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/* Written  3:15 PM  Mar 29, 1994 by newsdesk in igc:zmagazine */
/* ---------- "Z: Independent Radio's Problems and" ---------- */
>From the March, 1994 issue of Z Magazine

Title: Independent Radio's Problems and Prospects

An interview with Peter Franck, former President of Pacifica
Radio

 By Peggy Noton

Peter Franck's connection to KPFA, Pacifica's Berkeley station,
goes back to the 1950s, when, as a student leader in the new left
movement at UC Berkeley and president of the campus's student
chapter of ACLU, he was interviewed by KPFA program director Elsa
Knight Thompson. He did a monthly commentary on the station for a
couple of years during the 1960s, and in 1973 joined the local
advisory board. Two years later he became a member of the
national board of Pacifica Foundation (the national board is
composed of selected members of the local boards) and in 1980
became president of Pacifica, remaining in this office for four
years.

Since its beginnings in 1949, Pacifica radio has participated in
all the major political battles of the times. In addition, it has
weathered not a few of its own. This past year saw a beleaguered
KPFA, Pacifica's local affiliate and the foundation's flagship
station, coming under heavy criticism from a new listener group,
SAVE KPFA. The group has criticized the station for the dearth of
progressive analysis in public affairs programming, undemocratic
structure at both local and national levels, lack of
accountability to listeners and much of the staff, and the threat
of large-scale corporate funding.

Today Peter Franck is a San Francisco attorney practicing
copyright and entertainment law. He is treasurer of the National
Lawyers Guild and a member of the Guild's Committee on Democratic
Communications. When I interviewed him, I discovered that the
problems that prompted the creation of SAVE KPFA have been
brewing at Pacifica since the early 1980s. Franck talked about
how selection of the board of directors of Pacifica Foundation
used to be more democratic, about the leadership deficit that has
left Pacifica open to the recent attacks from rightwingers like
David Horowitz and Bob Dole, about the differences between PBS
and community radio, and about the original vision of Pacifica.

Q- You have talked about the "fading vision of Pacifica," and in
one of your Folio columns during the 1980s you mentioned founder
Lou Hill's vision of community radio as a tool to help in the
struggle for a just society and world peace. Do you feel that
vision is being kept alive at Pacifica?

A- Here and there, but not nearly enough.

Q- Just what was Lew Hill's vision?

A- Lou Hill went to jail as a pacifist conscientious objector
during World War II. After the war he was a radio journalist in
Washington, DC, and he saw the gathering Cold War storm clouds.
He wasn't allowed by his station to talk about it on the air
because of management's fear of the advertisers. So Hill quit his
job, came out to Berkeley, and started KPFA. The name Pacifica
means peace. Hill said the only way we are going to be able to
talk about peace and justice is if the listeners are the sponsors
and not the advertisers. So, Listener Sponsorship, I've always
thought, and he thought, is the key to the vision of Pacifica,
because the only freedom is when you get your financial base from
your listeners. You're not beholden to anybody. Today you see
Pacifica stations drifting away from this as the language
switches from "listener-sponsored" to "listener-supported."

Q- When did that happen?

A- It started happening under Joel Kugelmas, the first executive
director. He was always talking about "listener-supported" radio.
"Supported" means "give us your money and shut up." "Listener-
sponsored" means, "you're our sponsor, we are responsible to
you." You see the language drifting, except around marathon time,
from "listener-sponsored" to "listener-supported." If you listen
to Public stations, they use the language of listener-supported a
lot.

Q- Did Lou Hill build any democratic structures into KPFA, what
were they, what happened to them?

A- It's an important question. I don't know all the details -
this is what I was told by Elsa Knight Thompson who was hired by
Lou Hill as program director of KPFA around 1950 and became a
major influence on the station and everyone who went through it:
Lou Hill set it up with a large group of staff and community
people which selected the Pacifica board. That's the way it was
structured. The Pacifica board, about 1961, changed the bylaws to
make itself self-perpetuating. It changed itself from a board
elected by this staff and community to a board that elected its
own members. The FCC ruled that was an illegal change of
ownership, but they never did anything about that, they didn't
fine the station, and nobody took advantage of the FCC ruling to
challenge it. It was a real change in the structure. The
democratic vision of a direct link between listeners and the
structure of the station was lost.

Q- What was the motivation behind the change.

A- I think it was a quiet coup. I know Elsa Knight Thompson was
very upset about it. At that time, you had station staff that was
pretty radical and militant and a board that was mostly well-
heeled liberals, which viewed the staff as the unwashed masses -
that was some of the dynamic between the board and the staff.

I don't know, from my own experience, how well this old structure
worked. There is always a problem getting community people
involved in a station when everyone is busy, and while important,
the station is only one of many things in their lives. At the
same time, there is considerable resistance to community
involvement on the staff. Most of the staff are volunteers or are
paid much less than they would make elsewhere. This leads to a
strong feeling among them that they are the station, that they
own the station, and that they are the ones that should make the
decisions.

KPFA used to be a revolving door. Again, going back to Elsa
Knight Thompson, her vision was the station would have a few
seasoned, experienced, progressive people, like herself, who
would train a revolving door of bright young people, who would
then move on to other things. That made it very young, but it
also made it very fresh and in touch. Now people stay there much
longer, and it has lost its freshness. You get an attention to
career that you didn't used to get, a loss of energy and
freshness.

Q- What was the main problem you ran into when you were president
of Pacifica Foundation?

A- I was president from 1980 to 1984, and fundamentally I had a
conflict with David Salkiner's predecessor as executive director,
Sharon Maeda, over the direction of Pacifica. She came out of
public broadcasting. I came out of being politically active on
the left since my first year in college. Was Pacifica going to be
the liberal wing of Public Broadcasting, which was Sharon's
vision, or, as I envisoned, was it going to be the voice of the
progressive movement, reaching the United States with a larger
message.

