I will never listen to KPFA again. EVER.
August 7th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
The only thing I take issue of in Marc’s argument. It is an insult to people coping with those maladies to compare them to the likes of Dave Adelson. Adelson does not have voices in his head. This is his time in the sun - it is the typical power story. Yes he is a disturbing species. His behavior is intentional, not the result of an illness.
What NOBODY has mentioned is the lack of analysis on Democracy Now. Amy extensively (and shamelessly) used the “corporate takeover” has a chance to secure her own show and no doubt increase in stature and revenue. She would gladly give coverage to some right wing media baron who was accused of the kind of things Georgia is accused of.
August 7th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
With the exception of occasionally tuning into Saturday morning gospel and blues shows that have been on KPFA for as long as I can remember - and making sure I switch channels before any of their “current affairs” programming catches me unawares - I’ve not kept up with this corner of the Left world at all. The “Hamas Men’s Choir” anecdote kind of says it all. In the annals of Desert Island Left sycophancy, that’s one of the funniest/saddest (take your pick) things I’ve ever heard.
August 7th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Woody, a little of it goes a LONG way, but Stephine Miller’s show is pretty funny. Zoo radio at it’s dumbest, still a thousand tiimes smarter than you.
August 7th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
Two words: Michael Slate. The man can’t even utter a complete sentence, much less a cogent argument for a people’s “revolution.” This stammering, disoriented ’60s relic needs to be returned to the archeologists who unearthed his mummified husk somewhere on the Berkley campus. Still, his show has great entertainment value. He should be on today around 5 p.m.
August 7th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
All of the drama of the Middle East, but as out of touch from reality as you can get.
Many of those people quoted in the Times piece don’t have a shred of credibility, especially Adelson, with whom identity politics clearly trumps all else. The only person who makes sense is Ian Masters… though it’s such a toxic place that I can’t understand why anyone would stay there after so much turmoil and nonsense. What a weird collections of names on that petition!
August 7th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Marc, glad you came out with this eloquent and much-needed tirade.
To me the heart of the matter is this ‘graph:
“At at time when media is more important than ever, when the left whines about the dominance of conservative talk radio, the near half-century old Pacifica network is, frankly, irrelevant. KPFK has a flamethrower signal strength of 110,000 watts buts its audience is dwarfed by the area’s other public radio stations. Its direct mail solicitation has collapsed under its inept management. Its public management meetings are shouting matches for enraged factional leaders. Race baiting is the most common tactic for argument. Those who believe that Al Qaeda and not the CIA struck on 9/11 are branded as government flunkies. Incompetence is rewarded in the name of diversity and political correctness. Professionalism is derided as elitism.”
Jon, Barbara Osborn, and Ian are all smart, decent people, and pros. But the rest…
Every so often I tune in to the station thinking, heck, how bad could it be? Answer: really, really bad.
August 7th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
I’m an unapologetic, brazen, unreconstructed, lifelong liberal and my favorite radio show is Harry Shearer’s “Le Show.”
He takes shots at everyone, from Clinton to Gore, Al Franken, Garrison Keillor and Dan Rather–along with the usual suspects like Cheney and Bush. Nine times out of 10, his slings and arrows hit the bullseye.
This is what liberals want. Not the kind of party line harangues you hear on conservative talkradio. There will never, ever be a liberal counterpart to Rush Limbaugh’s success. It just won’t happen.
Anyone listening in vain to KPFK longing for that–a leftwing parallel to Rush et al–is doomed to remain indignantly dissastified.
As for KPFK’s demise, it’s beyond obvious that the riddance is good.
August 7th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
WBAI doesn’t seem to have any traction here in NYC either. WNYC dominates sensible talk in NYC and among the various public radio entries here in the area, the leaders are, in addition to WNYC, WBGO, WFMU and WKCR.
KPFK is no more representative of liberal, left-leaning radio than Charlie and Nellie Babbs’ KTTL-FM in Dodge City, KS was of right-wing radio in the early 1980’s .
August 7th, 2007 at 11:32 pm
I’ve never heard KPFK, living up in the Bay Area, but I had my fill of KPFA for a long time. I switched them off permanently when I got to hear a big, long puff piece on Gerry Adams and the IRA.
August 7th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
And the problem with that is?
August 7th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Morton is very close with the Dahlan clan, you see.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:32 am
bunkerbuster>…The left has it’s resentments and emotional needs as well, but they are far better met by more factual news and analysis.
Like this!
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/07/31/2874/print/
Will Bush Cancel The 2008 Election?
by Harvey Wasserman & Bob Fitrakis
It is time to think about the “unthinkable.â€
The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Edward Murrow was noted on this thread. What the George Clooney movie avoided.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/111705F.html
Edward R. Murrow wasn’t a communist. He took umbrage on behalf of both himself and the Duggans — particularly Laurence, whose death six years earlier was a raw wound for the East Coast establishment of which Murrow was a part. They had lost one of their own when Duggan jumped or fell from the 16th floor of his Manhattan office in 1948 in the midst of the legal and political maelstrom of the Alger Hiss spy case.
Larry Duggan, former chief of the State Department’s Latin American division, a charming, smart, and warm-hearted Ivy Leaguer who strived to bring about world peace, had a lot in common with Hiss. Murrow, justifiably angry that America’s loudest counter-subversive was trying to intimidate him and sully his friend’s memory, did not know that that friend was, like Hiss, a dedicated communist who passed sensitive information to Stalin’s agents in the United States. The FBI interviewed Duggan in connection with the Hiss prosecution in December 1948. His shocking death days later at the age of 43 preserved his secret, for the media and his friends and family made him into a martyr — a liberal destroyed by right-wingers who enjoyed impugning respectable citizens without due process. For decades afterward, those interested in the history of this period generally viewed the Duggan affair in the same way as the literary lion Archibald MacLeish, who wrote a poem upon Duggan’s death that began:
“God help that country where informers thrive! Where slander flourishes and lies contrive.”
It was not Senator McCarthy who had pursued Duggan as an underground communist but those active in the Hiss case: Representative Richard Nixon of California, the ex-communist Whittaker Chambers, and the ex-communist Isaac Don Levine. These were the people accused of symbolic manslaughter by university presidents, diplomats, newspaper columnists, and other worthies when Duggan died. The tragedy received front page coverage in the New York Times. Prominent people attended Duggan’s memorial service. In Washington, a group of his friends put out a statement deploring the congressional panel on which Nixon sat, the House Un-American Activities Committee. HUAC’s investigations, they charged, dragged the names of good Americans through the mud. Some Duggan supporters even suspected foul play.
Foul play there had actually been, but not what MacLeish, Nicholas Murray Butler, Sumner Welles, Harry Emerson Fosdick, and the other grieving friends of Duggan might have thought. According to the account of Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev, The Haunted Wood (1999), when in 1937 a man named Ignatz Reiss broke from Stalin’s secret service, a pair of KGB assassins hunted down the defector in Switzerland and killed him to stop him from blowing the cover of Laurence Duggan and another American official who secretly assisted the KGB out of devotion to world communism and the Soviet Union, Noel Field.
In 1948, the furor over Duggan knocked the counter-subversives back on their heels. Nixon dove for political cover. Pressed for comment by reporters, his fellow anticommunists awkwardly tried to say nice things about the deceased, a sensitive family man and pillar of the community, even as they stuck by their conclusion that he was in league with Moscow’s agents. Chambers, cornered by a New York Times reporter in the corridor of the federal court house where the Hiss grand jury was meeting, said that he’d testified to Duggan’s being one of the covert communists he’d heard about, but he was not personally acquainted with the man nor had he used him as a source in the pre-war spy ring that he, Chambers, managed for Soviet military intelligence.
Chambers sounded defensive, but his testimony was borne out later, when archival documents and decrypted cable traffic between Moscow, New York, and Washington came to light after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet cables and documents showed that Duggan’s deliveries to the KGB (known in those years by other acronyms) included a confidential cable from the U.S. ambassador in Moscow back to the State Department, U.S. diplomatic dispatches from Europe offering U.S. perspectives on the civil war going on in Spain, and a State Department personnel list. Two of his code names were “Frank” and “Prince.” His handler was Norman Borodin, whose boss was KGB station chief Izhak Akhmerov.
Murrow and the rest had been unable or unwilling, in the heat of the communist controversy, to distinguish between McCarthy’s theatrics and the more considered charges leveled by people who actually knew a lot about communism. Murrow, according to his biographer, wanted to follow up his television broadcast on McCarthy with one on the untimely demise of Laurence Duggan. This, he believed, would drive home the moral point about the evils of anticommunism. He never got to make that show.
What if he had? Or better yet, what if he knew then what we know today? Would it have affected his airy indifference — well conveyed by actor David Straithairn as the movie’s Edward R. Murrow — to whether a targeted individual was a communist or not?
“Good Night and Good Luck” is a missed chance in this regard. For Laurence Duggan was one of several “romantic radicals” in the federal government in the 1930s and 1940s, to borrow a phrase from The Haunted Wood’s chapter on Duggan.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:05 am
Thanks to Richard Locicero for inquiring as to my whereabouts. After being purged in 1982, I went to graduate school and got a history doctorate from UCLA. My book Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival is now out in a second edition (paperback) and may interest Pacifica listeners as it details mind-management emanating from so-called “progressives”and the Communist left. Sad to say, Pacifica was never the oasis of truth and freedom that I had thought it was, but perfectly mirrored the left-wing of the Roosevelt administration and the labor-friendly stance of the Ford Foundation and similar patrician conservative reformers after the second world war.
I wrote an analytic memoir on the history of Pacifica (by email attachment) that I will send to anyone here who cares. Write to me at clarespark@verizon.net.
August 8th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Postscript to my last message. I much prefer being on the radio talking to autodidacts than addressing any academic audience. I truly miss KPFK and my friends there and in the listenership. I only wish I knew then what I have learned since.
I have appeared on numerous programs via telephone on the Houston Pacifica station, KPFT. Look for the archived LivingArt program hosted by Michael Woodson.
I would love to be back on the air here in Los Angeles, but I don’t think I would fit in, nor would they have me. Academe and the culture in general is in an uproar, and numerous subjects we took for granted are being rethought in the light of new research and declassified archives, here, in China, and in the former Soviet Union. You will not hear much about these developments in Los Angeles nor in the left-wing press.
I have also been researching the history of the founding of Israel, and Pacifica has been horrible on the subject. No excuse for it except the mindless following of a political line.
August 8th, 2007 at 10:58 am
[...] article and Pacifica’s response: Marc Cooper, a former Pacifica staffer and current critic, opines about the recent spats. Cooper’s not unknown for his views on Pacifica (he’s referred to Executive Director [...]
August 8th, 2007 at 1:43 pm
I don’t know why its worth trusting right wing websites on murrow. But he was a Wob.
August 8th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Another postscript. Had Pacifica made its mission to seek the truth amid the key controversies of the postwar period, nothing could have stopped it. But no, it became a prize in the struggles of partisans. I think that, at bottom, namely the allergy to following objective evidence wherever it leads, and no matter who it offends, accounts for its descent into irrelevance and mismanagement.
I wrote an article on the vogue for multiculturalism and subjectivism for History News Network, and here is the link: http://www.hnn.us/articles/4533.html. I like this essay, and you will see that I did benefit from graduate work in intellectual history.
My thanks to those who have requested my unpublished memoir, and I urge others to read and circulate it.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Michael Pugliese: You make my point: the journalists and Web site you refer to are doomed to obscurity because there’s no mass liberal audience for that kind of conspiracy mongering.
Meanwhile, the right has people like Lou Dobbs and Rush Limbaugh and Bill OReilly who spin emotional wingnut rhetoric into 10s of millions of viewers/listeners.
Sure, there is a fringe faction of left wingnuts who behave much like their rightwing counterparts and have the same insatiable appetite for edification.
But that faction this is much smaller on the left and has never and will never be big enough to support the kind of talkradio and noise machine we see on the right in America.
How many failed liberal media projects will there have to be before we can accept that?
Even as liberal ideas and liberal candidates win, liberal media that’s conceived as a counterpart to rightwing noise fails. That’s the point.
August 8th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Michael Pugliese sometime, when I have the time and energy I’ll be glad to enter what James Jesus Angelton called “The Wilderness of Mirrors” and discuss Hiss, VENONA, Popov, and all the other great “Spy vs. Spy” capers that the boys at Langley still like to talk about. Maybe even NSA’s dirty laundry like Martin and Mitchell and SGT “Jack”.
But until then I’d be careful about Weinstein and the idea that he has the last word on that case. More has come out and it gets murkier and murkier.
