Bill Mandel on KPFA: Democracy Deferred?

INTRODUCTION

Bill Mandel, now 88 years young, was a KPFA and Pacifica broadcaster for 37 years, until he was removed by station management in one of their many corporate purges, despite the fact -- or perhaps because of the fact -- that he had been one of the station's most popular and politically-cogent broadcasters.

For more information about Mandel, see his website at http://www.billmandel.net. Mandel's autobiography, SAYING NO TO POWER (Introduction by Howard Zinn), is a history of how the American people fought to defend and expand its rights since the 1920s, employing the form of the life of a 30s AND 60s activist, one who was involved in most serious movements: student, labor, 45 years of efforts to prevent war with the USSR, civil rights South and North, women's liberation (Mandel's late wife appears on 50 pages), 37 years on Pacifica Radio (where he invented talk radio), and civil liberties. On Mandel's website, you can also see and hear his testimony before different McCarthy-Cold-War-Era witch-hunting committees (used in six films and a play). Mandel is the author of five books in his academic field.

For more information about the campaign to put Mandel back on the air, please email struggle_and_win [at] yahoo.com.

Audio of the La Peña forum is archived on Maria Gilardin's TUC Radio website, at http://www.tucradio.org/contact.html#DemocracyDeferred. TUC Radio is also selling a tape of the forum. Please note that Mandel was not able to finish his presentation at the forum due to time constraints. What follows is his entire prepared presentation.

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KPFA: DEMOCRACY DEFERRED?

KPFA listeners have always been interested in the station's internal affairs. During most of its history other listeners and the station staff could learn about that interest from the Letters columns in the monthly FOLIO it published. Comments about my own program were very common, and I always took them into consideration in future broadcasts. Once in a while I would respond in the FOLIO. Today the FOLIO no longer exists at this station or at KPFK and WBAI, which carried my broadcasts for decades. My understanding is that this was on the recommendation of one of the innumerable consultants Pacifica has gotten into the habit of employing.

The fact is that the greatness of these stations was established in the years we did have folios, and when we did not have consultants. What sense would they make in stations that, every day, did things no other station would do, and therefore that no consultant could have any experience in? Obviously I'm not speaking of engineering matters, in which technical knowledge is of the essence. Yet even there, the kind of engineers who wanted to work at Pacifica stations were people with the same boundless curiosity in their own field that the rest of us had in what we were broadcasting or whatever else we do to keep them operating.

It is also a fact that KPFA and the other Pacifica stations have always had internal conflicts. The reason is simple enough. KPFA was founded by people who dissented from government policy sufficiently that they went to jail for refusing to fight in World War II simply because they would not agree to kill or be killed. It is inevitable that people with that strength of conviction would exercise that same quality in dealing with the problems that this entirely new kind of radio would experience, whether those problems were financial, or in the realm of programming or organization or anything else.

There is the grim reality that Lewis Hill, founder of KPFA, committed suicide when he was only 38 before the station was a single decade old. It is by now pretty well agreed that he took that course because of a combination of two factors, an exceptionally painful form of arthritis and the tensions of the struggle within the small group of people who, as comrades, had founded the station. He had resigned twice. He had fired others and they had fired him.

I can tell you that I lasted on the air for nearly four decades not only because my subject-matter was regarded as vital and that I handled it in a manner that satisfied listeners. There was the further fact that I stayed out of the absolutely uninterrupted series of in-house conflicts that split the staff, burned it out, and caused people to be classified as belonging to faction A or B or, for that matter, C or D. So that you will understand that this was not some kind of inherent disease, may I point out that the issues were very often forced upon the station from without.

In an era lasting nearly half a century, communism was used by the rulers of this country as the same kind of bogeyman that terrorism is presented as today. Those of you who have seen the film, "KPFA On the Air," will remember Lou Hill's wife telling her interviewer that there were lots of people who thought of KPFA as communist because it made its microphones available to people who held dissenting views on all kinds of taboo notions, such as homosexuality and lesbianism or marijuana or on the FBI.

It was impossible for a person of principle not to take sides on many issues, and I did, but only on those that seemed to me of overriding importance. For the rest, I would come to the station Monday evening, do my show following the News, and go home. Of course, at home and in the university libraries I read the newspapers, magazines, and books essential to my program, and did the research demanded by many of the letters from people involved in the struggles of people of color, of women, of labor, of gays and lesbians, of the disabled, and those based on the sheer curiosity of academics and professionals and plain folk of every conceivable occupation about how their interests were dealt with in the competing society that was my focus.

But when I did take sides in conflicts that split the station, I found that, invariably, it was the listeners who restored peace. The most pleasant form was when an outside entity or, in the 90s, a gang of pirates who had captured the Pacifica Board, found that somewhat over 7,000 listeners were willing to take to Berkeley's streets in support of this radio station, something simply unknown in the world of radio here or abroad. That brought us all together, however briefly.