I took seriously Ron Dellums's challenge. He once told us, "you
have to decide whether you are the newsletter of the left, or the
newspaper of the left." In other words, are you a house organ for
the convinced, or are you an instrument for reaching out to a
broader constituency? I felt very strongly that with five of the
largest FM transmitters in the country, who's signals reach
collectively 20 to 25 percent of the population (when you throw
in the affiliates it's even more), that we needed to reach a much
larger constituency. And we needed to reach them with a message -
what Lou Hill was about - peace, social justice, social change.
That meant that the constituencies that we should be bringing
into Pacifica and drawing strength from were activist
constituencies, trade union constituencies, peace movement
constituencies.

One of the fights at the very end of my term was to get Gus
Newport, Osama Doumani, (who was very active in the Arab-American
Anti-Defamation League), and Carl Bloice (formerly of the
People's World), onto the Pacifica Board. I thought we should
have had William Wimpissinger (the progressive President of the
Machinists' Union) on the Board. That ran up against views of
Pacifica getting more money from CPB, getting more awards from
them, being more popular at the Public Radio Conference, getting
money from corporations and corporate foundations, etc.

Q- Why was the position of executive director created?

A- Until the mid-70s, Pacifica was a very loose corporate
umbrella over five essentially separate stations. Around that
time, the stations started to get in trouble, especially around
issues of accounting and fiscal accountability, and it was
decided that there had to be an executive director of the overall
foundation to make sure that the stations were fiscally sound and
to do the things that were necessary to protect the license and
prevent the stations from getting into trouble. Typically the
station's bookkeepers were people who wanted to do programming
but there wasn't a programming job for them to do, so they would
give them a job bookkeeping, and the bookkeeping was in a
shoebox. We almost lost WBAI when the New York board of charities
required a CPA's audit of all of Pacifica, because it was all one
corporation - and if we hadn't gotten it in time, WBAI wouldn't
have been able to ask for money over the air.

It was becoming a tighter regulatory environment. Reagan
supporters attacked Pacifica by name very shortly after Reagan
was inaugurated. The stations tended to be mom and pop
organizations, very informal. So there was a risk of losing them
for accounting and legal reasons if the Foundation didn't do more
to take care of business. There was also a vision of Pacifica
being more than five separate stations, of doing more powerful
outreach to the country as a whole, so the decision was made to
hire an executive director.

Up to that point, the head of Pacifica had been the president,
who had had the title of CEO, Chief Executive Officer. He (and
all but one were men) was the managers' boss. The managers
formally reported to him.

I was only the third president who wasn't a millionaire. There
was a tradition at Pacifica of old money folks, wealthy liberals,
being involved with Pacifica. About four presidents before me was
Ed Goodman, of the Bergdorf Goodman family, for instance, and
before him was Rudy Hurwich, who made his fortune on the patent
for the Dymo label-maker. As the politics of Pacifica changed in
the 1970s, we ran out of millionaires. We didn't want them
anymore because they tended to bring with them a conservative,
liberal white male upper-class world view.

There was ambivalence about hiring a national executive director.
When the first one was hired, it was made clear that he was
running the national office, but not the stations. At the time
there was a Pacifica National News Bureau in Washington, a
controller (the person who was supposed to keep all the money
stuff together, get the tax returns filed, that kind of thing),
and the Pacifica Program Service, which was the archive. So there
were already three national, non-station units, and the executive
director was put in charge of those three units. He reported to
the president, as did the station managers. So, if you drew an
organizational chart, the five stations and the national
operation were all on the same level. That was the formal
structure which was initially set up. The executive director did
not, initially, have supervisory power over the managers at all.
The managers had a lot of power over him because the managers
have a great deal of the power in Pacifica, in fact, not
formally, but in fact.

Q- It seems now as if David Salniker, as executive director, has
more power than the managers. How did that change come about, and
how is the executive director selected?

A- I believe he is selected by the executive committee of the
national board, which is four or five people. As to why he now
has so much power, you have to follow the money.

The change came about when the FCC changed the rules about
subcarriers. A FM signal is capable of carrying two other signals
on "sidebands," which don't interfere with the primary signal at
all, and those are called subcarriers. For a long time,
noncommercial FM stations weren't allowed to do anything with
their subcarrier frequencies, but in the Reagan era, they
deregulated this, and Pacifica was able to license each station's
two subcarrier frequencies for a lot of money. KPFA was initially
licensed to an outfit that sends stock market quotes to hand-held
gadgets. The subcarrier frequencies are used for a variety of
communication purposes and are very valuable. This was found
money, it was new money, and the decision was made that this
money would be handled by the Foundation.

Up to that time, the money for the foundation came from the
stations. Ten to fifteen percent of station revenue went to fund
the national operation, so the managers, who physically had
control of the money, had a lot of leverage. The change in power
took place when the national got control of this major new stream
of money which came directly to it. Because it was found money,
it was no loss of income to the stations, so they went along with
it. It was an independent pot of money to work with on the
national level. I think that changed the dynamic.

Q- Did you leave the presidency because of a power struggle, and
who were the players?

A- There were personal players, and there were and are larger
forces. There was Sharon Maeda, the executive director, who was
backed by David Salniker, who was general manager of KPFA at the
time. Another key player was Jack Odell, who was (and still is)
chair of the board.

Q- So even then, while he was KPFA manager, Salniker had bigger
visions of power?

A- Yes. He wanted to be Executive Director and knew I would
oppose that.

Q- And what were the larger forces?

A- One was activists, community people who wanted to see Pacifica
reflect the activist movement and be its voice and reach out to a
much wider audience.

There were two other forces, which overlapped. First were the
people whose reference point (the world they wanted approval
from), was the world of Public Broadcasting. They wanted more
money. They weren't worried about corporate underwriting and
corporate grants. They wanted more money for the stations to pay
permanent programmers; wanted the stations to get bigger and
better, the way PBS or KQED (the SanFrancisco PBS station) has.
They were broadcasters, primarily, and often had not come out of
political movements, and didn't want the stations to be doing
things that rocked the boat too much, things which would upset
the people they respected at the CPB headquarters in Washington
and at NPR, and so on.

