Management turnover has been unrelenting, with 19 executive directors or interim executive directors having served since 2003. The extent to which the board is “involved” in management decision-making is “more than anything we have experienced,” the National Educational Telecommunications Assn., which provides administrative services to public media licensees and has been assisting Pacifica, told directors late last year. The directors also have been accused of micromanaging the local stations, creating confusion among the staff. With 22 representatives elected by “members” of the local stations - defined as anyone who contributes $25 or more in a year - the Pacifica National Board is regarded by experts in nonprofit governance as too large to provide effective leadership, especially since members seem to spend as much time on internal squabbling as on the immediate problems facing the network. The threat partially reflects dysfunction on Pacifica’s board of directors. Talk Show a Far Cry From ‘Happiest Place On Earth’įew corporations in the world strive to project as sunny a public image as Walt Disney Co. But more recently the problems have coalesced into an all-encompassing emergency amounting to what then-interim Executive Director John Vernile called in September “an existential threat.” In recent years Pacifica has lurched from financial crisis to crisis. WBAI was the original broadcaster of comedian George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” routine, drawing a reprimand from the Federal Communications Commission in 1973 that was later narrowly upheld by the Supreme Court. The network supported protests of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, and in 1970, its KPFT was forced off the air when the Ku Klux Klan blew up its transmitter tower. In 1957, KPFA won a George Foster Peabody Award for programming critical of Joseph McCarthy. KPFT in Houston and WBAI in New York - has been in the forefront of progressive broadcasting for most of a history that encompasses landmark battles over free speech and politics. The Pacifica Foundation, which comprises five FM radio stations - including WPFW in Washington, D.C. The KPFK transmitter’s rated power of 110,000 watts is strong enough to reach from Santa Barbara to San Diego.īy contrast, public radio powerhouses KPCC and KCRW, with signals about one-tenth KPFK’s power, have as much as 10 times the audience. west of the Mississippi, KPFK’s listenership is strikingly small - a cumulative audience of about 130,000 in an average week or as few as 1,000 listeners during an average quarter-hour, or 0.3% of the Los Angeles radio audience or less at any given time, according to Fields and the Nielsen survey. Given that it owns the most powerful radio signal in the U.S. Other public broadcasting, such as National Public Radio, has been accused of moving toward the political middle, while right-wing talk radio and Fox News seem to be on the ascendance in the media universe - leaving Pacifica as one of the last progressive voices on the air. The decline of Pacifica in general and KPFK in particular represents a squandered opportunity on the radio dial. Among the hallmarks of truly independent thinkers is that they’re impossible to manage.
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