Note to A Comrade: Best of Luck

Kazembe Balagun recently posted his own program for Pacifica station WBAI. Balagun is a respected activist who has made so many great efforts over time, not the least of which is his Black Man With A Library blog. As a program director at Pacifica station, I get a lot of ideas from people on ‘saving’ Pacifica. Few people have as high a regard in my book as Kazembe, and I encourage you to check out what he wrote.

Regular readers will notice I cut and paste a lot to this blog. I won’t in this case. I want you to read Black Man With A Library, and his recent post. In it, he tries to sort through the many troubles at radio station WBAI and gives an admirable try at proposing ideas to help.

I maintain a KPFT blog as part of my work, but maintain a personal blog where Pacifica often comes up. In the spirit of requesting feedback, I wanted to offer some comments and critiques to what was presented. Clearly, WBAI has so many complex ongoing issues that I cannot reasonably address the whole call, but I have a few thoughts.

Point One concludes, “we reject any attempts at selling off any stations or giving up or leasing the air waves.” While I do not think the author or the piece is attempting to lend credibility to one of Pacifica’s great conspiracy theories, putting it out there (again) does so. The right has birthers, the left has truthers, Pacifica has… ‘salers’? I don’t even have a name for it yet, but the claim a station sale is looming has been around for years. I don’t listen to every national board meeting and maybe I am wrong, but no one to my knowledge has ever called such a sell-off notion legitimate, proposed-for-voting-by-the-national-board and actually coming. Each time I have asked, people mention the pre-2000ish board reportedly discussing it seriously and various remarks people make in reports, etc. as proof. I have never seen a posting or even a draft of one for possible purchasers to review assets. Perhaps verifiable efforts to sell a station are out there, but I haven’t seen materials. Sometimes I wonder if this idea is trotted out to engender distrust between factions, or is some painful self-awareness of WBAI’s financial struggle. I am unsure, but floating out the station sale theory hurts the program early on.

While demanding “continued support and nurturing of people of color, LGBT and other underrepresented communities” (Point Two) is positive, fostering youth involvement and leadership development is crucial for Pacifica. I told a previous local board in a meeting that we need to adjust our expectations and power dynamics for young people. The bulk of whites and people of color in stations are over 30; not that anything is wrong with being over 30, but the ways youth use media and find radio’s relevance are different than older folks. That means young people may create media that doesn’t sound like the ‘old’ Pacifica. That also means Pacifica’s internal factions must find a way of seeing not just their previous lines in the sand (race and (under)representation primarily) but the fact all factions are aging quickly and do something to address youth empowerment with youth leading same. As an aside, while nurturing and support is good, I believe leadership development to be a vital need right now, though that’s a much longer post.

Point Three advocates adding another layer (or two or three) to Pacifica’s muddled and expensive elections process, and does not really address the complexity of the elections and their cost to listeners. Also, unexplained is how the proposed tracking of campaign spending, candidate funding, etc. is financially supported — is tracking and such for this material another role of local election supervisors, national election staff or local stations, and so on. On an unrelated note, calling for funding-source disclosure comes at a strange time, given the recent Nation piece, blasting Pacifica governance for allegedly seeking funding disclosures from Democracy Now! I don’t think Point Three seems like a terrible idea, though I confess not really understanding what such disclosure hopes to prevent, if XYZ candidate who receives funding from, say, Kraft Foods, Michael Savage or other entities are forbidden to run, or if such information is permissible to use in negative campaigns against said candidate. Former Executive Director Greg Guma wrote the elections process as a whole needs an overhaul. In 2007 comments to the national board, Guma stated:

For democracy to function compromise is essential. A minority that loses will only play along if it feels that the winning side is playing fair. This becomes difficult when groups adopt a stance of moral absolutism, or form factions. And we see both here. When factional disagreement becomes public and intense, the organization suffers from disunity, charges and counter-charges about the conduct of the elections, fraudulent or unethical conduct, and repeated attacks on so-called enemies. This is beginning to seriously undermine the legitimacy of the organization’s democratic process.

Guma’s thoughts are helpful in understanding the current nature of Pacifica. I could go on, but a few remarks:

How does one justify the expense/time of such public training programs (Point Five) when partnering with an area school, adult-education program, et al. is more cost effective and could welcome others?

Will “local programming be placed on a five year rotating basis” (Point Six) be canceled after that period to make time for new programming?

Does returning to a portfolio-newspaper format, which indubitably appeals to older audiences, make much sense in a new-media world, especially given previous points in this program around information technology? There’s something endearingly old ‘new left’ about newsprint. It has a special place in my heart, for sure. But is it really the outreach tool it used to be, and is it worth the expense? I’d wager not. As pointed out in the post, WBAI is in the middle of the dial. The audience is already there. Improved programming is a better outreach tool than newsprint, in my opinion.

Good luck, and thanks for the post.

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• Pacifica’s WBAI Bounces Back
• Basics to Producing a Radio Special
• Guma’s New Pacifica Series
• Journalism on the Cheap
• What is the WBAI-Stewart Conflict?