The third group was also station staff who felt they spoke for a
community, but were not comfortable with the larger vision some
of us had for Pacifica. I felt Pacifica needed to reach a larger
audience. I heard Martin Luther King speak just once, but it was
amazing. In that speech he talked to the sharecroppers in the
audience, and to the PhDs, and to everyone in that huge hall in-
between. That was a model for Pacifica - that this was too
precious a resource to be just talking to the convinced of
Berkeley (which is what some portion of it tends to do
sometimes). We felt that Pacifica was a tool with which we could
really lay the groundwork for changing the country.

The notion of being able to talk to a larger audience without
diluting or losing your message takes considerable skill to pull
off. If we were going to seriously try and reach out that way, a
lot of people on the staff who were there then (and some are
still there), might not still be around, because that takes a
level of skill that not everybody has. So there was resistance on
the staff level to the notion of better, broader, more effective
programming.

Q- It seems as if the staff would have felt even more threatened
by Sharon's agenda of wanting slicker radio.

A- It didn't come down that way. They saw more money coming into
the stations. I don't think her vision of it was as visible to
them as it was to me. The reason SAVE KPFA is happening now, and
I wasn't able to really rally something then, is that these
trends, when they start, are pretty invisible and hard to see,
unless you're right in the middle of it. Sharon's thrust for more
program underwriting and more non-listener funding for
programming was simply seen by much of the staff as more money
coming into the stations. What she was doing to the nature and
direction of Pacifica didn't impact them that much.

David knew I was not excited about him succeeding Sharon as
executive director. I had the sense that he would pull Pacifica
further away from its roots, its pacifist roots, its political
roots, and would go in the direction Sharon had been going. That
he would blunt the edges of Pacifica's vision.

I was also concerned that he would not stand up on important
questions. And he didn't, like on the censorship issue.

Q- He didn't?

A- No, I don't think he did.

Q- He's making a big point right now of how much he is standing
up to Pacifica's attackers.

A- What I'm talking about goes back to the George Carlin case,
the seven dirty words, and the FCC's interpretation of the
Supreme Court decision. Shortly after the FCC came down with a
more restrictive interpretation, there was a question of how much
Pacifica would fight it. Salniker had Ginsberg censor his famous
poem "Howl" on the air. He told him not read certain parts. I
thought at the time that it would have been a strong test case,
and there was no reason to cave in. This was about 1986.

In any case, Pacifica adopted rules that went along with the
FCC's restrictions. The general attitude has been defensive and
cautious: we have these licenses, which are precious (which is
true) and we have to protect them and we can't take risks. The
question is, do you pull your horns in and avoid getting slapped
down by the FCC, or do you make a test case and rally the public
behind you and strengthen the organization. Every time Pacifica
has done that it's come out stronger. But that's not David's
style. You can claim to be a hero if you're attacked. That does
not make it so. If a bully is beating up on you and you try to
defend yourself, it's not necessarily being a hero.

As we all know, Senator Robert Dole attacked KPFK by name at the
Public Radio Conference this summer. What nobody has been talking
about is why, at the beginning of the Clinton era, was Dole the
keynote speaker at the Public Radio Conference? That tells you a
lot about the world of public broadcasting.

Q- When did Pacifica start getting CPB money, what restrictions
are placed on you when you get that money, and do you know what
percentage of the budget is CPB money?

A- We started getting CPB money in the early to mid 1970s. The
percentage grew. When I was president, it was about 18 to 20
percent of the budget. CPB adopted rules that all noncommercial
stations are eligible for the money if they meet certain
criteria, and the criteria had to do with the number of employees
(a minimum of five) and the power of the transmitter. So here the
government is saying, this money is available, and you qualify,
so they went for it. It was a subject of considerable internal
debate at the time.

There are two kinds of CPB grants. One is a matching grant,
matching money you raise elsewhere. That is not really
restrictive, and it's the big chunk of what they used to get.
Then there are grants for particular projects, for particular
programs, which must be spent on those programs. For those you
have to please the grantor.

Q- How do you feel the station has changed since you left?

A- Not much - the same people are there. It's blander. One of the
things I really got in trouble for before I left was for
criticizing the KPFA news. It's bland and centrist and it uses a
lot of filler. The amount of time they spend on actuality - for
example, 15 minutes of a local reporter having sound bites with
various members of the county board of supervisors, when Bosnia's
going up in flames. I see on PeaceNet how much is going on in the
world, and only a tiny fraction of that is on KPFA news. They
waste a lot of air time. Actually, the new National Pacifica
newscast is much better.

Q- How do you feel about the quality of KPFA public affairs
programming?

A- One answer is that I don't listen to it very much. I don't
hear very much that's new and fresh.

Q- From what you say the news was bad pretty far back.

A- It's the same people. David Salniker hired Mark Miracle in
about 1977. He has a pattern of hiring people from outside the
area. He passed over Lincoln Bergman, who had been around the
movement a lot and was a political person. What really upsets me
in the news is the failure to rewrite the jargon in the AP or
whatever wire service they are using.

Q- Being stenographers to power.

A- Yes. Featuring government pronouncements as the main story is
not reporting - its propagation of the official line. For
example, recently they were talking about Lani Guinier. They had
some good actuality, then they said Clinton had picked her as his
top civil rights "enforcer," a negative, loaded word. They pick
up the wire service jargon and code words, and they don't take
them out.

There are alternate news services available to them, which they
don't use because technologically they are a little bit harder to
access. They could be using the InterPress Service, (IPS), which
is based in Italy, and is Third World oriented. IPS moves about
10 percent the number of words that AP or UPI move. I read it a
lot on PeaceNet, and in fact one of the reasons PeaceNet made a
big effort to get IPS on-line was so that Pacifica could use it.
But it's not as technologically easy as it comes across the
computer terminal, and they don't use it.

