The Pacifica Radio Network
Midweek Politics airs on an affiliate of
the Pacifica Radio Network and is syndicated for all Pacifica member
stations.
Pacifica Radio is a network of five
independent owned and operated, non-commercial, listener-supported radio
stations, one associated station, and 90 affiliated radio stations in
the United States that is known for its leftist and pacifist political
views. Some other U.S. and Canadian community radio stations also carry
some Pacifica programming. Pacifica was the first public radio network
in the U.S. The network is run by the Pacifica Foundation (a.k.a.
Pacifica Radio Foundation).
Pacifica Radio's audio archive is the nation's oldest public radio
archive, documenting 50 years of grassroots political and performing
arts history. The Pacifica Radio Archive houses original recordings of
interviews with John Coltrane, Lorraine Hansberry, and Langston Hughes,
among many others.
History
Pacifica was founded in 1946 by pacifist Lewis Hill who was born in
Kansas City, Missouri in 1919. During World War II he filed as a
conscientious objector. After the war he and a small group of
ex-conscientious objectors created the Pacifica Foundation. The
foundation's first project, KPFA in Berkeley, California, was
inaugurated in 1949.
For most of its history, Pacifica gave each of its stations independent
control of programming. Then during the 1990s, a major controversy arose
over rumors that the national Pacifica board was attempting to
centralize control of content, in order to increase listenership. The
rumors also included accusations that the board also proposed changing
the network's funding model away from reliance on listener donations and
toward corporate foundation funding. There were also accusations that
the Board was considering selling both KPFA and WBAI, which operate on
commercial broadcast channels. The frequencies were and are worth
hundreds of millions of dollars. All of this led to years of conflict,
including court cases, firings and strikes of station staff, and public
demonstrations. Many listeners to the individual stations—especially
KPFA in Berkeley, California and WBAI in New York City—objected to what
they saw as an attempt to tone down the overtly political content on
Pacifica stations. The controversy included highly publicized disputes
between listener organizations and Mary Frances Berry, the radio
network's chairman.
The board eventually was embroiled in counter lawsuits by board members
and listener-sponsors, and after global settlement of the lawsuits in
November, 2001, an interim board was formed to craft new bylaws, which
it did in two tumultuous years of national debates among thousands of
listener-sponsors and activists, finally giving listener-sponsors the
right and responsibility to elect new local boards at each of the five
Pacific stations, whose boards in turn elect the national board, all of
which are now subject to accountability and recall by the listener
sponsors.
Pacifica National News Director Dan Coughlin was voted Interim Executive
Director of the network in 2002. But the years of internal legal battles
and financial mismanagement had taken a toll. As of late 2005, the
network was still on somewhat shaky financial ground, and was operating
with an interim executive director. In early 2006, Pacifica hired Greg
Guma as the new executive director of the Pacifica Foundation.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacifica_Radio
