This week in HaitiHaïti Progrès
January 10 - 16 , 2001
Christmas Coup Rocks Pacifica's WBAI:
Purge Targets Community Base, Radical Voices
In the early morning hours of Saturday, December 23, programming at radio station WBAI-FM in New York City suddenly ground to a halt. Utrice Leid, a well-known producer and host of the afternoon program "Talk-Back," went on the air to announce that she was the new general manager of the station, replacing long-time administrator Valerie Van Isler. "There are no SWAT teams here," announced Leid to the stunned listenership at 1:40 a.m. "This is not a coup."
But it sure looked like one. Leid and managers from WBAI's Washington-based parent Pacifica Foundation changed all the locks in the station, installed security guards, restricted access to a list of "approved" persons, then fired and banned key producers and staffers from the station. Also fired were Program Director Bernard White, who hosted the popular morning show "Wake-Up Call" and the show's producer and WBAI shop steward Sharan Harper. They were awakened early Saturday morning by a courier informing them that they had been sacked and that if they came to the station, they would be arrested.
WBAI staffers and listeners immediately protested the move, calling it a "Midnight Massacre" and a "Christmas Coup." "We deplore the [Pacifica] Foundation's coming in secret in the middle of the night at the start of a holiday weekend to change the station's locks, and the illegitimate installation and imposition of new station management," protested WBAI staff members, including "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman and "Afrikaleidoscope" producer Elombe Brath. "We deplore the firings, the bannings, the presence of security guards in the station, and the denial of access to personal property belonging to staff."
Listener-sponsored WBAI in New York City has long been an independent and radical voice for community and activist groups in the New York area and internationally. Through its programming -- particularly through "Democracy Now!" -- it has helped fuel resistance to the World Trade Organization, the death penalty, police brutality, violence in East Timor, injustice against immigrants, and media disinformation about Haiti, to name just a few issues.
The station, through producers like Goodman, White and Van Isler, has also provided an important outlet for the Haitian community in New York. Van Isler, a former producer at WBAI who received the New York Association of Black Journalist's award for her reporting on Haiti, continued covering the country even after she took over as general manager in 1990. Of Haitian heritage on her paternal side, Van Isler traveled to Haiti as a reporter and delegate to national congresses of the National Popular Assembly (APN) in 1989 and 1995. Goodman also visited and reported from Haiti following the U.S. military occupation in late 1994, revealing the complicity of U.S. military commanders with agents of the right-wing paramilitary organization FRAPH. This is why one finds many Haitian cab drivers in New York with their radio set to WBAI.
The station's radical programming and grass-roots character has increasingly vexed the rightward-drifting Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI and four other radio stations around the country. The Pacifica National Board is moving to centralize control and soften the left-wing content of WBAI and other stations. Some board members have advocated taking corporate funding for programming.
Pacifica Radio was formed in the 1940s by radical writers and conscientious objectors to World War II who started the network as a forum for marginalized voices and a vehicle to promote peace and social justice. They started broadcasting out of KPFA in Berkeley, California, in 1949 and pioneered the concept of supporting the station through listener contributions, shunning commercial advertisements. The formula worked and, in addition to KPFA and WBAI, Pacifica Radio now owns KPFK in Los Angeles, KPFT in Houston, and WPFW in Washington.
In the 1980s, Pacifica managed to secure funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a Federal agency funded by the U.S. Congress, despite the opposition of some right-wing Republican lawmakers. But the additional support turned out to be a double-edged sword. Since the mid-1990s, the CPB has prodded Pacifica to end its radical programming and to wrest control of its stations from local listener boards. Congress had sharply objected to Pacifica's airing voices like that of famed journalist, former Black Panther, and death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal.
"In 1998, Pat Scott, who was the Pacifica Board's executive director, solicited an opinion from the CPB, which then began to directly interfere in our governance structure, which they had never done before," explained Mimi Rosenberg, the co-host of a labor-oriented program entitled "Building Bridges." "The result was that the national board completely severed its relationship with the local advisory boards [of Pacifica's member stations] for fear that CPB funding would be lost."
Previously, each local Pacifica station elected two of the national board members. Gradually, some national board members began to seat their friends and allies as "at large" board members, even if those people were from areas not covered by Pacifica's radio signal. "With the 'at large' seats they could put on the board whoever the hell they wanted," Rosenberg explained. "Then finally, you had a by-law change which resulted in a board which was 100% self-appointing."
To make matters worse, the national board's executive committee began to illegally make decisions without ratification by the full board, a move which is now being challenged in court.
In March 1999, the crisis between the national executive and local stations exploded. Pacifica fired the general manager of KPFA and a number of other producers. Listeners and the community objected, and Pacifica closed down the station for 23 days. Only after a protest of more than 10,000 people in the summer of 1999 did Pacifica reopen the station.