I don't hear very much on KPFA news that I don't hear on the
mainstream news. From time to time, yes. Some of the experts they
call up and consult for opinions you would never get on the
mainstream news, but that's relatively limited. Just as is done
in the mass media, KPFA news often not only broadcasts lengthy
excerpts from official statements, but they repeat and paraphrase
them uncritically. Such framing, with its tacit acceptance of the
Establishment world view, not only fails to give us any
alternative view, it reinforces the mainstream assumption, and
gives the official propagandists further legitimacy.
Unfortunately, it tends to be mainstream reporting in both
technique and content, which serves the interests of corporate
America far more than it does of Pacifica listeners.

KPFA news recently proudly advertised itself on the air as
"slightly to the left of center." This is not the original vision
of Pacifica.

Q- Do you see the problem arising mainly from the local level,
from the staff, or from the national direction towards
NPRization, or both?

A- There are reasons why the staff that's there is there, and I
don't think it's a matter of personalities. It's a matter of
careers. It's because there is no real job or programming review,
no accountability. There have been sporadic attempts at
instituting such review, but there has never been any serious job
review or quality control. Once someone is in they can stay
forever. It's very hard for a manager to change anything.

Q- That's what [former KPFA manager] Pat Scott said.

A- I think she's right. When I was President I made some
decisions that I might have done differently, with hindsight. I
sometimes backed the managers even when I wasn't sure they were
right, because without strong managers you can't change anything.
There's a tacit, very strong agreement among the staff, "You
don't challenge me, I don't challenge you." "You don't challenge
my lock on this half-hour, I won't challenge your competence." A
mutual, unspoken agreement to protect each other's turf that
keeps everything locked in place. There's not much money in a
Pacifica station salary, so the reward is the air time. The staff
has always been resistant to bringing in outside forces.

Q- Where do you think the problem in Pacifica is?

A- I think it's all levels. I think Pacifica has to be redesigned
from top to bottom - no small task. I'd put together a blue-
ribbon commission of highly respected people, community people,
from all over the country, and figure out how you can restructure
it to get it back to its purposes, figure out what those purposes
mean in the mid to late 1990s.

One thing the KPFA local board did some years ago (before I was
President) was to organize station support groups among the
listeners. We very consciously organized listener groups around
the Bay Area. These groups would distribute folios, do
fundraising, get the word out to outlying communities, and they
would each elect a representative to the station board. We needed
staff cooperation to make the support groups work, but staff was
never interested. Staff, in my opinion, never wanted to empower
the listeners. The Board saw setting up these groups as a
potentially more powerful way of involving the listeners in the
life of the station because if you get groups of people who
really make a commitment to the station, they're going to be more
involved than people just voting because there's a ballot in the
folio. I think that model - of active listener groups - could
have worked.

Q- How did the listener groups get their desires actualized in
the Programming decisions?

A- Each functioning listener group was entitled to send someone
to be a KPFA board member. That was a way of having people
elected who were actively involved, had made a commitment to the
station, and were really working on behalf of the station.



Q- But the board supposedly has no input into programming.

A- That "supposedly" is the key word. A strong attitude has
developed that the board doesn't talk about programming. That's
like saying the board of General Motors can't talk about cars.
This attitude is simply staff building a circle around itself,
saying you can go raise money for us and go hand out folios, but
you can't talk about what the station is going to do. You can't
talk about programming. Of course a board does not decide whether
the news is going to start at 6:00 or 6:15. You don't
micromanage. But you do talk about the direction of programming,
the quality of programming, the priorities of programming. That's
what the station does, and you neuter the board if you say they
can't talk about it.

The staff wants to be able to do their own thing. The managers
really need the community, through the board, to back them up,
but managers have rarely sought that support. Managers want peace
above all else. I used to say that the managers float on a sea of
volunteerism. You ripple anything, you change something, and
everybody's mad at you. Only with the articulate backing of a
true community board can the managers change anything.

Q- What can be done?

A- I think a big part of the problem is the  "vision thing."
Without a well articulated vision of what progressive media could
do for the country it's hard to focus on how badly the Pacifica
vision is fading. You've got the awful mainstream media over
here, you've got KPFA, certainly better, over here. Less well
known to the general listenership are the people who know and
think about media. There is a whole broad international movement,
advocating the Right to Communicate, including the people doing
micro-radio. Those people know that with the resources of KPFA it
could be so much better.

The whole issue of communications, of media, hasn't been on the
agenda much in this country. There is so much more that could be
done with radio than is. There are 120 countries and important
things happening in all of them and hardly any of it gets covered
by KPFA. What SAVE KPFA represents is a percolating to the
surface of a discontent that's taken ten years to reach critical
mass.

I think concentrating on changing the news could be an effective
strategy. It's a funny thing about Pacifica stations. They're
like the emperor has no clothes. They have enormous inertia, but
if you start to really pressure them, they'll bend. I think by
going and sitting down and talking to the news directors, you'll
get nothing changed. Steady public critique and pressure can be
effective.

It would be good if FAIR applied the same critical methodology
they have to NPR, to Pacifica. You might talk to the Union for
Democratic Communications. It's an organization of mostly radical
communication scholars. They have the skills, they have the tools
of content analysis. I think SAVE KPFA is right to concentrate on
the news.

What community radio is doing around the world - what AMARC is
doing (AMARC is the acronym in French for the World Confederation
of Community Broadcasters) - is very progressive, and it's using
radio for organizing in South Africa. I just saw a story about
helping people in El Salvador. There is a whole world of stuff
going on in radio that Pacifica could be part of. I've gotten
involved with the legal defense of micro-radio because they're
starting fresh, without a lot of regulatory paraphernalia. It's
green politics, very grass-roots oriented.

