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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 21, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------Protesters defend WBAI against Pacifica management
By John Catalinotto
New York
WBAI Station Manager Valerie Van Isler became the latest target of an assault on the influential progressive radio station when the Pacifica National Board tried to fire her in early December. By Dec. 7, some 400 supporters of the station had rallied in her defense, along with radio journalists Bernard White, Amy Goodman and others, for a demonstration in midtown Manhattan.
Pacifica is the national network of which WBAI is a member.
Goodman co-hosts the award-winning show "Democracy Now!" with Juan González. Bernard White is WBAI's program director.
WBAI journalist Earl Maitland, who was severely injured by cops at the funeral of police-brutality victim Patrick Dorismond last spring, returned to "The Morning Show" in time to help rally support for Van Isler and the station.
The protesters gathered at the office of John Murdock at Park Avenue and 47th Street. Murdock is a recent addition to the Pacifica National Board. He is a corporate attorney whose firm, Epstein, Becker & Green, specializes in "maintaining a union-free work place." In other words, Murdock is a union-buster.
WBAI supporters demand that Murdock be removed and that Pacifica stop its attacks on the station. WBAI is the only listener-sponsored station in the New York area free from government and corporate control.
Along with a selection of music and cultural shows impossible to find on commercial radio, WBAI broadcasts dozens of news and discussion programs that allow views to the left of the Democratic Party to be expressed.
An organizing center
The station is also an organizing center for progressive activities and meetings in the New York area, both for large mass events and for those organized on short notice. It is especially noteworthy for its thorough coverage of police brutality, the struggle to free political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier and Lori Berenson, and exposing U.S. human-rights violations worldwide in programs like "Democracy Now!".
Beginning in the early 1990s, national Pacifica management adopted a plan to make deep structural and programming changes that have moved the network away from its original progressive, community-based focus.
The Pacifica National Board majority has targeted the stations with the most activist and honest news programming--KPFA in Berkeley, Calif., and WBAI in New York. Its goal is to eliminate these progressive alternatives to the monolithic imperialist media that dominate the airwaves.
Valuable licenses
Because these stations operate in the large San Francisco and New York metropolitan areas, their operating licenses are also the most economically valuable in the Pacifica network. Some board members have promoted a plan to sell off one or both stations to finance the network. But the main objective is to neutralize Pacifica's political message.
In the spring of 1999, Pacifica management flew from Washington to Berkeley to impose a gag order on KPFA staff. The Washington management had police come in and arrest staffers so that they could impose their own programming. Then they ordered the station occupied by security goons at a cost of $10,000 a day.
The struggle grew and finally drew in the masses of KPFA supporters. On July 31, 1999, some 15,000 people demonstrated against the Pacifica National Board and for the KPFA journalists who had been fired.
This fall, the national board turned its attention to WBAI, focusing its attack on the station's decisions to air Cuban President Fidel Castro's speech at Riverside Church, the support some of the journalists gave to publicizing Ralph Nader's presidential campaign, and Amy Goodman's impromptu interview with President Bill Clinton, where she asked tough questions instead of submitting to his agenda.
It is just these decisions, many area activists believe, that make WBAI worth fighting for.
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