Till then, we’ll just have to stay in the cold.
August 8th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
We need look no further than Woody to identify the rightwing mentality that thrives on rhetoric-driven talkradio and commentary.
Woody says, in a stupendous moment of self-reflection/definition: “There is nothing you can tell me that I don’t already know.”
Indeed, for Woody and a wide slice of American “conservatives” not knowing what you don’t know is an ideological cornerstone. A lot of rightwingers tell themselves this is “common sense”–something they know instinctively, exclusive of factual substance. When factual news reports challenge their “common sense,” as they define it, they feel under attack by “the mainstream media.”
They find little outlet for responding to these constant, growing affronts to their self-reinforced ignorance, because when they try to argue their point of view with people they come across at work, school, etc, they’re made to feel stupid.
Thus the resentment of academic achievement, the indignant references to the mainstream media as “elite,”–as if there is something inherently wrong with achieving elite status in your chosen profession–and the recurring theme that “liberals think they’re so smart.”
Rightwing commentary-driven news media are the only salve for what ails the Woodies of the world. Limbaugh et al are heroes because they alone make the contemporary American right wingnut feel smart.
Note that much of the commercial success of rightwing talkradio turns on commercials narraged by the host. Limbaugh, Medved and so on personally vouch for products.
If you’re in the business of selling washing machines, you have to know that Rush’s “dittoheads” are easy marks for just about whatever he’s willing to personally sell.
Again, the left has it’s own faction of resentment-driven “know-nothings” who look to the media to salve their sense of aggreivement. But it’s a lot smaller faction and overlaps far, far less with “mainstream” liberalism than is the case with wingnuts and mainstream American conservatism.
August 10th, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Cooper writes:
“A network whose market value nears a half-billion dollars has been left to slowly rot away because the Left has not shown the courage to stand up to the zealots who have rendered these radio stations pretty much useless and marginal.”
I think this pretty much hits it on the head, but also assumes a level of coherence on the part of “The Left” that doesn’t really exist. I think a lot of Pacifica’s slide–the conspiracy-mongering, the dwindling role of debate in its programming, etc.–reflects a larger pathology of the American Left. There is little ideological coherence in today’s left, and too many of the people who identify themselves as part of the left have abandoned critical thinking and fact-based politics.
In a time like this, sadly, I think the most one can hope for from an institution like Pacifica is not that it will reform itself into a coherent national network, but that it might respect the professionalism and editorial autonomy of its programmers enough to maintain space for moments of brilliance (like Ian Masters) alongside the mediocre and downright kooky. Sadly, all the members of new, “democratic” pacifica boards seem interested in doing is meddling in programming, rather than hiring managers with the professional competence to build up the next generation of high-quality programs.
August 17th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
Marc makes salient points about some of the disturbing treads at the K, especially the tilt toward 9/11 conspiracy and new age hocus pocus.
But the other criticism comes off like cheap pot shots. Like mean spirited comments about people’s IQ. I think it undercuts some of his legitimate criticisms. I understand that he is bitter about being pushed out but that was nearly six years ago. I guess those wounds still sting.
From what I understand, the 9/11 material and the new age programming may offend or repel more politically inclined listeners, but it very popular during fund drive. This anyway is the rationale I have heard.
There are two overlapping problems/issues: 1. Management of the station 2. Programming
1. Although the station staff and volunteers have grown to either despise or ridicule the management, other powerful interests point to “positive”changes in programming made by said management. They argument goes, “How can you criticize these folks, when the station sounds so great.”
Now this argument has lost some of its weight as listenership declines and questionable programming emerges.
Morale is low but there is true passion for meaningful radio and to make a difference in our troubled world. The K just reflects the outside world with the leadership crisis and confusion amongst progressives and radicals.
2. Programming. I personally think its fine if the K is a little rough around the edges. That’s what makes is unique. You are hearing raw, hard to find info and voice often of the community people like me who were once listeners or supporters
This is not to say that there should be broadcast standards but that this should not be what is most important.
I believe, contrary to Marc, that the answer is not to simply have more Ian Masters and Suzi Weismanns. (although these programs are often insightful). The station needs an infusion of young, people of color who active in their communities to shake the place.
The Chicano, Asian American, and African American communities have an abudance of young artists and activists that would infuse new blood to the K, if there were only an systematic way to recruit and train these people.
