Pacifica Radio 2E (American Subjects) - Softcover

Lasar, Matthew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566397774 ISBN 13: 9781566397773

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Examines the external pressures and organizational problems within the Pacifica Foundation that led, in early 1999, to the police shutdown of network stations KPFA. This title calls it the worst crisis in the history of community radio. It is the story of Lewis Hill and the small band of pacifists who in 1946, set out to launch KPFA.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Lasar was a reporter for KPFA's news department through most of the 1980s. His essays on the social history of free speech debates have appeared The Journal of Policy History, The Journal of Radio Studies, and Pacific Historical Review. He has a Ph.D in United States History from the Claremont Graduate University.

From Publishers Weekly

In the first book-length study of Pacifica Radio, Lasar recounts the history of "our nation's only independent nonprofit [radio] network." In 1946, activist Lewis Hill and four other conscientious objectors formed the Pacifica Foundation to offer California pacifists a public forum. Pacifica was denied an AM frequency but soon began broadcasting on FM as Berkeley's KPFA. As a subscription-based station, it was forced to "aim at a smaller more exclusive audience than originally envisioned," Lasar reports. Quickly stigmatized as "eggheaded," it courted the Bay's affluent, college-educated community by offering alternative journalism, storytelling, classical music (with a smattering of blues and folk) and forums on topics ranging from radical politics to Eastern thought. By the early 1950s, influential commentators such as Pauline Kael and Kenneth Rexroth filled Pacifica's airwaves. Under the pressures of operating budgets and McCarthyism, the station began to tone down its provocative programming. It aired controversial discussions of Howl, in 1957, for instance, but edited a tape of Ginsberg reading the title poem (KPFA explained that it had excerpted segments "for radio broadcast... simply as a matter of taste"). Lasar concentrates on the conflicted early years of Pacifica's development without elaborating on the network's later achievements, such as its expansion and crucial Vietnam coverage, in which the network supported Bertrand Russell and I.F. Stone and sent the first American news correspondent to Hanoi. Lasar's emphasis on administrative squabbles makes this history more useful as a behind-the-scenes account of Pacifica's growing pains than as one that clearly establishes a historically significant media company's vital role in the nation's public discourse.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566397774
• ISBN 13: 9781566397773
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277