RENTERIA vs. BERRY IN RIVERSIDEby Adrienne Lauby
Lame duck National Pacifica Board chair Mary Francis Berry cancelled her appearance last month at a Riverside feminist conference but she did come to Anaheim for a diversity conference five days later. Activists had vigorously opposed both California speaking engagements. Berry said illness in her family caused the change in plans.
Characterizing the Pacifica Network as a progressive voice endangered by "increasing corporate concentration across the media industry," Berry said attacks by "a vocal, and energetic group of those involved...in many ways...appear to come from quarters bent on destroying the network."
Berry’s remarks appeared during the conference week in an op-ed essay in the Riverside Press Enterprise.
"The truth," according to an opposing editorial by Rafael Renteria, "is something closer to this; Dr. Berry and the Pacifica Board have come close to destroying the Pacifica tradition and the network itself in their effort to save it for the mainstream audiences they intend to serve."
Renteria, the National Spokesperson of the Pacifica Listener’s Union, criticized Pacifica’s participation in a program that "meant disinheriting community radio's traditional audiences and its moral purposes."
Berry said she became in the chair of Pacifica in 1997, "because I was a regular listener to its Washington, D.C. station, WPFW; and I believed in the strategic plan for the future, [former Pacifica Chair, Jack] O’Dell shared with me. The Board had unanimously adopted A Vision for Pacifica Radio: Creating a Network for the 21st Century."
"I readily embraced Pacifica's commitment to peace, social justice and the advancement of progressive ideals through its unique programming," Berry said. "It was abundantly clear that some programming in the network had become stagnant; programs failed to take into consideration the dynamics of the ever changing and shifting demography of their signal areas."
Renteria agreed that Berry arrived when "Pacifica was already heading in a new direction," but his view of that direction differed widely.
"The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was demanding a larger ante from [community] stations before they could qualify to get CPB funds to pay for essentials like salaries and equipment," he said. But, "to raise the station's ratings and the level of donations from their listener-sponsors...meant reaching a more mainstream audience."
"In 1995 it led to a predictable result - a massive purge of hundreds of Pacifica's volunteer programmers and staff and a dramatic reorientation of the network's programming - with the elimination of a wide array of programs that had served oppressed communities and whose content was politically too far left to attract the listeners and the money," he said.
Renteria went on to say that "after the purges of ’95...Pacifica hired union busting firms to split the unions at KPFA and KPFK in Los Angeles."
Berry did not address staff unionization at the five stations but focused on the acrimonious dispute of the last year. She said opponents of Pacifica’s gag rule used "a labor dispute," to "attract the support of local politicians, and an array of protesters from around the Bay Area."
According to Berry, "Whatever the motivation of these groups, they leveled several serious charges against individual members, and the collective board. Board members were accused falsely of graft; of conspiring to sell off network assets; of stifling free speech; and in engaging in anti-labor activities."
"All of these charges were leveled against unpaid volunteers, people of good character with stellar reputations, most of whom were originally nominated by their local station advisory boards and who have long histories of activism in the civil rights, labor and other progressive movements. Lies, half-truths, rumors, and whispered innuendo wound its way through e-mails, facsimiles, letters and phone calls to a less than discerning press willing to print news. Truth, and the goodness of committed souls, suffered immeasurably in this process," Berry said.
"Some members of the Board and key administrative staffers resigned in the face of incessant vituperative comments and harassment," Berry went on to say. She quoted another board member to say that Pacifica critics, "behaved in many respects like the worst elements of the Far Right we all abhor. Using violence (shooting into the Foundation offices), racist and sexist epithets, harassment at people's workplaces, in their homes. -smacks of right wing hate groups not progressives disagreeing about personnel decisions."
Renteria focused on the history of the dispute at Pacifica, especially at the "Houston station, KPFT, the only radio station in the US that had the distinction of being bombed off the air - twice - by the Ku Klux Klan and which had once broadcast in eleven different languages."
"Today, KPFT broadcasts in English Only," Renteria continued. "There is no locally produced news. There is not a single public affairs program for Houston's Black community - the largest Black urban population in the South. There are no public affairs programs for Latinos- who number more than one million. Gone are innovative and daring programs like The Atheist Hour - the first program of it's kind in the world.
"The Asian community, Persians, Arabs, Native Americans and Feminists and others have all been stripped of their voice. In their place Pacifica - once the standard bearer of alternative radio - has put a format called the Sounds of Texas, a mix of country music and piped in news from Public Radio International.
Berry defended Pacifica’s long range plans.