"Pacifica, founded by 'discontented leftists,' now openly expresses discontent with leftists," noted the late WBAI Program Director Samori Marksman, referring to the recent red-baiting and political witch-hunts launched against radical voices in Pacifica. Verna Avery-Brown, known as the "Voice of Pacifica" after 11 years as national news anchor, walked out of the Pacifica Network News (PNN) in late 1999 because of a dramatic shift toward mainstream orthodoxy and blatant censorship. "I left because I no longer felt the renegade spirit of Lew Hill was in control of Pacifica," said Avery-Brown, referring to Pacifica's founder. "I left when I realized the majority of the board members were too timid, too uninformed, or too conservative to give a damn to step in and make the necessary changes. I left because the Pacifica I had fallen in love with no longer existed."
Dan Coughlin, a former correspondent of Inter Press Service in Haiti who broke such stories as the U.S. government's theft of Haiti's 160,000 pages of coup-related documents, became Pacifica's News Director in 1998 but was removed from the job in late 1999 after he tried to halt the News Department's rightward drift. The pretext for his firing: a 30-second news spot about the KPFA conflict, which violated an unspoken Pacifica gag-order about mentioning the Berkeley war.
This week, Leid moved to fire Robert Knight, the award-winning morning news director, producer of "Earth Watch," and (like Van Isler and White) a twenty-year veteran of the station. But WBAI's news director Jose Santiago refused to carry out the firing, forcing Leid and Pacifica's bosses to back down... for the time being.
The model Pacifica station for most national board members is KPFT in Houston, which now operates as a music station with a "Sound of Texas" playlist. Previously, the station was politically oriented; it was bombed twice by the Klu Klux Klan in the 1970s. Now, the BBC occupies its top morning news slot.
To reach the KPFT goal of soft, non-controversial programming, the Pacifica Executive Leadership has also advocated selling WBAI, which could fetch, according to the New York Times, between $150 to $200 million for its frequency -- 99.5 -- in the middle of the FM dial. In a 1999 e-mail that went astray, Pacifica Board member Micheal Palmer, a corporate executive with the real estate firm CB Richard Ellis, discussed the sale of KPFA versus the sale of WBAI: "My feeling is that a more beneficial disposition would be of the New York signal as there is a smaller subscriber base without the long and emotional history as the Bay Area, far more associated value, a similarly dysfunctional staff though far less effective and an overall better opportunity to redefine Pacifica going forward. It is simply the more strategic asset."
Palmer added, "The Executive Committee, at a minimum, should have access to experts (whether from Wall Street, NPR/CPB, Microsoft or otherwise) to get a strong reality check (me included) about radio and Pacifica's position in it so that informed decisions can be made."
The Christmas Coup at WBAI comes in the wake of mounting attacks by Pacifica on Goodman's daily national program "Democracy Now!" The Pacifica network, which has ties to the Democratic Party, cracked down on Goodman after she interviewed Green Party candidate Ralph Nader on the floor of the Republican National Convention last summer. Pacifica claimed that Goodman violated journalistic ethics by conducting the celebrated interview at the Convention and yanked her press pass, preventing her from providing the same sharp coverage of the Democratic Convention. Management then imposed a new set of "work rules" on her, including the demand that she clear all speaking engagements with Pacifica bosses and provide them each week with "a list of possible shows the following week and a short status report on each."
"The motivation is blatantly political," said Goodman in a October 2000 memo to the Board, noting that Pacifica executives had criticized her for airing the story of the 1997 New York police brutalization of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. One Pacifica boss said that he didn't want to hear details of police brutality "before breakfast." Goodman has also been slammed for her extensive coverage of Mumia Abu-Jamal, East Timor and Peru.
While presenting itself as a left-wing network, the Pacifica Board's composition has slowly moved to the right in recent years. This celebrated non-profit, community-based, listener-sponsored radio foundation now has some serious capitalists on its national board: Pacifica treasurer Michael Palmer has boasted of developing "maquiladoras" in Northern Mexico; Pacifica vice-chair Ken Ford works for the National Association of Home Builders, a lobbying group for corporate builders; Businessman Bert Lee has extensive experience buying and selling broadcast licenses. Appointed to the national board last February was John Murdock, a corporate attorney whose practice, Epstein Becker & Green, is known as one of the most anti-union law firms in the country.
"In 1949, Lew Hill went to the airwaves at the height of the Cold War and said that the FBI was a scurrilous and contemptible organization, that the whole country knows it, that he would resist it, and that everyone else should join him in resisting it," Rosenberg recalled. "One would be hard-pressed to believe that Pacifica's current national board would ever make such a statement."
This conservative make-over of the National Board fundamentally results from the bypassing of the earlier structure controlled by local advisory boards, which were in turn elected by listeners in the community. "One of the most crushing series of blows to the U.S. left, and to democracy in this country, has been the gradual transformation of the five station Pacifica Radio network from locally-based and left-oriented stations into centrally controlled, mainstream institutions," said media critic and author Ed Herman in a recent interview.