Q- SAVE KPFA is working towards creating a local governing board
of directors to run KPFA, and we ultimately hope all the Pacifica
stations would have this. But sometimes when we talk about this,
people point to KQED's governing board, which is controlled by
wealthy business types. Do you think this could be avoided at
KPFA? Why is it that conservative business interests control the
KQED board?

A- It is built into the original design of Public Broadcasting.
The key document to read in terms of understanding public
broadcasting is the Carnegie Commission Report, which laid out
the blueprint for Public Broadcasting many years ago. What the
Carnegie Commission said is that the upper middle class, the
intelligentsia, aren't watching commercial television, the
country is starting to fall apart. They argued that "we" have to
have a channel for getting to the intelligentsia. So public
broadcasting was conceived as a channel to the educated classes
to keep them tied into the system and to remind them that the
system is good and viable. That's the mission of public
broadcasting, that's what Carnegie, the smart establishment
money, was designing public broadcasting for. That's why I have
never had much faith in the struggles at KQED. The danger of
Pacifica moving in that direction is that it becomes part of that
Establishment agenda, rather than part of an activist agenda of
changing things.

Q- So public broadcasting was created by the establishment elite.
That's certainly very different from the origins of Pacifica.
What do you think Salniker's current agenda is? What do you think
his politics are?

A- I don't think he is very political at all. I think he wants a
bigger Pacifica, a stronger, more powerful Pacifica in the sense
of more money, more listeners, more outlets. Otherwise, he's just
got a boring job. It's the desire to make a difference. He's got
these five stations and within the parameters he's working in,
they're pretty intractable. Nothing much has changed at the
station level in the past ten years. He put out a lot of fires.
But what he could do is build a superstructure - the news, the
national office, and so on.


It's this natural tendency we all have of wanting to build. But
if you haven't got a vision, if you haven't got some politics
guiding what you want to build, then you just build bigger. In my
period as president, I was always somewhat ambivalent about the
centralization of Pacifica. Basically I supported it, because I
saw what Pacifica could do, but growth and centralization bring
with them very conservative tendencies, and if you don't balance
that with bringing in a constituency that will demand that you do
what's necessary - you bring in labor, civil rights, peace, and
so on - then making it bigger is also going to make it more
conservative, more cautious.

Q- And in order to support bigness it has to get big bucks, and
where are those going to come from?

A- They're going to come from the people who have big bucks in
this society, and what is their agenda? It's not Lou Hill's
agenda.

Curtis Gray assisted with this interview.

Triumph of the Principals

Edward S. Herman

Pragmatism: Serving "The Principals"

During 1993 Bill Clinton moved from being a captive of the
McGovern-leftwing of the Democratic Party and the "special
interests" to "pragmatist." The former designation was given him
in his first six months in office when he talked big and made
some minor moves against gay discrimination in the military,
proposed a small economic stimulus, and broached a health plan
that conflicted somewhat with the interests of the drug and other
health industry principals. The business community and New
Democrats were worried that Clinton was allowing "principles" to
interfere with service to "the principals," and he got a bad
press, no doubt partly designed for disciplinary purposes.

But as Clinton brought in Reagan's public relations expert David
Gergen, and retreated on virtually every front--Guinier and civil
rights, fiscal policy, the military budget, antitrust, Haiti,
EPA, the preservation of the ancient forests--and especially as
he made the passage of the NAFTA and trade expansion his central
concern, the attitude of the business community and the tone of
the media became much more positive. He had shown himself to
advantage in resisting labor and the majority of his own voting
constituency and legislative representatives in pushing for
NAFTA. He had demonstrated his toughness by bombing Baghdad and
sending Haitian refugees back to the ministrations of their
leaders. Bill had moved to the "center." He was a "pragmatist,"
definable as serving the "principals" of the socio-economic order
rather than do-gooder "principles"--or democracy itself.

Competitiveness

This key word refers to the ability of firms to make money in
selling goods at home and abroad. As this is to a large extent a
function of the level of wages and benefits to labor, as well as
the taxes and regulations imposed on business to serve the larger
community and pay for business' externalized costs, "improving
competitiveness" is often a euphemism for cutting wages,
benefits, and business taxes, and removing regulatory
constraints. Improving competitiveness may also encompass
policies promoting exports and an "industrial policy," which
means encouraging and subsidizing industries supposedly with
growth or export potential. These are "liberal" policies,
supported by Robert Reich, Lester Thurow and others in the United
States, and the Labor Party in Great Britain.

But conservatives and the business community see wages, benefits
and business taxes and regulations as the crux of the matter. In
speaking of a forthcoming White Paper on competitiveness, British
Tory minister of trade and industry, Michael Heseltine, recently
pointed out that "people will not base industries in Europe out
of charity," and that Europe is going to have to "face up to some
pretty unpalatable changes" as governments try to "enhance the
environments within which industries can thrive."

If, in order to be competitive, business must fire workers and
cut wages and benefits to the bone, isn't this better than their
going out of business altogether? Actually, it would not be
better if worker ownership or the state's deployment of resources
for constructive ends were options. But if free market use or
non-use of labor is the only allowable route, then
competitiveness rules. This condition is interpreted in the
ongoing intellectual fog as the triumph of laws of nature rather
than superior power.

Jobs and Crocodile Tears

George Bush, Clinton and the business leadership and media have
talked incessantly about jobs, jobs, jobs. Bush's and the auto
industry executives` famous trip to Japan in 1991 was, according
to Bush, "to relentlessly pursue our mission to create jobs," and
his Secretary of State James Baker even made protecting jobs a
goal of the Persian Gulf War. This creates an impression of
devotion to the interests of ordinary citizens that is remarkably
hypocritical. We are in a period when the "reserve army of labor"
is steadily increasing in the Free World, and wages, working
conditions and employee security are deteriorating. This is all
functional in a globalizing capitalist order, which explains why
it is allowed to proceed without anything serious being done
about it.

The key measure of societal concern with a problem is the
directness and magnitude of the effort made to deal with it.

