What is happening to Pacifica Radio?

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Hillel Aron (laweekly.com, 3-21-14)

KPFK is the L.A. affiliate of Pacifica Radio, which Lewis Hill began in Berkeley in 1949.

Left-wing Pacifica Radio is sliding into the abyss

(Illustration by Ian Keltie)

On March 13, after weeks of rumors, Pacifica Radio's board of directors voted to fire its executive director, Summer Reese, during what was essentially a conference call. 

 

But nothing is as simple as all that in the oldest and oddest public radio network in the country.
 

"We desperately need adult supervision.” 

- [CIA mole and longtime KPFK radio host] Ian Masters

 

Four days later, Reese sent an email to the entire Pacifica staff announcing that she was not recognizing the board's authority: "I want to assure you that I am in possession of a signed and valid contract for three years of employment from the board of directors and that I fully intend to complete that contract."

 

And so it was that Reese marched to the Pacifica national office in Berkeley on March 17th, bolt cutters in hand, removed a padlock placed on the front doors over the weekend, and essentially occupied the building.

 

When newly appointed Interim Executive Director Margy Wilkinson showed up, Reese and 12 of her compatriots -- including Reese's mother, a longtime anti-war and civil rights activist -- refused to let Wilkinson, her husband, and two of her allies pass.

 

"You're all going to be personally liable -- and I'm going to enjoy your houses!" Reese shouted at them, according to former board member Sasha Futran, who backs Wilkinson. More

• LA Sheriff candidates to be quizzed about "mass incarceration"

Social Media: The First 2,000 Years (audio)

Wisdom Quarterly; Tom Standage, Mitch Jeserich (KPFA), Frank Rose (NY Times, 11-1-13)

Through the ages: A Roman wax tablet and its 21st-century electronic descendant, the iPad.

The Romans had social media and tablets. The Victorians had an Internet. We are taught to believe it's novel, but it's the way things were before media got centralized. Technology has just returned us to where we were with everything potentially faster and cheaper.

For nearly 20 years, we’ve thought of “new media” as the brash young upstart and “old media” as the stalwart if increasingly embattled establishment. 

But what if new media aren’t as new as we assume -- and old media not really old at all?

 

Social media history (popscreen.com)

So argues Tom Standage in Writing on the Wall, a provocative book that asks us to look at media less in terms of technology -- digital or analog -- than in terms of the role they invite us to play. Are we passive receptors for whatever facts, opinions, and ad messages come our way? 

Or are we participants, sharing what we like with others, amending or commenting in the process? The second is characteristic of the Internet in general and social media in particular. But there’s nothing revolutionary about this, Standage says. 

Instead, it’s the role of consumer, so typical of 20th-­century mass media, that’s unnatural -- and to Standage, a historical blip. This observation has been made before, but never with such a wealth of information to back it up. Standage -- the digital editor at The Economist and the author of such unorthodox chronicles as... More

Writing on the Wall: Social Media — The First 2,000 Years by Tom Standage. Illustrated. 278 pp. Bloomsbury.

• Letters and Politics, Dec. 26, 2013, 10:00 am
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