One last bit, I think Marc really unfairly hissed at Roy of Hollywood. Old Roy has been churning out some brilliant radio for 30+ years.
Now Dave Emory and Gary Null may not be for everyone, but for come on, give Roy a little latitude is broadcasting at midnight to 6AM for christsake. Its the hour for some fringe stuff.
This is not to say that Roy only plays loony stuff. His Alan Watts and spirituality program has touched many lives, including my own. And he still plays Chomsky and investigative news often way before other programmers.
I fondly remember finding KPFK when I was 16 late at night listening to a Roy of Hollywood show about the nefarious role of the CIA in central America. It was mind blowing stuff and I was hooked.
August 18th, 2007 at 1:41 am
KPFK Programmer wrote:
“I believe, contrary to Marc, that the answer is not to simply have more Ian Masters and Suzi Weismanns. (although these programs are often insightful). The station needs an infusion of young, people of color who active in their communities to shake the place.”
While this might be true, it is no true fix. Clare Spark was far closer to prescribing the necessary remedy when she wrote:
“Had Pacifica made its mission to seek the truth amid the key controversies of the postwar period, nothing could have stopped it. But no, it became a prize in the struggles of partisans. I think that, at bottom, namely the allergy to following objective evidence wherever it leads, and no matter who it offends, accounts for its descent into irrelevance and mismanagement.”
All that Pacifica had every really needed to achieve both relevance and success is known to all who work there, yet somehow forgotten. Here’s a reminder.
The purposes of the Foundation, as stated in Article II of the Articles of Incorporation, are as follows:
To establish a Foundation organized and operated exclusively for educational purposes no part of the net earnings of which inures to the benefit of any member of the Foundation.
To establish and operate for educational purposes, in such manner that the facilities involved shall be as nearly self-sustaining as possible, one or more radio broadcasting stations licensed by the Federal Communications Commission (”Commission”) and subject in their operation to the regulatory actions of the Commission under the Federal Communications Act of 1934, as amended.
In radio broadcasting operations to encourage and provide outlets for the creative skills and energies of the community; to conduct classes and workshops in the writing and producing of drama; to establish awards and scholarships for creative writing; to offer performance facilities to amateur instrumentalists, choral groups, orchestral groups and music students; and to promote and aid other creative activities which will serve the cultural welfare of the community.
In radio broadcasting operations to engage in any activity that shall contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations, races, creeds and colors; to gather and disseminate information on the causes of conflict between any and all of such groups; and through any and all means compatible with the purposes of this Foundation to promote the study of political and economic problems and of the causes of religious, philosophical and racial antagonisms.
In radio broadcasting operations to promote the full distribution of public information; to obtain access to sources of news not commonly brought together in the same medium; and to employ such varied sources in the public presentation of accurate, objective, comprehensive news on all matters vitally affecting the community.
September 11th, 2007 at 1:19 am
Oh my god. Hearing you all goo over Ian Masters and his sidekick comrade Suzi is disturbing as all hell.
If you believe it is fine journalism to report week after week that the Bush administration is a nothing more than a bunch of bumbling idiots (just like those darn democrats) then you must be smoking crack.
You think that these people don’t know what they’re doing? they have taken away all of your rights (they can peak at your email, medical records, reading habits, tap your phones and rendition your ass to some god forsaken country) but according to Ian and Suzi it’s nothing to get upset about, they’re just nothing more than a few drooling fools.
come on. can’t you see that a guy who has cia spook after cia spook on his show might not be the real deal? since when do you believe the cia?! oh i get it, they’re all better now right?. nowadays the’yre fighting for our safety. gimme a break.
you can pick on the “tin foil” programmers at the k all you want. but i know that if i want bologna i can tune into CNN or FOX or ABC or IAN for that matter.
I guess you also believe that JFK was shot by one damn bullet and that the murders of MLK, RFK and Malcolm were just crazy coincidences. Nothing here to see folks, just go back to sleep.
Wait let me guess, you also believe that cointelpro was a good thing right? maybe you also believe that the school of americas is just a misunderstood boys club.
wake up people - the democrats and the republicans have been hijacked for years now and they have had a different agenda than what we the people want. they are not bumbling idiots - they know exactly what they are doing.
February 7th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
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