CHRISTMAS COUP ROCKS PACIFICA'S WBAI:
PURGE TARGETS COMMUNITY BASE, RADICAL VOICES
HAITI PROGRES
"Le journal qui offre une alternative"
* THIS WEEK IN HAITI *
January 10 - 16, 2001
Vol. 18, No. 43
In the early morning hours of Saturday, December 23, programming
at radio station WBAI-FM in New York City suddenly ground to a
halt. Utrice Leid, a well-known producer and host of the
afternoon program "Talk-Back," went on the air to announce that
she was the new general manager of the station, replacing
long-time administrator Valerie Van Isler. "There are no SWAT
teams here," announced Leid to the stunned listenership at 1:40
a.m. "This is not a coup."
But it sure looked like one. Leid and managers from WBAI's
Washington-based parent Pacifica Foundation changed all the
locks in the station, installed security guards, restricted access to
a list of "approved" persons, then fired and banned key producers
and staffers from the station. Also fired were Program Director
Bernard White, who hosted the popular morning show "Wake-Up
Call" and the show's producer and WBAI shop steward Sharan
Harper. They were awakened early Saturday morning by a courier
informing them that they had been sacked and that if they came to
the station, they would be arrested.
WBAI staffers and listeners immediately protested the move,
calling it a "Midnight Massacre" and a "Christmas Coup." "We
deplore the [Pacifica] Foundation's coming in secret in the
middle of the night at the start of a holiday weekend to change
the station's locks, and the illegitimate installation and
imposition of new station management," protested WBAI staff
members, including "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman and
"Afrikaleidoscope" producer Elombe Brath. "We deplore the
firings, the bannings, the presence of security guards in the
station, and the denial of access to personal property belonging
to staff."
Listener-sponsored WBAI in New York City has long been an
independent and radical voice for community and activist groups
in the New York area and internationally. Through its programming
-- particularly through "Democracy Now!" -- it has helped fuel
resistance to the World Trade Organization, the death penalty,
police brutality, violence in East Timor, injustice against
immigrants, and media disinformation about Haiti, to name just a
few issues.
The station, through producers like Goodman, White and Van Isler,
has also provided an important outlet for the Haitian community
in New York. Van Isler, a former producer at WBAI who received
the New York Association of Black Journalist's award for her
reporting on Haiti, continued covering the country even after she
took over as general manager in 1990. Of Haitian heritage on her
father's side, Van Isler traveled to Haiti as a reporter and
delegate to national congresses of the National Popular Assembly
(APN) in 1989 and 1995. Goodman also visited and reported from
Haiti following the U.S. military occupation in late 1994,
revealing the complicity of U.S. military commanders with agents
of the right-wing paramilitary organization FRAPH. This is why
one finds many Haitian cab drivers in New York with their radio
set to WBAI.
The station's radical programming and grass-roots character has
increasingly vexed the rightward-drifting Pacifica Foundation,
which owns WBAI and four other radio stations around the country.
The Pacifica National Board is moving to centralize control and
soften the left-wing content of WBAI and other stations. Some
board members have advocated taking corporate funding for
programming.
Pacifica Radio was formed in the 1940s by radical writers and
conscientious objectors to World War II who started the network as
a forum for marginalized voices and a vehicle to promote peace and
social justice. They started broadcasting out of KPFA in Berkeley,
California, in 1949 and pioneered the concept of supporting the
station through listener contributions, shunning commercial
advertisements. The formula worked and, in addition to KPFA and
WBAI, Pacifica Radio now owns KPFK in Los Angeles, KPFT in
Houston, and WPFW in Washington.
In the 1980s, Pacifica managed to secure funding from the
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a Federal agency
funded by the U.S. Congress, despite the opposition of some
right-wing Republican lawmakers. But the additional support
turned out to be a double-edged sword. Since the mid-1990s, the
CPB has prodded Pacifica to end its radical programming and to
wrest control of its stations from local listener boards.
Congress had sharply objected to Pacifica's airing voices like
that of famed journalist, former Black Panther, and death row
inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal.
In 1998, Pat Scott, who was the Pacifica Board's executive
director, solicited an opinion from the CPB, which then began to
directly interfere in our governance structure, which they had
never done before, explained Mimi Rosenberg, the co-host of a
labor-oriented program entitled "Building Bridges". The result
was that the national board completely severed its relationship
with the local advisory boards [of Pacifica's member stations]
for fear that CPB funding would be lost."
Previously, each local Pacifica station elected two of the
national board members. Gradually, some national board members
began to seat their friends and allies as "at large" board
members, even if those people were from areas not covered by
Pacifica"s radio signal. With the "at large" seats they could
put on the board whoever the hell they wanted, Rosenberg
explained. Then finally, you had a by-law change which resulted
in a board which was 100% self-appointing."
To make matters worse, the national board's executive committee
began to illegally make decisions without ratification by the
full board, a move which is now being challenged in court.
In March 1999, the crisis between the national executive and local
stations exploded. Pacifica fired the general manager of KPFA and
a number of other producers. Listeners and the community
objected, and Pacifica closed down the station for 23 days. Only
after a protest of more than 10,000 people in the summer of 1999
did Pacifica reopen the station.
"Pacifica, founded by 'discontented leftists,' now openly
expresses discontent with leftists," noted the late WBAI Program
Director Samori Marksman, referring to the recent red-baiting and
political witch-hunts launched against radical voices in
Pacifica. Verna Avery-Brown, known as the "Voice of Pacifica"
after 11 years as national news anchor, walked out of the
Pacifica Network News (PNN) in late 1999 because of a dramatic
shift toward mainstream orthodoxy and blatant censorship. "I left
because I no longer felt the renegade spirit of Lew Hill was in
control of Pacifica," said Avery-Brown, referring to Pacifica's
founder. "I left when I realized the majority of the board
members were too timid, too uninformed, or too conservative to
give a damn to step in and make the necessary changes. I left
because the Pacifica I had fallen in love with no longer
existed."
Dan Coughlin, a former correspondent of Inter Press Service in
Haiti who broke such stories as the U.S. government's theft of
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