Or, way back, when the staff, including unpaid staff, went on strike twice in a short span of years. One lasted a month, during which no broadcasting occurred. There was an increasing demand from the listeners for the station to return to the air. That resulted in a meeting that packed the auditorium of the school near the bottom of University Avenue, today I believe the city's evening school. Both sides presented their views. I got up and verbally banged the heads of both sides together. The listeners were very enthusiastic in their response, and the strike was settled very shortly.


KPFA LISTENERS ORGANIZE

During the strikes, and on a number of other occasions, organizations of listeners came into being. Invariably they collapsed for want of ongoing interest when the particular crisis was over. The crisis of 1999 created an entirely new situation. It was long, deep, and marked by unprecedented events: shutdown of the station by the National Board, and police action including arrests on the demand of the Board, which threatened to sue the city of Berkeley if the police did not open access to the building. That access was blocked by an extraordinary phenomenon: Camp KPFA, in which listeners, very largely young people of color and even the homeless (although I know of one elderly white woman), kept a 24-hour-per-day vigil, setting up tents and using sleeping bags.

This ACTION by listeners had an immediate effect upon programming. The young people of color, including not only the Black and Spanish-speaking and Indian groups who live everywhere in the country, but Pacific Islanders whose very presence reminded us that the California coast is an exceptional place, wanted to be able to present their cultures and their concerns and the happenings in their communities on the air. The degree to which that is now the case is a direct measure, good and bad, of the extent to which station management has taken those demands into consideration.

The overall impact of that crisis brought about something new: the listenership wanting to have an ongoing instrument through which their desires could be transmitted to station management and reflected in what could be put on and heard over the air. This has been effectuated by the provision, in the new bylaws, that all Pacifica stations have local STATION boards instead of local ADVISORY boards. What is really new is that these new boards enjoy some actual POWER and that paid staff, unpaid staff, and listeners, being part of a single board, learn to make policy together.

This is where the difficulties have arisen that necessitated this forum. There is a group best called entrenched staff. These are fundamentally long-term paid people. The group also includes some unpaid staff who feel dependent upon the paid people for access to air time as well as the everyday envelope-stuffing and telephone-answering kind of activities essential to the station's functioning and its fund-raising. Together they are a disciplined voting bloc that has prevented the station board from being more than the advisory board that previously existed.

I offered my thoughts on this during audience-input time at the March meeting, in Berkeley, of the National Board. These words were greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by the listeners in attendance:

"I believe the biggest problem facing the new National Board in accomplishing anything whatever, particularly in programming, is breaking the stranglehold that senior paid staffs now have on the stations. In the case of KPFA, which I know best, these were militant, activist people when first hired as youths. Today, however, in late middle age, their main consideration is holding their jobs. As a result, they fear change. They behave as though they own the stations. At KPFA their conduct recently caused the resignation of its new manager, Gus Newport, an African-American whose earlier tenure as the city's mayor contributed to its being called the 'People's Republic of Berkeley.'

"The new Board must behave in a manner making it clear that IT, not the senior paid staffs, runs Pacifica and its stations, or it will accomplish nothing."


THE BANNED AND FIRED

The second subject I was asked to cover this evening is that of the banned and fired. The total number of people whose broadcasts were canceled in consequence of what we called the August Massacre in 1995 was 165, doing some 60 programs. Some of those programs were weekly, some every other week, and some once a month. A disproportionate number were by people of color, including the only program on American Indian affairs in our listening area, to the best of my knowledge. There were several reasons.

One was to make room for five lengthy programs by "stars," including ex-Governor of California and present Mayor of Oakland Jerry Brown.

Another was to eliminate the tone of outrage to be heard on KPFA. That was quite successful, if one considers the fact that any such tone has been missing from KPFA's air in treatment of the stealing of this year's presidential election.

A third reason was to eliminate programs that brought in minimal amounts of money during fund-raising marathons. That is in flat contradiction to Lewis Hill's principle that the size of the audience for a program made no difference if it presented thought or any other significant product of human activity that had no other outlet to radio listeners.

Now that the coterie underlying these changes is gone, it is incumbent upon the station to re-examine those program cancellations and, as time permits, restore those of quality to the air, with preference to underrepresented communities.

All the programs just referred to are, like all presently on the air, subject to the judgment of the Programming Council as soon as it has been re-organized to remove the present preponderant influence of entrenched staff.

There are two cases of people separated from KPFA for reasons other than those stated above. They are Maria Gilardin and myself. I asked Maria to explain her case in an e-mail to me and she did.

"I was banned from all Pacifica stations in June of 1993 after demanding at the L.A. National Board meeting access to the financial records -- access that was promised to me at the previous National Board meeting in Berkeley. The reason given in the banning letter signed by Jack O'Dell was that I threatened violence. The situation on the ground, witnessed by many, including Kiilu Nyasha, Jeff Blankfort and Sue Supriano was that I protested not being allowed to speak to this topic during the public comment period. The meeting was quickly adjourned when I walked up to speak. I turned to the audience and asked to close the doors since I had not spoken yet. Nobody heard me and folks filed out of the room.

