Familiarity Breeds Contempt? Not Hardly

Several members of my online writing group are in that most frustrating part of the writing cycle where they are sending work out to agents and publishers, waiting on pins and needles and dealing with the inevitable slew of rejections that are, hopefully, the prelude to eventual offers of publication or representation.  This has led to a spirited discussion of the role of “gatekeepers” in the rapidly changing publishing world.  Are they really interested in bringing new voices to readers, or are they only interested in higher profits?

Without claiming any special knowledge, I would assert that they are interested in both, but the two are sadly less compatible than they once might have been.  It’s always been the case that everyone wants to find the next big thing, but once they do, everyone else feels the need to jump on the bandwagon and not get off until diminishing returns force them to look elsewhere.

Star Trek was nearly cancelled
after one season

I would also posit that some combination of the increasing homogenization of our external world and the insecurity caused by environmental, social and economic upheaval makes people crave the familiar, which thanks to the internet, is always at their fingertips.

Last week, a virtual earthquake shook the radio station where I am a chattel worker – um, I mean unpaid producer.  Our Interim General Manager announced a new morning lineup, including a slightly revamped version of the old Morning Show, which was taken off the air a year and a half ago.  The former Morning Show producers and hosts have made it their single-minded focus for the last year and a half to bring it back, blaming its cancellation for every problem the station has ever had, from lack of money to declining listenership.  This despite the fact that the show was cancelled in the first place because the station had a half million dollar budget shortfall – which has now been made up, and that the station’s subscriber base has remained relatively constant (and low) since the 1950s.  Film critic Pauline Kael, who volunteered at the station, complained when she left in 1963 that management was not doing enough to increase listener sponsorships.  At that time there were about 17,000; at our peak in 2003, we had about 28,000, which had dropped to around 20,000 before the most recent layoffs.  In the same period, California’s population grew by 225%, and KPFA is heard through one-third of the state.

In their campaign to get the Morning Show reinstated, the producers and their supporters had viciously and publicly attacked Interim General Manager Andrew Phillips.  They also embroiled the station and its parent network in costly lawsuits (which were thrown out), picketed the station repeatedly, and at times encouraged their supporters to give money to a separate Morning Show fund instead of to the station.  Andrew had said very publicly several times that the show would not go back on the air.  Many staff on the other side of station politics reacted to last week’s announcement with shock and horror, feeling the message it sends is that bullying pays.

Staff also feel that we’re moving backward rather than forward.  The Morning Show was a traditional news magazine, produced and hosted by paid staff, covering the issues that are important to KPFA’s core audience, which is 65% white men over [50].  Its replacement was a show called The Morning Mix, produced by a diverse, rotating group of unpaid staff.  The style and issue focus of the Mix vary, depending on who is producing and hosting.  The paid producers at the station have refused to help them, so the production quality also varies.  Some listeners like it much better than the old Morning Show, some stopped listening altogether, some like certain hosts and hate others.  The show has steadily built both audience and fundraising capacity over the last fourteen months.  It has definitely brought in new voices and listeners.

When the new-old show, “Up Front” debuted last week, in the middle of the fund drive, it raised three times as much money as any other single hour during this drive.  However, there’s some indication that the new show might be pulling money from similar shows.

I recently heard George Lucas talking about how he could not get a studio to make “Red Tails.”  I mean, this is the guy that made Star Wars!  But studio execs didn’t believe he could get people to go see a movie about Black fighter pilots.  When the film did well, these executives were shocked.  “Hollywood studios were stunned by how well the No. 2 film, George Lucas banner film Red Tails, did in matinees today. Until they discovered that the Lucasfilm/Twentieth Century Fox movie’s marketing inside the African-American community resulted in busloads of schoolkids and midday filmgoers for the Tuskegee airmen’s story.”

