By Cliff Barney

I am as much interested in what Pacifica's news organizations cover as in how they covers it. I don't listen to Pacifica for a slant on the news, but for access to information about topics I don't see in other media. In the particular case of politics and social issues, I depend on Pacifica to tell me about the people and organizations that are working to achieve peace and social justice, what they are doing and how they are doing it.

One of these organizations is Pacifica itself, so news of what happens to Pacifica is important to me. But I rarely get it without making a strenuous effort, tracking Internet lists and attending local meetings. The mainstream press doesn't think Pacifica is important, and Pacifica itself seems to agree. There is very little news about Pacifica on Pacifica's airwaves. For years, news about Pacifica was actually banned from the air by official policy and the application of the so-called dirty laundry rule, whose origins no one could ever find, but which effectively prevented listeners from knowing much about changes within the network. The national board thus was able to make itself self-selecting without a peep to the listeners.

As Pacifica broadcasters perforce adhered to this practice, they seem to have gotten used to it. Even now, with the dirty laundry rule history, this culture persists. It has its uses when something happens, like a fight between board members, that one would just as soon not be made public. But even everyday Pacifica news is ignored by the stations and the network. I's like pulling teeth to get a report to the listeners out of the stations - it's even hard to get reports to the LAB's. The regular broadcasts concerning the bylaws process, mandated by the board a year ago, have faded away. As for news departments, they repeat the mantram learned under the old board: "The listeners aren't interested in the inner workings of Pacifica. We have other things -- wars, revolutions -- more important to cover."

That was the official point of view while Pacifica was being hijacked. It was only when KPFA broke the tradition of omertá and reported on the firing of Nicole Sawaya that listeners found out what was happening and started to organize against it.

And only during the a brief interregnum that followed, when KPFA operated as a kind of rebel station, did I hear anything on the six o'clock news about the struggle to regain control of Pacifica. Then there were regular pieces about protests and court events, and KPFA covered Pacifica's bizarre attempt to censor its own press conference. But now that that struggle is won, the story has dropped out of sight. Not a word on the news about the whole incredible process of reinventing Pacifica, writing a new set of bylaws, undergoing bitter and tendentious factional strife, all under the gun of a judicial mandate. This is not news to the news departments or to Free Speech Radio News.

As a journalist, I have a hard time following their reasoning. Didn't we just learn what happens when governance is carried out in secret? I think Pacifica needs to give full coverage to this process. Not live or Internet broadcasts of national board meetings, not occasional two-hour mega-specials involving all five stations and the affiliates, not special reports to the listeners; not talk shows featuring one or more interested parties; or at least not just these, but real ongoing news coverage by reporters who, under the aegis of an editor, contact sources and write independent stories.

Media Democracy

The reason is simple: the listeners need it. The listeners must have news coverage of their network in order to become full citizens of this democratic media. Had it not been for the report on the firing of Sawaya, the hijacking plan might well have succeeded. News coverage is an efficient way to get the word out. Special broadcasts are hard to put together and not everyone has time to listen to them. For that matter, not all news events are worth special broadcasts. But regular, day-to-day, coverage of Pacifica news would go along way toward helping Pacifica's listeners participate in its governance and making them an informed electorate when it comes time to choose board members.

(Naturally at election time, the stations will run election specials and give candidates air time. And Pacifica needs to cover its own elections just as it covers any election. But beyond that, regular coverage of Pacifica events, including, specifically long-term processes like writing the bylaws, will familiarize the listeners with Pacifica in a way that pure talk show format can't do, in that the news offers context and a sense of independence.)

Example of what is missing: Last year, Pacifica's most popular program, Democracy Now!, was spun out into an independent production. Nothing about it was described on the air, though many insiders felt that the deal had some unaddressed questions of conflict of interest, and others were surprised, to put it mildly, to find that the newly independent DN! would be given access to Pacifica's mailing lists. After a brief uproar, the contraqct was supposed to have been re-examined. Not a word about the result, if any of this process, or even if it ever took place, has been broadcast on Pacifica.

Example 2: The only news story out of the recent Los Angeles meeting of the iPNB was a three and a half minute FSRN piece that gave very little hard information about what happened there. On the Internet, Carol Spooner reported that the board had adopted a budget, that it had delayed a vote on the bylaws but adopted a schedule for it and circulated drafts of amendments, that it had formed a diversity committee to wrestle with the problem of establishing Pacifica policy within legal limits, and taken a number of other interesting steps; but most Pacifica listeners know nothing of this, or why it was or wasn't important, because it wasn't covered on Pacifica. Only the few hundred listeners who follow the Internet lists saw Spooner's report. How can the thousands of listeners who didn't see it be expected to act as an informed electorate? Most of the meeting was broadcast, but trying to puzzle out the workings of Pacifica from the occasional network broadcasts of iPNB meetings is like trying to interpret Congress by watching C-SPAN: you see only the show, nothing of the context.

Example 3: As I write this, a serious battle is taking place between proponents of different views on how Pacifica should promote diversity among its listeners and officers. Several members of the iPNB say that the battle threatens the very settlement that regained control of the network. Others say people who think like that are racist. One of the LABs seems to be at loggerheads with the others over the bylaws provisions. None of this is told to Pacifica listeners, who are contributing record sums to the stations under the impression that the struggle for control of the network is over. It isn't, and they aren't being given the details.

News Values

There is another reason Pacifica reporters need to cover this story, and I am amazed that they don't see it: it is the media event of their generation. Nothing more important than the attempt to democratize Pacifica, the nation's only independent media network, has happened in my journalistic experience, and I don't think anything will come about very soon hereafter, either. What is happening now far transcends, I think, the experiences Matt Lazar chronicled in his history of early Pacifica. That was the birth and adolescence of Pacifica. Now comes the maturity. In an age of media agglomeration, when, as Amy Goodman put it on the Charlie Rose show, corporations control what stories are covered and how Big Media covers them, Pacifica is, or is becoming, the lone democratically run national network. Through satellite radio, its reach can be global. In addition, Pacifica is in a position to play a role in building the whole new distribution structure required for a true popular alternative to mass media.

Big story, lots of angles, plenty of ways to cover. Pacifica should be on it. It's not; Pacifica's news departments are completely missing it. They should have been on the bylaws process from the beginning, sending reporters to the committee meetings and summarizing what happens. Ignoring the process, which is what they have done, is like running a newspaper in Philadelphia in 1789 and not covering the writing of the Constitution.

Trouble With Self-Reference

News organizations, it is true, have traditionally had difficulty covering themselves. It makes all parties uncomfortable - the reporter who writes about the boss, the boss forced to allow publication of sometimes embarrassing material.

There's a tradition in the news business: you don't write about yourself, or at least you do it only on special occasions, as when you win a journalism prize or promote someone to assistant city editor. Newspapers, A. J. Liebling liked to say, write about other newspapers with respect, and about themselves with what amounts to awe. (Pacifica modified the principle somewhat; while it took the gloves off in reporting on other news organizations, for itself it enforced the gag rule.) Reporting on itself won't be easy for Pacifica. There are too many built-in conflicts of interest. Management and board members will always want to constrain editorial enterprise. Individual reporters, many of them activists themselves, may tend to favor one or another of Pacifica's many warring factions.

One FSRN reporter, for instance, recently published a biting description of the activities of the board, the nature of the diversity battle, and the competence of some board members, on the Alliance mailing list. The reporter made no secret of his disgust with one faction, and then added:

"Don't worry; my report would never sound like that - this is not me, the reporter talking, this is me the frustrated about-to-hit-somebody activist screaming. Can I switch hats and be a fair journalist? Of course. I do it all the time."

Well, maybe. Based on my own experience in journalism, I certainly believe it is possible. You report on the topic fairly by sticking to reporting what is happening.

But a lot of people won't believe that this is possible, and in fact a lot of reporters won't do it, because they can't or don't want to or don't really understand the issue. So sooner or later someone is going to broadcast a story that is wrong in some detail and manages to antagonize one of the factions; Pacifica needs to think of how to handle this type of situation.

In addition there is a long tradition of putting one's self in the best light. Pacifica is not free of this universal condition, and its culture of not airing so-called dirty laundry will work against open reporting on the changes now going on.

Finally, the news departments do not now see this as an important story and someone will have to build a fire under them in order to change their minds. The Pacifica story needs beat reporters who will track events and report on them regularly.

How to effect this change? One place to start would be at Free Speech Radio News, which as an independent group has an arms-length relation with Pacifica, but has a regular program to air what it sees as news.

There are people at FSRN who want to do this story, but so far they have had little opportunity. The story is now so big that they despair of telling it in the short segments allotted to news stories; however with regular short items, rather than the occasional blockbuster, listeners can get a sense of continuity. That's what news is about.

Judging from past practice, nothing will happen, I think, until the listeners demand it. They have the same choice they always have - to bring pressure on the news departments for coverage of important news. We are always being told to write letters to newspapers commenting on coverage; now we can do it with Pacifica as well. Of course, Pacifica doesn't have a letters column. Perhaps one way to start would be to lobby for some form of regular, edited feedback on Pacifica.org and at the various station websites. Let this memo be the first entry.