"There is a video showing the whole event. I showed it to Bruce Brugman, Tim Redmond and Ron Curran, and the Bay Guardian decided to take my side in a story they printed... I have hardly ever spoken about my case because I felt that your banning and the purge of 1995 was more important and showed better the intent of the station management regarding programming." One word needs correction. She wrote of me: "your banning." She was literally banned: forbidden to set foot in any Pacifica stations. In my case, my program was terminated, but no physical matter was discussed.

With respect to Maria, the action needed is a letter from Coughlin, the Executive Director of Pacifica, rescinding the ban and, in my view, offering an apology on the part of Pacifica for an unjust action taken against a devoted employee.

My case is different. The Pacifica Board had had a Strategy for National Programming drafted in 1992. Aside from the very serious changes it proposed, it revealed just plain ignorance. The writer referred to Berkeley and Oakland as though they are suburbia, by contrast to the urban orientation called for. I wrote a response that I broadcast as a program, obviously a violation of the gag rule, which I never accepted. My response was also published as an article in the KPFA Folio, and Jeff Blankfort, without my knowledge, although I certainly didn't object, offered it to that remarkable rural paper, the Anderson Valley Advertiser, which published it. My response included language a good deal more vigorous than any I have used this evening. I wrote:

"The document is permeated with language that is at odds with the spirit of Pacifica, and reflects the terminology of commercial radio. Over and over one sees the words 'markets,' 'marketplace,' 'market share,' 'packaged.' Shit can be prettily packaged, perfumed and in smell-proof plastics. A market is a place one enters to sell goods and services for profit. Ours is a non-profit organization."


PIRATES OUT FOR MY SCALP

From that day on the pirates were out for my scalp. They could not act immediately because my popularity was extraordinary, as shown by all kinds of figures on listener reaction as well as my repeated violation of the gag rule in the 20 years it had existed. (The founders of KPFA had no such rule, and themselves deliberately engaged in and invited discussion of station matters on the air. Inasmuch as my program had to deal with the Soviet Union, which had imploded the previous year, interest in that country declined, as distinct from interest in what people heard from me as a thinker dealing literally with every aspect of human existence, because that was the battlefield on which the Cold War was waged. But I was then, as I am today, fundamentally an American interested in the destinies of my own country.

In 1995, Newt Gingrich used affirmative action as the wedge issue in his "Contract On America" [he called it "with", not "on"]. The Bill Clinton devotees who had taken Pacifica over didn't want that issue discussed. I took advantage of a vicious column against affirmative action by the San Francisco Chronicle's resident satirist to devote my weekly 20 minutes on the Morning Show to ripping it apart. Phil Maldari, who subsequently has been particularly insistent that I not be returned to the air, closed the program by saying: "Bill, I certainly thank you for bringing this column to our attention, and opening the issue." The Program Director fired me from the Morning Show segment, "effective immediately." Alexander Cockburn devoted part of his page in The Nation to this, and called it "scarcely credible arrogance."

The station made no announcement of the cancellation, and one letter I later got from a young man in Visalia, who listened over KFCF, said he thought, knowing that I was elderly, that I had died. So when someone phoned in to my remaining once-in-two-weeks evening show and asked why I was no longer heard mornings, I told him the story and my evening show was promptly canceled for violation of the gag rule.

I was active in Take Back KPFA for the next couple of years. With regard to my own place on the air, I distributed leaflets at probably every meeting of the LAB, saying that I did not want a show on Russia, although I would deal with questions about it during the phone-in segment, but wanted, and want, a weekly half-hour titled: "Thinking Out Loud With Bill Mandel," because the question period was what my audience liked best. I refuse to apply to the Program Council for a show, because Bensky, Bernstein and Osman, later fired for violating the gag rule, were restored without going through that procedure.

80 people went to the time and trouble of picketing the station for my return. A group of listeners initiated a petition to management to put me back on the air. Not only was there a very long list of signatories, but they included names that comprise a galaxy: actor Ed Asner, environmental icon the late David Brower, Mime Troupe founder R.G. Davis, novelist Tillie Olsen, Pete Seeger, filmmaker Luis Valdez who had once been a student of mine, Wavy Gravy, and Maudelle Shirek of Berkeley's city council, the oldest Black office-holder in the country, and perhaps the oldest of any ethnicity.

The brief letters accompanying the addition of signatures on my website, http://www.billmandel.net, are astounding. I quote some in my autobiography, which tells the whole story in much greater detail.

Only when Maria has received her apology, I am back on the air, and re-examination of all the 60 programs canceled in 1995 is undertaken, will we be able to consider the crisis of 1999 a closed page in the history of KPFA.