Archives

SAN FRANCISCO, (AFP) A generation after Pacifica radio made a mark opposing the Vietnam War, the pacifist broadcaster is making a comeback, offering a dissenting voice as most American media are accused of cheering on the US invasion of Iraq.

Fifty-four years after its founding by pacifist Lewis Hill, the station based in the traditionally left-wing California university city of Berkeley with the call letters KPFA delivers a mix of savvy reporting and critical commentary, unapologetically underpinned by Hill's original anti-war message.

"If you are listening to KPFA news, you are more likely to hear a peace activist than a retired general," said news co-director Aileen Alfandary, explaining what makes the station stand out.

Accusing mainstream US media of serving as "cheerleaders" for US war policy, officials at KPFA say they offer their tens of thousands of listeners in and around San Francisco a much-needed alternative view.

Unlike numerous other US broadcasters which appear to back the official US stance, KPFA stresses the plight of the Iraqi people, who it says are most affected by the war.

Alfandary notes that KPFA has broadcast US peace rallies live, and in late March it broadcast a 10-hour UN Security Council session on the US attack on Iraq.

"It is particularly important to let people know what the rest of the world says about the war," Alfandary said.

It is a difference which has given KPFA - along with its four sister stations in New York, Los Angeles, Washington and Houston, and more than 50 affiliates around the country that share programming - a new lease on life after losing audience share in the 1990s.

"People are really hungry for the kind of information we give them," explains Larry Bensky, host of a current affairs show on the station. Bensky says he is swamped with callers to his Sunday morning program, which features news reports from around the world and interviews with anti-war scholars and activists rarely heard in the mainstream media.

It is a familiar role for KPFA. During the 1960s and 1970s, the station was a key source of information for the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements.

It broadcast peace rallies live and dared to air bold exposes of Federal Bureau of Investigation misconduct and the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, which mainstream commercial media shied away from.

It was KPFA that in 1974 broadcast the notorious taped message in which kidnapped heiress Patty Hearst branded her press baron parents "capitalist pigs".

"I can't overestimate the importance of Pacifica in the sixties," said Columbia University journalism professor John Dinges, a Pacifica alumnus. "They were the station you listened to if you were against the war."

KPFA was the country's first listener-supported radio station, eschewing advertising to depend on donations from its audience. It became the model for the now mainstream but intellectual National Public Radio (NPR) network.

"NPR probably wouldn't exist if Pacifica didn't come first," said Leslie Peters of Audience Research Analysis, a public radio research firm in Maryland. In the 1980s, the station continued to serve as a beacon for the American left, covering events such as the US government's Iran-Contra arms scandal.

But Pacifica lost its cachet in the 1990s against the growth of audience-targeted cable television and NPR's rapid expansion, and it began losing its listeners while becoming riven by an internal schism.

Station officials concede that refusing to dictate a political or editorial policy can result in the airing of extreme views which draw criticism from the left as well as the right.

The station was ridiculed in 2001 after some announcers blamed the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on the Central Intelligence Agency. But Dinges calls KPFA's news reporting solid and serious. "They have real journalists, and they think about what they are doing. They think about it in a political way, and that makes them different."

Alfandary says the public response to KPFA's fund-raising drives in October and February that brought in more than a million dollars each was proof of the growing support for its increasingly un-politically correct message.

www.crescat.com

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager