Chapter 1: Radio as Lightning Rod

The Pacifica Model: Collective Pacifism and Open Dialogue

Community radio is, among other things, an attempt to stabilize these fickle windows of opportunity for creative and otherwise unprofitable radio experiments, often in contrast to an increasingly capitalist mediascape. Likely the best-known type (broadly) of community radio in the U.S. today is that associated with KPFA, the Berkeley, California-based community station at the heart of the Pacifica Network. The Pacifica Network is a distributor of largely progressive and politically left-leaning news and public affairs programs to non-commercial stations throughout the country. It is run by the Pacifica Foundation, which owns and operates five community stations of which KPFA was the first to be established.

Historian Matthew Lasar’s history of KPFA’s origins offers a thorough station-sanctioned account of KPFA’s roots in pacifist advocacy; several of its founders met in Civilian Public Service camps for conscientious objectors during World War II. He notes that in the decades since KPFA’s establishment in 1946, this orientation was often misrepresented, and that often “journalists, even sympathetic ones, described the founders as communists, or liberals, or adherents of some other incompatible perspective” (1999, 3). Lasar makes clear that the KPFA founders felt no such affiliations with these labels and gradually broke with mainstream pacifism as well. Of key Pacifica figure Lew Hill (who voluntarily allowed himself to be taken to a conscientious objector camp even though he could have been relieved of military duty based on chronic spinal arthritis), Lasar writes:

Over time, however, Hill began to lose faith not so much in pacifism but in how pacifists expressed their beliefs within the political system; he saw the emphasis on individual antiwar resistance as detrimental to collective efforts toward peace. Although he too sometimes resorted to a dramatic pacifist gesture, Hill left [his directorial position at the National Committee on Conscientious Objectors in] Washington [DC] convinced that the pacifist movement had to find ways to communicate with people on their terms, not just in the context of what he increasingly saw as an isolated, self-referential community, bent on dramatic but ineffectual forms of resistance. (17)

KPFA began in the San Francisco Bay Area at least in part because of the then-dominant imaginary of the region as a haven for countercultural social movements, cooperative organizations, and anarchist artistry.[1] For a group of disillusioned pacifists, such collaborative possibilities were inspiring. The Pacifica Foundation emerged from this space committed to what Lasar calls “the principle of pacifist dialogue: the idea that peace emerged not out of polemics but out of the process of diverse groups of people communicating with each other” (44). This utopian ideal of perfectly equal conversation was not only philosophical but practical as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) implemented a so-called fairness doctrine over broadcast stations that mandated equal time for opposing points of view on controversial public issues. KPFA’s founders, particularly Hill, carefully worked to frame the nascent station as primarily committed to “fairness and public service, in opposition to exclusiveness and commercialism,” obscuring somewhat the station’s explicit connections to conscientious objectors while still implicitly embracing dialogue as a core principle (49). This was a fine imaginary line to walk, and one that would not hold long.

Giving equal airtime to opposing viewpoints was soon more controversial than the KPFA founders expected it could be. In the 1950s, U.S. government-sponsored anticommunist fearmongering swept the nation. Mass media provided especially visible and audible targets for persecution; simultaneously, Lasar notes, “television greatly enhanced the power of the state” (78). It was at this point that mainstream radio writers and producers like Norman Corwin and Orson Welles and performers like singer/actor Paul Robeson (often employed in Corwin’s works) and boxer/actor Canada Lee found themselves more or less blacklisted and unable to access the airwaves. By now based in the university town of Berkeley, California, where many academics were openly outraged at the authoritarian censorship inherent in such practices as loyalty pledges (which professors were required to sign in order to keep their jobs) and House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings, KPFA was in a unique position in that it could broadcast against the national McCarthyist grain with listener support. In 1953, KPFA broadcast educator and free speech advocate Alexander Meiklejohn’s speech “First Amendment: Core of Our Constitution,” originally given before a U.S. congressional committee. Meiklejohn’s argument in this context makes clear the political leanings inherent in KPFA’s original vision, even if the KPFA founders themselves intended to cultivate perfect political balance:

…in our popular discussions unwise ideas must have a hearing as well as wise ones, dangerous ideas as well as safe, un-American as well as American. Just so far as at any point the citizens who are to decide issues are denied acquaintance with information, or opinion, or doubt, or disbelief, or criticism which is relevant to those issues—just so far[,] the result must be ill-considered, ill-balanced planning for the general good. It is that mutilation of the thinking process of the community against which the First Amendment is directed. (1966, 131).

Meiklejohn’s interpretation of the First Amendment of the United States constitution (instated to protect freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and religion from being legally limited) all but pitted it against the federal government of the time, invested as it was in the overt eradication of left-wing viewpoints. Airing it on KPFA, as Lasar notes, “would win the station a national award and define its opposition to McCarthyism” (1999, 31) and thus the increasingly polarized U.S. political right. While not all U.S. community stations are of the KPFA ilk, those that are have for the most part continued to slant toward the political left, albeit with adaptations to local listener and programmer viewpoints befitting a station meant to facilitate experiments with a focus on people in a specific space.

[1] That the Bay Area was home to Ken Kesey’s “Acid Tests,” including the one recorded for KPFA, is surely in part thanks to this same imaginary.