Statement of the Board of Directors
of the Free
Speech Movement Archives,
July 30, 1999, regarding
the
KPFA / Pacifica controversy:
The Free Speech Movement Archives was established to disseminate information
about the 1964 struggle for free speech on the Berkeley campus.
Pacifica radio, in the form of KPFA, was a vital link
between the campus
political organizations of 1964, the campus community,
and the community at
large. At a time when newspaper, radio and TV reporting
was hopelessly
slanted, KPFA was a beacon of fair reporting and open
discussion of issues of
concern to the Free Speech Movement. Its coverage of the
Bay Area civil rights
movement, the rise of the New Right, and the developing
war in Vietnam helped
us understand the context within which the University was
moving to stifle
dissent. Without KPFA's reporting of our campus conflict,
the Free Speech
Movement would have faced a much more difficult task in
securing the political
rights of citizenship for students.
We now find that the Pacifica Foundation, created by the
founders of KPFA as
merely an institutional vehicle to hold the license, has
developed a
bureaucracy and policy of its own which seem counterposed
to the survival of
stations like KPFA. In apparent pursuit of mindless
growth and bureaucratic
self-aggrandizement, Pacifica has moved to shut down KPFA
as a community-based
information channel. This has been made possible by the
undemocratic
insulation of Pacifica from its roots in the stations and
their subscribers.
Like the University administration which galvanized the
Free Speech Movement,
the Pacifica Foundation may have secured the technical
right to this level of
control, but it has failed to recognize the community's
passion to exercise
the rights guaranteed to citizens. In both cases a swift
response from
communities that held important stakes in free
communication broke through the
facade of "business as usual" and brought the
issue to the forefront of
public attention.
Both struggles have brought larger issues into focus.
While the Free Speech
Movement began over a fairly narrow issue, it quickly
raised larger issues of
the undemocratic nature of the university structure. The
present conflict has
revealed the slow erosion of the community radio ethos
throughout the Pacifica
network, and the fact that undemocratic structures are a
positive danger to
media serving community needs.
The Board of the Free Speech Movement Archives supports
the struggle of the
KPFA broadcast staff and volunteers in seeking to keep
the station firmly
based in the local community. We support the effort to
ensure that all
Pacifica stations are part of an open, democratic
structure. From our
experience, we know that it is impossible to overestimate
the value of an open
forum to the life of the community.
(The following Board members have abstained from voting on this resolution:
Margot Adler, Kate Coleman and Reginald Zelnik.