WRONG PARADIGM

Paul Schaffer

 

It's the tiny facts that get to me.

What most stunned me in the leaked Pentagon Papers was an eminent U.S. adviser's pre-1965 proposal for gradually disabling Hanoi's civilian buses by contaminating the gasoline. As tactics went, this was almost benign, but the disclosure drastically lowered my willingness to disdain seemingly paranoid scenarios.

Recent tiny fact about Pacifica, trivial but telling: The National Federation of Community Broadcasters, home base of many recent Pacifica managers, has designated Marc Cooper's KPFK program "best daytime show."

Disregard what might be said about NFCB or Marc Cooper. What value has a category such as 'best daytime show' to noncommercial radio, particularly Pacifica?

This is a Madison Avenue distinction, unrelated to content or genre, a convenience for presenting ratings data to advertisers. (Does Democracy Now qualify as a 'daytime show,' I wonder?)

The terminology is symptomatic. Pacifica's tendency to use NPR and commercial talk radio as its paradigms has worsened over the last few years. One result: Missing the point of an increasingly electronic environment.

Consider the potential for tying Pacifica more closely to its audiences and constituencies. One model might be the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, where participant-journalists uploaded onto the web their dispatches and impressions, variously using audio, video and text. No credentials required.

Perhaps participant-chroniclers is a better description for such folks, since professionalism and dispassion are optional.

Pacifica ought to be creating permanent channels for such activity. Let us fantasize a 2 a.m. daily program of relatively unedited activist dispatches (replaced by music if nothing turns up). Highlights might or might not be included in that evening's Pacifica Network News.

And yes, PNN airtime would have to be made available to the activists' foes.

An adjacent fantasy: Consider that internet discussion groups and bulletin boards have enabled many implicit communities, including Pacifica's dissidents, to create new pathways and content. Pacifica itself might easily foster worthwhile E-groups and then derive on-air material from the resulting information.

But the reality is laughably different. Even so low-tech an option as a 'listener comment line,' hooked up to an answering machine, has been pigeonholed by WBAI's management despite pestering by the local advisory board.

When national Pacifica thinks of the new technology, it thinks in parallel with the National Association of Broadcasters: Which digital frequencies, how much web distribution, what satellite options.

That Pacifica might be asking a different set of questions about these technologies, because its legacy is non-commercial and politically dissident, doesn't seem to arise.

The options I'm describing may be fantasy, but they are anchored to a piece of Pacifica's (and my) past. Back in 1966 through 1968, I was on WBAI's staff and faced the question of how to provide worthwhile stuff on Vietnam with minimal resources.

The commercial paradigm (NPR didn't even exist then) was reporter on the spot, audio actualities, etc. But there wasn't much possibility of getting from here to there.

So what I ended up with was: an exotic mix of wire services (no AP or UPI), rewriting 17 daily newspapers (some translated from French), and actively soliciting news items from listeners about protests and other stuff.

A 15-minute war summary was added to WBAI's weekday schedule, separate from the ordinary newscasts. Dispatches from Wilfred Burchett, a partisan journalist close to North Vietnam's leaders, were shared before publication by his U.S. outlet, the Guardian.

Almost nothing in that stew was based on imitating other media. Judged against criteria of good broadcasting it was almost hideous, mostly one talking head.

And yet: The New York Times started listing BAI's news programs in its daily listings, both the primary newscast and the war summary. That was unprecedented, and lasted until Frank Millspaugh (of Pacifica's current national board) booted me. Neither of us would look good if I were to describe that episode in detail, so I won't.

The broad lesson is that there are (frequently?) occasions when Pacifica could flourish by explicitly disregarding the way things are done at other outfits. But most of Pacifica has lost the sense of operating by its own rules.

 

(680 words)

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Pull Quote: Pgph.6: "Pacifica's tendency to use NPR and commercial talk radio as its paradigms has worsened over the last few years."