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Free Amy! The Left hasn't lost its genius for self-immolation. By Susan Zakin I used to want to be Cokie Roberts when I grew up. It wasn't because Cokie is one of the best-connected women in Washington. It wasn't even because she gets to be a political pundit on TV, which is remarkably unappealing, except, of course, for the money, influence and fame. What impressed me was the effortless way Cokie shuts up her This Week co-host Sam Donaldson. Donaldson resembles, on his better days, an incessantly barking dog. But Cokie doesn't even have to raise her voice and Sam just rolls over and throws his paws in the air. How wrong can a person be? Cokie just published a nauseating book with her husband, the pompous ex-New York Times reporter Steve Roberts, about what makes marriage work. I didn't mind Cokie writing about her mother, who was, after all, ambassador to the Vatican. But this is like Hillary Clinton handing out cookie recipes. Fortunately, I discovered Amy Goodman, who hosts the Pacifica radio program Democracy Now!, broadcast at 9 a.m. every day on KXCI. In a word, Goodman rocks. She does shows on East Timor, U.S. Africa policy, press freedom and ballot initiatives. She interviewed Leonard Peltier for almost an hour before the election, while we still thought President Clinton might pardon the long-suffering American Indian Movement activist instead of sleazy financier Marc Rich. Goodman impressed me most when Clinton called in for a five-minute opportunity to shill for Al Gore last fall. In a bravura performance, Goodman kept the president on the hook for 45 minutes. I didn't agree with all of her political points, but she was not intimidated, not even when Clinton showed the famous temper that I had read about. This reminded me that presidential interviews are incredibly stage-managed. At a press conference, the president always has the option of calling on an easygoing reporter when he needs a break. Reporters only get the good stuff in a prolonged give-and-take. But the only ones allowed long interviews are weenies like Diane Sawyer. A few weeks ago, I heard that Goodman's show might be on the block. KXCI station manager Tom Ford told me that the station is withholding its payment to Pacifica until the situation is clarified. "Amy is Pacifica," says Ford. "Pacifica is very embattled right now but I cannot imagine anyone, even a business person, getting rid of the person who is running that show." Embattled? I decided to look into what was happening at the alternative radio network. Because I grew up with WBAI, the network's New York station, I had pretty much taken Pacifica for granted. A group of San Francisco Bay Area intellectuals led by a World War II conscientious objector named Lew Hill started Pacifica in 1949 as an antidote to the commercialism of American radio, according to an article by John Dinges in The Nation. The network, which refused advertising and depended on subscribers, crested in the 1960s and '70s. It was the first place to broadcast Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl." A Pacifica reporter interviewed Che Guevara shortly before his death in a Bolivian jungle. The network probably hit its mark most consistently with its Vietnam War coverage. When I was growing up, WBAI was alive with brilliant commentators like Steve Post, who hosted a midnight to 6 a.m. call-in show that regularly made me late for school. I used to lie awake in the dark listening to Post trading quips with regular callers like The Enema Lady and John the Preppie. Post once read the recipe for head cheese on the air, which made me unable to look at a deli counter with a straight face for years afterward. My cousin was an intern at WBAI and reveled in the opportunity to fetch Häagen-Daz coffee ice cream for Post and the other hipster radio celebs. But the once-vibrant Pacifica I remember has fallen on hard times. The network now has 800,000 listeners, five stations in New York, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston and Washington, D.C., and 57 affiliates, including KXCI. But its position has eroded, partly because of the phenomenal success of National Public Radio, the wine and brie "Isn't America Quaint" abomination created in 1971. Pacifica's budget these days is $9.2 million, while NPR's is $75 million, according to Dinges. Sadly, many of Pacifica's troubles are of its own making. Like so many left-wing organizations, Pacifica is a textbook case of horrendous management whose disciplinary actions have been so erratic that they often resemble persecution. Tension had been building for years, but things didn't get ugly until 1999, after the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which donates about 18 percent of the network's budget, told Pacifica that representatives from local advisory boards no longer could serve on the network's national board. This was just a technicality, according to a longtime Pacifica stalwart who asked not to be named. But it deepened the rift between old-line Pacifica staff and supporters who favored local control