The Left Eats Its Own at KPFK

KPFK Responds LA Weekly film critic Ella Taylor's story on the situation at KPFK, "The Left Eats Its Own at KPFK," paints a picture of a tiresome conflict seen many times before by long-time participants and observers of political struggles within the Left. The intensely biased piece is an attempt to get readers who know little of the situation at KPFK to buy into her framework to understand the conflict. An important problem with the story she tells is that it rests on inaccurate facts and misleading assertions and attributions, and it misrepresents both the actions and the intent of those it reports on. At its heart, the story is a thoroughly distorting and trivialized vision of the motivations and goals of the Pacifica reform movement, which is comprised of hundreds and thousands of people nationwide who have struggled against such misleading caricatures for years now. Read more >>

Word is out that I'm working on a story about the latest coup at KPFK, and troops from both sides are massing on my voice mail, my e-mail, my editors' voice mail in varying tones of panic, paranoia and PR.

The radio station's interim manager, Steven Starr, worries that the opposition is giving me a distorted picture of what's going on. A woman who had pitched a KPFK story to the L.A. Weekly a year ago leaves me precise instructions on how my piece should be written. A member of the newly rejuvenated Local Advisory Board, fondly or otherwise known as the LAB, wants to set me straight about the "antics" of Marc Cooper, host of the station's most popular drive-time talk show, who was suspended by Starr for refusing to raise funds for the new KPFK because he didn't like the direction in which it was headed. And my in-box is buried under an avalanche of variously furious, anguished or waggish electronic mail from the dispossessed, who have taken to calling the LAB and the national board "the Branch Pacificans."

Going in, I imagined I would write a wry, detached account of yet another brawl at KPFK, yet another palace coup in the long history of Pacifica radio wars. My piece would be about two camps of battle-scarred lefty partisans fighting over very little, yet convinced that the Earth was at stake. I'd seen such futile wrangles elsewhere, notably in my years as a college professor, when people of allegedly higher intelligence fought to the death over the protocol of office supplies. It's an old story in any hermetically sealed organization where no one outside the zone of combat gives much of a damn about the issues or the outcome. But on the marginalized far left, whose history is pocked with struggles over minuscule differences of policy or procedure -- distractions from the task of playing gadfly to the powers that be -- infighting is second nature. Over the years I've taught myself to knit, crochet, and sleep with my eyes open at meetings where the agenda was the agenda.

Except that as I sank into the thick of things, the battle at KPFK began to matter, to reveal itself as more than an internal power play, more even than a struggle about what counts as good alternative radio. Can it really be that the left in Southern California, which apparently helped fuel the station's highly successful February pledge drive, is willing to have its agenda set by people who give airtime to black separatists who refer to other blacks as "paint jobs" and "Uncle Toms," or to a nutball conspiracy theorist who got ample airtime in the closing hours of the fund drive to persuade us that the CIA plotted the attack on the World Trade Center? KPFK's troubles, which stretch back over the years since the station was founded in 1959, offer a case study in the widening abyss between two wings of the aging American left over the question of whether to go forth into the world speaking truth to power, or languish in splendid, and increasingly irrelevant, isolation. On one side are the '60s activists who have become intellectuals and argue that the left must work from within society and refine itself through dialogue and debate. On the other are the '60s activists, mostly hard-line Marxists or self-appointed guardians of minority identity, who believe that any contact with corporate capitalism and white elites contaminates and dilutes the cause.