Pacifica Radio

Pacifica Radio, listener-funded radio foundation that is the oldest independent media network in the United States. Pacifica owns and manages five listener-supported, noncommercial FM radio stations: KPFA in Berkeley, California (inaugurated in 1949); KPFK in Los Angeles (1959); WBAI in New York City (1960); KPFT in Houston (1970); and WPFW in Washington, D.C. (1977). Pacifica also funds and promotes news and public affairs programs, most notably Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News, for its own and nearly 100 affiliated community radio stations. The organization’s main contribution to U.S. journalism has been the consistent airing of perspectives of the American and global political left.

Beginnings: Lewis Hill and Elsa Knight Thompson

The Pacifica Foundation was created by Lewis Hill and other World War II-era conscientious objectors in August 1946. Hill, the nephew of an Oklahoma oil millionaire, had worked as an announcer at a news radio station in Washington, D.C., following his release from a conscientious objector camp in 1944. He saw radio as a way to rescue organized pacifism from its marginalization following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and the consequent U.S. entry into World War II, and he envisioned listener support, or “sponsorship,” as a means of establishing a funding base independent of advertisers and educational institutions. Pacifica launched KPFA in 1949 largely through volunteer labour. The focus of the station was primarily cultural, including commentaries by movie critic Pauline Kael, Zen scholar Alan Watts, and poet Kenneth Rexroth. Although the station broadcast political commentaries, most notably Hill expressing opposition to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Korean War, news and public affairs programming took a backseat to culture until the arrival of journalist Elsa Knight Thompson in the mid-1950s.

Thompson, who had worked at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in London during World War II, pushed to build a news and public affairs department at KPFA. She produced many groundbreaking programs, including a lengthy 1958 broadcast on the civil liberties of homosexuals that is generally recognized as the first radio documentary about gay rights. In 1960 Thompson took a team of reporters to San Francisco City Hall to provide live coverage of hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee. When students outside the hearing chambers began to riot in response to the subpoenaed witnesses’ denouncements of the committee, the KPFA team turned the broadcast into a widely distributed radio documentary.

The 1960s through ’80s

The opening of Pacifica stations KPFK in Los Angeles and the acquisition of WBAI in New York City accelerated the foundation’s emphasis on news and public affairs. KPFK’s Terry Drinkwater (later to join CBS) produced a provocative interview in 1959 with notorious anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith. In October 1962 WBAI producers Richard Elman and Chris Koch, the latter a protégé of Thompson, interviewed a disgruntled former FBI trainee on his experiences with the bureau. For three hours WBAI listeners heard Jack Levine disclose anecdotes of racism and anti-Semitism at the agency. The FBI retaliated by producing a dossier of nearly everyone at Pacifica and handing it over to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. The senators subpoenaed members of the Pacifica board, and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stalled the renewal of Pacifica station licenses. Only the resignation of a Pacifica board member once associated with the Communist Party enabled the foundation to survive intact.

During the 1960s WBAI enhanced its reputation with unique coverage of the Vietnam War. In 1965 Koch became the first American reporter to visit the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi, and return with lengthy commentaries and interviews, and in 1968 Dale Minor provided dispatches from the Battle of Hue in South Vietnam. WBAI also won a huge audience in Greater New York by including European news service items in its daily newscast on the war. All three Pacifica stations developed daily newscasts.

In 1968 Pacifica’s alternative radio news service began to expand its audience as community radio stations proliferated across the country. In 1972 Larry Bensky’s live coverage of the Democratic and Republican national conventions was sent to two dozen community stations via telephone connections. By the early 1980s Pacifica was producing a daily national newscast. The production drew from correspondents around the world, including Israeli reporter Peretz Kidron, a prominent critic of his country’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In 1987 Pacifica and Bensky were acclaimed for their live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate’s Iran-Contra hearings. That time Pacifica employed a satellite connection to reach a much larger group of community radio stations. Bensky interviewed hundreds of guests during the hearings and took listener call-ins to get audience reactions on the scandal. The production won Bensky, his producer, Bill Wax, and Pacifica a prestigious George Polk Award. The organization continued using satellite distribution to provide live coverage of the Senate confirmation hearings of controversial Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas in 1991.

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Later developments: Democracy Now! and Free Speech Radio News

By the early 1990s Pacifica’s leadership had committed itself to centralizing the organization’s resources in order to produce and distribute more national programming. In 1992 former Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) official Gail Christian completed a study for the organization titled “A Strategy for National Programming.” The document recommended the creation of a national production facility for the network that would provide about 100 hours a month of programming to 100 community radio stations, including Pacifica’s. Although the organization never created this service, it began to experiment with a wide range of national programs, including the Julianne Malveaux Show, featuring the progressive economist and her guests, and then former California governor Jerry Brown’s We the People.

By the mid-1990s Pacifica noticed that affiliate community station KFCF in Fresno, California, had been buying access to a commercial satellite system operating on the so-called Ku band (14.0 to 15.5 gigahertz) in order to route KPFA programming to its audience. Pacifica followed suit in 1997 with a Ku band service that distributed a wide variety of programs to community radio stations, including Marc Cooper’s Radio Nation, Michio Kaku’s Explorations in Science, and the Pacifica Network News (PNN).

The centerpiece program of the satellite system was Democracy Now!, inaugurated in 1996 and hosted by WBAI programmer Amy Goodman and New York Daily News reporter Juan González. Democracy Now! represented a significant departure for Pacifica radio. Whereas earlier Pacifica programming usually interviewed prominent leftists, Goodman also aggressively courted the participation of government officials, corporate spokespersons, and conservative ideologues. Goodman would often clash with these guests, as she did in confrontations with House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Pres. Bill Clinton, but those exchanges only heightened the popularity of the show among Pacifica and community radio listeners. Goodman also won acclaim for her coverage of events in Haiti and East Timor. By the late 1990s Democracy Now! was being broadcast to almost 80 community radio affiliate stations and an estimated audience of 750,000 to 1,000,000 listeners.

An internecine crisis over governance at Pacifica radio from 1999 through 2001 resulted in the collapse of PNN. Democracy Now! became an independent programming service but continued to receive substantial funding and promotion from Pacifica. In 2000 many reporters affiliated with PNN reorganized themselves as Free Speech Radio News (FSRN), an independent service. Pacifica provides substantial financial and distributional support to FSRN. The program is distributed by Pacifica to its affiliates and by FSRN directly.

Pacifica also distributes other national programs, including Dennis Bernstein’s investigative magazine Flashpoints; From the Vault, which features selections from their archives; and the Spanish-language news broadcast Informativo Pacifica. In 2005 the network launched its Internet-based distribution system, the Pacifica AudioPort.