"With a cumulative potential audience of forty million, Pacifica's five radio stations reached only about 760,000 persons in a given week," Berry said. "The network of 1997, it was clear, needed to sharpen its message, experiment with new programming, hire staff and programmers, and attract volunteers who reflected the racial and ethnic composition of its signal areas, and make every effort to promote the cultural diversity within the networks' reach. Failure to do so surely meant that the listener base, given demography would continue to dwindle especially in Northern California...Innovative programming, too, designed to convey progressive ideas and ideals to an expanding multicultural and multiethnic population, is also essential."
Renteria challenged Berry’s assessment of Pacifica’s cultural diversity goals.
"It takes little more than a cursory examination of the record to recognize that, however skilled in the rhetoric of diversity Dr. Berry and her allies at Pacifica may be, it is nothing more than rhetoric. As if to drive the point home, Berry's Pacifica recently named Garland Ganter Interim National Program Director of the network," he said.
"It was Ganter, in his roles as program director and general manager at KPFT, who stripped that station of the highest level of diversity ever attained in the Pacifica network.," Renteria said. And, "Ganter has another, more dramatic distinction as well."
Citing the well known facts of the 1999 KPFA lock-out Renteria described how the Pacifica Board voted to make its members self-selecting, fired popular KPFA manager Nicole Sawaya, and spent "an incredible half million dollars for armed agents to occupy" the station, Renteria described how "Ganter took over as interim manager there, and led the charge in locking out the station's staff."
"Ganter confronted a reporter who had just aired a leaked Pacifica memo calling for the sale of the beleaguered station," Renteria continued, and "had the reporter hauled from the newsroom -live on mike- and later arrested for trespassing."
"Fifteen thousand people took to the streets in a massive protest in its wake. Helmeted riot police guarded the building and Pacifica listeners held a weeks-long vigil at the station's quarters, blocking Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley for the entire period," Renteria said.
Berry said she has been "been arrested and jailed numerous for engaging in non-violent protest, [and] I support the right of people to peaceably assemble and engage in direct action protests. Still, as the Chairperson of the Board of Pacifica, I cannot condone the application of violence in protest action, or the uncivil activities that threatened the security of Pacifica's staff. Moreover, the board would have been delinquent in its fiduciary responsibility if it failed to support the Executive Director's actions necessary to protect the property of Pacifica as an FCC licensee."
Renteria reminded readers that, "Berry had the names of thousands of protesters who had written letters to Pacifica turned over to the Berkeley police, and is reported to have placed a call to cronies in the US Justice Department to have them use their influence to get the Berkeley Police to lean harder on the demonstrators. The Berkeley Chief of Police publicly complained."
Berry said she intended to insure an effective transition for her successor, Chair appointee DavidCosta, "so that the important work of the network can continue."
"Pacifica Radio Network," she said, "Will increasingly be responsible for reporting stories pertinent to progressives, the under-served, underclass, and underrepresented segments of our community. Issues concerning police brutality, disparities in the justice system, environmental racism, state sponsored terrorism, imperialism, and North-South global conflicts over trade and the environment will remain the staple of Pacifica's cutting edge reporting."
Berry ended her letter with a plea for peace.
"Recently a group of committed well-known Progressives including Ed Asner, Barbara Ehrenreich,* Saul Landau and others have called for an end to Pacifica Bashing so that the goal of strengthening Pacifica as a voice for progressive ideas can be attended to," she said.
"Surely my critics have the prerogative to speak and be heard and to admonish. I only insist that I have these very same rights."
Renteria rejected Berry’s statements.
"After seeking to discredit the movement to free Pacifica by wrapping themselves in the now-tattered mantle of diversity and by false charges that the movement is violent, Dr. Berry and the Pacifica Board [have] now turned to a new song, claiming that their opponents are out to destroy Pacifica."
He cited a recent incident which shows why peace is unlikely.
"When Pacifica affiliate stations held a one-day boycott of the network's programming, the editor of Pacifica's national news program decided the story merited a thirty-second spot at the close of that day's broadcast."
"He was removed from his position and the news show's anchor was removed from the air -- for covering a crisis that had gained international media attention," Renteria said. "The result was a strike by many of the reporters who contribute to Pacifica's national news show."
Renteria believes such things should not happen on "radio with a radical grass roots tradition that has all too often been the only consistent avenue of expression for voices that are normally excluded from the mainstream media."
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* Barbara Ehrenreich has since asked that her name be removed.
Rafael Renteria can be reached at listenersunion@hotmail.com.; Dr. Berry gave no address for contact. Their original essays appeared in the March 24th Riverside Press Enterprise, Riverside, California, Page A-9.
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