In the evolving New World Order (NWO) jobs can only be provided
by private, profit-making businesses; government enterprise is
being liquidated globally, government legitimacy as a producer of
social goods is shrinking, and its responsibility for the
unemployed is under wide attack. The government is no longer
accepted as the employer of last resort, and its support systems
like unemployment compensation are under assault because they
interfere with a "free labor market." The phrase "free labor
market" is the NWO euphemism for "absence of labor bargaining
power and social protection." In a "free labor market" an
isolated and unprotected worker bargains one-on-one with General
Electric Company.

The absence of any direct attack on unemployment as it increases
steadily, and the reliance on the trickle-down effects of
policies serving business to deal with it, tells us clearly that
jobs are not a first order national or global priority, although
the "principals" may worry about social instability and feedback
effects on themselves of massive unemployment. They are not
worried enough as yet, however. After the Los Angeles uprising of
1992, the U.S. Conference of Mayors proposed a $35 billion
spending program, which identified 7,200 public works projects on
hold that, if implemented, would have created an estimated
4l8,000 jobs. Clinton's proposals for direct grants and tax
incentives for enterprise zones over a four year period totalled
$3.5 billion; another $6 billion was to be allocated to housing
expenditures. Even this puny set of proposals was drastically cut
after legislative attack.

But although the priorities are clear, as a majority of people
have a greater stake in jobs than business profitability, it is
good public relations for the elite to pretend that jobs are
their deepest concern and to make them a proxy for the objective
that commands first attention. But when jobs and profitability
conflict, and it is not possible to increase jobs within a frame
of accepted business and profitability rules, jobs are
sacrificed, as we are witnessing globally today.


While business has become the sole acceptable job provider, it
has no  responsibility to protect jobs and workers. Sacred though
jobs allegedly are, the institutions that have been eliminating
them by the thousands are never condemned for this in mainstream
comment; they are even complimented for having taken steps to
improve efficiency, productivity and "competitiveness." There are
daily news reports to the effect that "GTE to trim 13 percent of
workers" in a "restructuring" and "Procter to shed 1,800 jobs in
planned cutback" looking toward greater "efficiency" (both on
Jan. 14). One "trims" excess fat off a piece of dead meat, and a
snake "sheds" its obsolete and dead skin as a new one takes its
place. The euphemisms, including purr words like restructuring
and efficiency, divert attention from the fact that human lives
are being shattered; they normalize the pain of those "redundant"
workers who are "shed" and enable the principals and their agents
to keep their priorities intact in the face of large scale human
misery.

And in the news reports about the trimming and shedding, there is
not even ironical reference to the business leaders' frequent
earlier pronouncements about "team spirit" and the corporation as
a happy cooperative joint venture of labor and capital. The
Japanese tradition of lifetime employment is occasionally
mentioned, often with some relish at evidence of its erosion, but
the issue of whether the primary institutions of society
shouldn't be responsible for their workers and not be able to
throw them on the scrap heap at will is not discussed. This
reflects institutional power.

In  Beyond Hypocrisy I defined "Jobs" as "The basis of and
justification for any enormity." This encompasses using jobs as a
cover for subsidizing business and expending all one's political
capital in improving "competitiveness," as discussed earlier. It
also reflects the more general use of the job rationale for doing
anything dirty and rotten, like selling arms and domestically
banned pesticides abroad, and looting the publicly-owned ancient
forests on a subsidized basis, now conventionally explained as
protecting "jobs" for loggers (versus the rights of the spotted
owl). In the case of the ancient forests, the profit incentive
and taxpayer subsidization of the lumber companies is rarely if
ever mentioned; the capture of the Forest Service by industry is
not discussed; and the other considerations--human, ecological,
biological--involved in the continued massive private rape of the
forests are not addressed.

Capitalism and Militarism

The steady rise of unemployment in the industrialized countries
coincides with the disappearance of the Soviet Union and
consequent great difficulty in justifying further enormous
outlays in an arms race. Many left analysts argued for years that
military spending was the heart of post-World War II Keynesianism
and the linch-pin of western capitalist growth and prosperity.
Under the regime of Military Keynesianism the government
contracted out for production that did not conflict with other
private outputs, helped enlarge and protect foreign market
opportunities, and massively subsidized private corporate
research and construction. This was one area of spending and
"industrial policy" that could always be enlarged without much
opposition in times of recessionary tendencies.

Nevertheless, during the Cold War years mainstream liberal
economists regularly sneered at the idea that capitalism "needed"
the arms race, dismissing it as Marxist ideology that failed to
understand that social spending (or tax reductions) could easily
compensate for declines in military spending. That military
spending was doing so well and treated so lavishly, and social
spending neglected, was in their view a result of historical
happenstance and strictly reactive "defense." James Tobin argued
that U.S. military spending could be explained as simple
"responses to world events," without any need to bring in U.S.
internal and imperial interests. (Tobin even included the Bay of
Tonkin incident of 1964 as an external event and provocation to
which the United States was reasonably reacting. See his 1974
book The New Economics One Decade Older). These guys are really
terrific social scientists; Jeffrey Sachs is working in a great
tradition.

Well, the chickens have come home to roost; military spending is
falling, with the result that over the past three years some
400,000 U.S. arms industry workers have been laid off, but like
the "peace dividend" of the post Vietnam War days, somehow the
political economy is once again not filling the gap with social
spending even though the needs there are huge and pressing. In
part this is a result of the NWO downgrading of the role of
government--and failure of the private market system to take up
the slack. Arguably, also, the huge national debts and deficits
constrain further deficits and government spending. Isn't it
interesting, however, that "the market" and political
establishment didn't get debt and deficit conscious during the
Reagan years of growing deficits that were funding an elite
Potlatch and a huge burst of military spending, but only focused
in on the terrible menace of deficits when they would result from
serving ordinary people?