Ironically, this year, WBAI is in better financial health than ever, running with a $71,000 surplus after its Fall on-air fund drive raised $921,000, the most successful campaign in the station's history. "We had achieved all the big goals for the station," Van Isler told Haïti Progrès. "We had balanced the budget. We had paid down all past debt from the move of the station [from midtown Manhattan] in 1998, one of the only Pacifica stations to do that in two years."
For these reasons, many feel that Pacifica's claim that WBAI management needed to be replaced overnight is disingenuous. "The real reason for Valerie's ouster was that she was no longer politically useful to the national board," said Ray Laforest, a Haitian activist and WBAI local advisory board member.
New Interim General Manager Utrice Leid has insisted that this is an internal issue that is being blown out of proportion. It is true that many producers at the station had disputes with WBAI local management over the years. But the conflict now is much larger and deeper than a mere personality clash between station personnel, as Leid and her defenders argue. All evidence suggests that Pacifica is exploiting internal rifts among the WBAI staff to grab power and disembowel the station of its progressive politics.
It also must be noted that in the early 1990s, Utrice Leid was editor at the now defunct Brooklyn-based African American newspaper The City Sun, which among other unenlightened political positions, justified the September 1991 coup d'état in Haiti. In an Oct. 2, 1991 article entitled "A Lesson in Irony: An Experiment Gone Awry," Leid's writer Hugh Hamilton argued that President Jean-Bertrand Aristide got what was coming to him due to his "separation, not only from the democratic institutions of the country, but from significant parts of the constituency that elected him." Hamilton's analysis came, not surprisingly, from Ray Joseph, editor of the right-wing pro-coup weekly Haiti Observateur, who is quoted extensively and exclusively in the article. Another "lesson in irony": Observateur was The City Sun's neighbor in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In the years since, Joseph's politics have become as reactionary as his journalism is flaky. Nonetheless, he has been invited more than once on Leid's "Talk Back" program, of which Hamilton has taken over as host since her "promotion."
To Van Isler's credit, WBAI in the past decade has increased its audience, achieved the first million dollar fund-raiser in community radio history, improved the quality of its shows, and won over 40 top awards in US journalism, more than any other Pacifica station. Prestigious George R. Polk Awards have gone to Knight for his reporting on Panama and to Goodman and reporter Jeremy Scahill for their reporting on Chevron's human rights abuses in Nigeria. WBAI produces some of the finest programming and programmers in community radio and, in the process, has built the most diverse audience of any public radio station in the country.
Meanwhile, WBAI has remained an indispensable voice for social movements and the chronicler of epoch-making events worldwide. When the Congo's Laurent Kabila made his historic march to Kinshasha, he spoke with WBAI before any other US broadcaster. Knight and fellow Pacifica journalist Dennis Bernstein broke the news of the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, while Goodman broke the story on the arrest of Lori Berenson in Peru.
WBAI achieved this unparalleled record of success not by killing its community ties, but by nurturing them, which was Pacifica's original mission. The strength of these ties was evident on Jan. 6, when hundreds of protesters gathered in the streets in front of WBAI's studios at 120 Wall Street in Manhattan to denounce the "Christmas coup" and the larger offensive to politically eviscerate WBAI. On Dec. 27, almost 1200 people turned out for a community meeting to discuss ways to turn back the coup. Dozens of smaller meetings on the crisis are being held by WBAI staff members, listener groups, and community activists each week. Columns protesting the coup have appeared in Ms. Magazine and Newsday.
"The founding purpose of WBAI, and the original Pacifica, was to provide a voice for the voiceless, to provide substantive analysis and contrary thought to the mainstream, unencumbered by commercialism, government, and corporatism," Mimi Rosenberg said.
This is the alternative vision that so many programmers, producers and
listeners still hold for Pacifica. It is a from-the-bottom-up approach
in terms of governance and programming. At its core is Lew Hill's vision
of a world without war, poverty and racism. WBAI has always aimed to serve
the diverse constituencies which have been locked out of the national discourse
as determined by the mainstream corporate media: new immigrant workers,
indigenous communities, labor organizers, gays and lesbians, democratic
media activists, prisoners, Black and Latino communities, and political
leftists. These sectors show no signs of letting the "Christmas Coup" stand.
To learn more and take part in the fight to take WBAI back:
1) For excellent background information, go to
www.savepacifica.net.
For more information, and daily updates, and to be put on an e-mail list for up-to-the-minute information,
call 718-707-7189 or 800-825-0055.2) Contact Pacifica Executive Director Bessie Wash to protest the coup at WBAI and to demand continued democratic processes at WBAI.
- Call toll free: (888) 770-4944, ask for Bessie Wash at ext. 348.
- Or fax a letter to: (202) 884-0860.
- Or write: 2390 Champlain Street N.W. Washington, DC 20009.
- Or email: bmwpacifica@aol.com.3) Call or write Pacifica Board chair David Acosta at (713) 926-4604.
E-mail: cpadga@aol.com.
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