and those who saw the potential for reaching a larger audience through a more national approach. When a popular manager in Berkeley was fired, the situation erupted. Almost 10,000 demonstrators gathered on the streets of Berkeley. Joan Baez appeared at a benefit concert for the dissidents. On-air journalist Larry Bensky, whose coverage of the Iran-Contra hearings equaled anything produced by Edward R. Murrow, was hauled out of the studio and fired for "insubordination." His crime? Reporting the network's internal conflicts on the air. Today there are three lawsuits pending against Pacifica. Two friends, Marc Cooper, an award-winning reporter who has a show on Pacifica's Los Angeles station, and Robert McChesney, a University of Wisconsin professor and author of Rich Media, Poor Democracy, disagree about both the problem and the solution. In Cooper's view, there is no conspiracy to turn Pacifica into another National Public Radio, the fear that many old-timers are expressing. He says that Pacifica stations in Houston, Los Angeles and Washington that have embraced change--without watering down their politics--have seen their audiences grow by 52 percent over the past four years. "Pacifica's national leadership is bureaucratic, visionless, beleaguered, technocratic and weak," Cooper says. "On the other side, we have zealots fighting for their tenured positions as $40,000-a-year radicals. It's like the collapse of the Cold War. These people grew up in a culture of militancy. They are so disenfranchised and they have been rendered so powerless by this society that they decide to act out against the only institution where they have a stake and a voice." McChesney, on the other hand, is sympathetic to the militants, whose supporters also include media critic Noam Chomsky and filmmaker Michael Moore. He believes that Pacifica must reform its internal structure if it is going to continue "shouting 'fire' in a burning theater," as one of its pamphlets described its mission in the '70s. McChesney has joined with Jeff Cohen of the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Media to call for a new board, drawn from the progressive community, and a new set of by-laws. Pacifica's board now includes, among others, an African-American executive at the American Homebuilder's Association and a lawyer from a San Francisco firm known for union-busting. "The irony of a community radio network being operated like a one-party state, with less accountability than a corporation, should not be lost on people," McChesney says. But the news isn't all bad. McChesney believes that a new Golden Age of Radio could be beginning. Pacifica could seize the moment, if only it could resolve its internal problems. "Radio is my favorite medium," says McChesney. "It's so inexpensive to produce that it's really the people's medium. Commercial radio is a sewer. If you can offer non-commercial programming, the chance to build audience is very good, especially with young people who are interested in political and social issues that fly under the radar." Disagreement is so rife at Pacifica that it's hard to get a fix on whether Goodman's show is actually threatened. Cooper doubts it would be canceled and warns that withholding payment, as KXCI is doing, risks sending the network toward corporate sponsorship and NPR-style blandness. McChesney on the other hand says "Pacifica should be building up a cadre of people like Amy Goodman, rather than trying to purge the few good journalists they have left." Goodman's lawyer did not return phone calls from this reporter. Neither did Pacifica management. Like everything else at Pacifica, the controversy over Goodman seems as much a question of personal style as political content. While Pacifica's troubles are a classic case of left-wing infighting, I wonder if there is something particularly personal about radio itself. Radio may be more intimate, even, than reading, because it is both solitary and not solitary. I suspect that's why something happened to me back then, something I can't quite describe, when I listened in the dark to those subversive voices broadcast from WBAI. A voice without a face can sometimes be clearer, as if one's preconceptions are momentarily invisible. On a long solitary night's drive through the Texas Panhandle, I heard Chuck Colson talking about getting born again in prison. I felt oddly touched, believing his conversion to be genuine. I remember Larry Bensky giving us the depressing news that Clarence Thomas had been confirmed. I was driving a U-Haul through Los Angeles on my way to live here. I was glad to be on my way to the mountains, away from all that. But hearing Bensky was comforting. Someone out there was telling the truth. In Tucson, we're lucky to have not one, but two independent radio stations, KXCI at 91.3 and Radio Limbo at 103.3. Perhaps, if Pacifica continues its freefall, these stations will start reporting the news. I hope they do. Who knows what dreams and subversions might lodge within us during an unguarded conversation in the night?
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