In any case, western capitalism is now operating under a double
whammy of job loss from the decline in military expenditures and
from firms relocating ever more readily to the most favorable
investment climes in the more open global market. Add to this the
fact that doing anything about such job losses is under potent
constraint from "the principals" of the global market. Perhaps
the threats to internal law and order by the restive majorities
in the G-7 countries will give a boost to the arms and security
industries, helping to bring about a Law and Order Keynesian prop
and a new social equilibrium a la Pinochet and the Argentinian
generals of 1976-1983.            ??
Speech May Be Free! But It Sure Isn't Cheap

Steven Hill

On January 12, 1994 the U.S. Supreme Court took a plunge down the
information superhighway. The Justices heard opening arguments in
Turner Broadcasting System v. Federal Communications Commission
about whether the cable industry's free speech rights are being
trampled by a 1992 federal law that requires cable systems to set
aside up to one third of their channels for local broadcasts. As
telecommunications technologies like cable TV, the telephone, and
the computer merge, billions of dollars in profits are at stake.
The cable industry loses potential revenue for every pay-per-view
or movie channel they must replace with local stations
broadcasting their own mix of local news, sit-com reruns,
educational and culinary programs, old movies and the like.

It is ironic that the cable industry should make a First
Amendment claim in  Turner v. FCC to deny local broadcast, since
the intent of the federal law was to offset the cable industry's
monopoly that was increasingly crowding out the local
broadcasters. The comments of legal scholars on both sides reveal
a contradiction: in the modern age effective speech is neither
free nor cheap. The rights of those who can afford to buy a lot
of speech can drown out the rights of those who can't afford it,
as much as any government censor. Today, speech is property, and
some of us have more of it than others.

But what if we were to take the monolithic free speech provision
of the First Amendment, and break it down into two distinct
categories--wealthy speech and cheap speech? How would that
affect our understanding and policy-making regarding that
doctrine? What if our First Amendment jurisprudence we-re to
distinguish between the free speech of say, the  New York Times
and a soapbox radical, or between General Electric-owned NBC and
a homeless single mother? Or between nationally-based cable
industry leader TCI and the smaller locally-based stations? As
obvious as such a distinction may seem, current First Amendment
theory treats the free speech doctrine as mostly a
nondiscriminating monolith, allowing very little distinction
between the elephants and the ants of the media, let alone
between corporations and individuals or the rich and the poor.
Constitutional conservatives, First Amendment purists and many
civil libertarians take literally the First Amendment
proscription saying "Congress shall make no law abridging the
freedom of speech." No law means no law, they say.

So much for theory. In practice, if the U.S. Supreme Court's past
record in matters of speech is any indication, it seems that the
justices have been quietly making their own distinction between
"wealthy" speech and "cheap" speech for at least twenty five
years. A clear pattern has emerged. During the Warren, Burger and
Rehnquist courts, in case after case regarding matters of speech,
the winner has been the well-to-do and the loser has been those
with lesser means. It's as if, in the eyes of the Court, free
speech is synonymous with wealthy speech, while cheap speech has
been pushed to the margins of First Amendment protection. These
results are troubling, especially since the Court will have an
opportunity  in Turner v. FCC to extend its First Amendment
jurisprudence to the emerging telecommunication technologies.

For instance, in 1984, Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote the
Court's decision striking down Congress's efforts to restrict
campaign expenditures made by political action committees like
the National Rifle Association, in  Federal Election Commission
v. National conservative Political Action Committee. Rehnquist
seemed to think he was being inordinately fair and
nondiscriminatory when he reminded us that the Court's decision
applied equally to multi-million dollar PACs as to "informal
discussion groups that solicit neighborhood contributions to
publicize their views."

This decision followed a consistent series of decisions by the
Burger-Rehnquist Courts expanding the wealthy speech rights of
banks, private corporations and millionaires on the one hand, and
restricting the cheap speech rights of the grass roots and
community activists. During the past two decades the Court has:
upheld the right of banks to spend money to influence the outcome
of public referendums; affirmed the right of millionaires to
spend unlimited personal funds on their own elections ("Thank
God!" says Ross Perot--"Too bad" says Larry Agran and Ron
Daniels); affirmed the right of utilities to include statements
on issues of public policy with their monthly bills to their
customers; struck down laws used to curb state regulation of
commercial advertising; and in March 1993 reaffirmed that
advertising and commercial speech are accorded substantial
constitutional protection, a status that did not even exist prior
to 1976. The only deviation from this pattern was the Court's
affirmation of a Michigan law prohibiting corporate spending in
support of political candidates. I

These decisions are in stark contrast to others involving the
exercise of cheap speech by those poorly financed causes of the
grass roots. In these cases the majority found ample
justification for government restriction, often as a means to
protect private property. For instance, the Burger Court held
that shopping malls, despite having replaced public town squares
as the new public arena, were private property and not subject to
the First Amendment (since then, a few state courts have decided,
under their own constitutions, that malls must accommodate free
speech). Also, the Burger-Rehnquist Courts have ruled that the
federal government could prohibit the deposit of leaflets and
circulars in the mailboxes of private homes; that the Fairness
Doctrine did not have to be extended to include the print media,
opening the door to a repudiation of the Fairness Doctrine by a
Reagan-appointed FCC; and that the Combined Federal Campaign,
which facilitated charitable contributions by federal employees
through payroll deductions, could exclude from participation
advocacy groups such as the NAACP and the Sierra Club (a decision
which was subsequently reversed by Congressional action).

In addition, the Court has also manipulated "time, place and
manner" restrictions, ruling that the city of Los Angeles could
prohibit the posting of posters on public property such as
utility poles and trees; that the managers of a publicly operated
state fair could limit the activities of religious solicitors to
an assigned booth and bar them from the crowded midway; that
homeless people could be prevented from conducting a symbolic
sleep-in at the public park opposite the White House; and that
the sidewalk in front of the post office could be placed off-
limits to political solicitation. In all of these decisions the
Court's reasoning seems to indicate that the homeless and poorly
financed have available to them other channels of communication
than those being restricted, since they are entitled--just like
major corporations and wealthy individuals--to use their own
private resources, however meager, to publish their own newspaper
or set up their own PACs that can spend unlimited amounts on
their lobbying efforts. Apparently in the foot race of the First
Amendment, it doesn't matter if a competitor is of Olympic
caliber or a grade-schooler, as long as all competitors begin at
the same starting line.

This historical context is essential for understanding the
magnitude of  Turner v. FCC, and other cases regarding the
telecommunications industry and the information superhighway that
will be heard by the Supreme Court in the years to come. As a
result of the rapid growth of communications technologies, vexing
legal questions will be revisited concerning computer bulletin
boards and the like, questions of libel, of pornography and
obscenity over the wire, of rights to privacy, of exposure of
children to violent and adult material, and so on.

But perhaps most vexing of all is the question of the
availability of the new communications technology to the general
public. In a few short months, Congress is slated to auction off
to the highest bidder 120 megahertz of frequencies for cellular
and personal communications services. The going price for each
frequency is at least in the tens of millions of dollars, and the
Congressional Budget Office estimates that the auction will raise
$10 billion for the Federal Treasury. At that price, only the
wealthiest will be able to afford to buy. Wireless communication
and other telecommunication technologies are poised at what could
be the 21st-century version of the great Western land grab,
except only the land barons will be eligible.

"I tend to look at cable and telephone as part of one big food
chain," said John Malone, chief executive of cable industry
leader TCI, in a moment of candor. "Right now, the higher mammals
are doing the eating."

"We're throwing 120 megahertz out there and it's going to change
the world," cautions the FCC's Tom Mooring. "We don't know for
sure what's going to happen, but we do know it's going to shake
things up."

The government has established a few mitigating rules, setting
aside a portion of the frequencies for minority-owned businesses
and limiting how much frequency any existing cellular companies
can control in a given service area. Yet these types of
restrictions and set-asides are exactly what the cable industry
is presently fighting as a violation of their free speech rights,
in lawsuits like  Turner. The ability of many individuals to pay
for access to the information superhighway is in no way
guaranteed, and existing economic disparities could easily be
exacerbated, the gap between rich and poor, between the haves and
have nots, intensified. To an uncomfortable degree the public's
accessibility will be in the hands of a U.S. Supreme Court which,
as we have seen, has had an ideological sympathy with wealthy
speech over cheap speech.

Is it wise to allow the First Amendment to be captured like this
by our economic system? Some legal experts and policy advocates
are beginning to question certain constitutional presumptions,
sounding an alarm that the new telecommunications technologies,
like free trade agreements, may exacerbate anti-democratic and
authoritarian tendencies.

"As history has shown time and time again," says electronic media
consultant David Bollier, "the unfettered marketplace will not
produce a telecommunications system which adequately serves the
full spectrum of society's needs." The free market model is not
truly operative here, insists Bollier, since market forces push
the electronic media toward monopoly. And the few large media
players that survive, gobbling like Pac-Men for ever larger
pieces of the market, are pushed by commercial forces toward
homogeneous programming. Despite the availability of thirty or
more channels, the familiar complaint is that "there's nothing on
tonight." Does anyone actually believe that 100 or 500  channels
will change this? The free speech of TCI and the Turner
Broadcasting Company, or NBC and the  New York Times, has not
yielded even a close approximation to the classic "free
marketplace of ideas," says Bollier. Nor have the media offered
choices in any way equivalent to the diverse kinds of expression
that make up U.S. society.

The new telecommunications infrastructure has the potential to
serve as an instrument to reinvent and liberate contemporary
media. But this will require fresh imaginative federal policy, as
well as a U.S. Supreme Court capable of reversing its past
allegiances to wealthy speech over cheap speech. Policy advocates
who favor the public's accessibility to the telecommunication
technologies must recognize the very real and significant
differences between wealthy speech and cheap speech, and cease
treating the free speech doctrine of the First Amendment as a
nondiscriminating monolith. A jurisprudence acknowledging the
difference between wealthy and cheap speech, and in addition
upholding a principle that society has a compelling interest in
valuing the latter even at the expense of the former, will put
the public's accessibility to the information superhighway on a
more solid footing. Set-asides of cellular frequencies for
minority-owned businesses is a good start, as are setasides for
local broadcasters and for those wacky Wayne's World programmers
of late-night public access television. Such trends need to be
defended when attacked, and broadened and strengthened.

Indeed, the very principle of set-asides is under attack in
Turner v. FCC, just as affirmative action set-asides like those
for minority contractors have been assailed. But what is
significant in  Turner is that the set-asides are under attack by
a free speech argument. It is counter-productive to ignore the
complexities and ambiguities of such an attack. People with
little money need effective speech as much as people with a lot
of money--arguably more so. But in the 1990's, because effective
speech is sold to the highest bidder, cheap speech may become an
increasingly irrelevant and endangered species. Regrettably, the
public space for cheap speech is actually shrinking as local,
state and federal governments and courts restrict public
postering, leaflets on car windshields, leaflets in shopping
malls, use of amplified speech in public areas, and other forms
of cheap speech. But the solution cannot be simply a cry for
"more speech," since that does nothing to alter the market forces
that are corralling the First Amendment.

First Amendment purists and civil libertarians who claim to be
for the public's accessibility to the information superhighway
and for a monolithic nondiscriminating free speech doctrine fight
for one at the expense of the other. But a jurisprudence that
argues for a compelling interest to expand cheap speech even at
the expense of wealthy speech offers a viable route out of this
dilemma. Anything less perpetuates a free speech doctrine that
has allowed the U.S. Supreme Court's sorry track record the past
twenty five years, during which capitalism has almost always won,
and "We, the People" have almost always lost.

Stay tuned this summer, when the U.S. Supreme Court will render
its decision in Turner v. FCC.


Steven Hill is a Seattle-based writer, community organizer and
co-editor of the Activist Men's Journal.