Brenda Chapman had to fight
to convince Pixar to make a film
with a female action hero

It is true, though, that you cannot build an audience overnight.  You have to do it over time.  In bygone days, television and radio stations could sometimes take the time to do that, because people did not have that much choice.  When I was growing up, we got four television channels.  If you didn’t like a show, you had a strong incentive to give it a chance to grow on you, if it was on at a time when you wanted to watch television.  Some of the most popular shows ever were nearly cancelled after their first season.  Star Trek was saved from the ax by a letter-writing campaign after its first season, but cancelled after three because of low ratings, only to live forever in late-night reruns and spinoffs.  “Cagney& Lacey,” which caused hours of angst for me and my politically correct feminist friends (because we all loved it), was renewed only after CBS replaced too-butch Meg Foster with the more “feminine” Sharon Gless.  The show was cancelled again after its first season, and again restored by viewer organizing.

Now, no one would take such a chance on a show that was losing market share.  They can’t afford to, because not only will they lose audience during that time slot, but they might lose it permanently.  If people flip the dial, they will probably flip it back, but if they turn off the TV and turn on their computer or download something on their Kindle Fire, they may never come back.  Check out "The 15 Best TV Shows That Were Canceled Too Soon" to find out what you've missed because of this instant make-it-or-break-it mentality.

That’s why authors, performers and producers have to spend so much time “building platform,” something else we talk a lot about in my writing group.  If you want anyone to take a chance on you, you have to show that you already have an audience.

We like what’s familiar.  That’s why series do so well, whether in print or on film.  I have to admit, if I have a choice of a show I never heard of or a rerun of “Law & Order,” I’m likely to pick the rerun, even if I’ve seen it five times already.  I do watch new things, I read books by new authors, but I like to mix them liberally with things I’m accustomed to.  Obviously, this is not unique to me, or “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2”, “Transformers: Dark of the Moon”, “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1”, “Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol” and the all-important “Cars 2” would not have been the top grossing movies of 2011.

What is it about us, I wonder, that makes us seek the comfort of what we know, even when we realize that everything familiar was new once?  How do you decide to try something new, and how long do you give it?

When Are Radical Gender Activists Going to Get Out of Our Own Way?

This morning, in observance of Corporate LGBT Pride Day, KPFA talk show host Philip Maldari actually devoted an hour to radical queer politics, or more precisely, to a critique of gay marriage. It was not bad. Of course, the two guests didn’t give credit to any of the people who have been making that critique and doing the activism to back it up for years, but they raised important issues. But then Philip, a gay man who until quite recently never identified himself as such on the air, said that he, and KPFA in general, never interviewed Harvey Milk back in the day because they considered Harvey too reformist for their then-revolutionary station.

“He was getting people to register to vote, saying ‘Forget about the revolution,’” Philip alleged.

Now first of all, that’s just not true. Harvey Milk was probably an arrogant jerk in a lot of ways, but he was very radical, and he never said anyone should give up on the revolution. He was pursuing electoral office, yes, but as part of a broad progressive coalition that briefly transformed San Francisco politics. He was the one who went bar to bar to get gay bars to drop Coors beer, building a coalition with unions to oppose Coors’ anti-gay and anti-labor policies.

And secondly, if that were the reason for ignoring Harvey Milk, you would assume that KPFA had interviewed a lot of radical queers to critique the mainstream gay movement. I’m pretty sure if you go back and look through the archives from that period, you’re going to find that they did not do that.

The real reason that the dominant group at KPFA didn’t interview Harvey Milk is the same reason they have not covered the campaign to get Israeli money out of the LGBT film festival or the Ban the Army, Not the Queers work: because they’re f***ing homophobes and have no critique of the patriarchy. It’s the same reason staff members like Philip are always trying to get rid of the one hour a week of gender-oriented programming KPFA has had for the last six years, and the reason KPFA has no queer show.

The Marxist left defined the gay movement and the women’s movement as bourgeois and reformist. To this day they refuse to pay attention to any but the most mainstream elements of those movements, and then use their bourgeois reformism to justify ignoring queer and women’s issues.

Neither of Philip’s guests challenged his revision of history. Of course, neither of them was living here during the time of Harvey Milk (I wasn’t either, but I moved here the year after Milk was killed, and got involved in the still-very-vibrant queer left within a few years of that), so they may not actually know either how progressive Milk was or how uninterested KPFA was in anything queer. They also didn’t challenge him because they are part of an unfortunate tendency by radical feminist and queer activists to collude in our own expungement.

The fact is that pretty much every social movement has its assimilationist mainstream, its radical and conservative wings. The queer movement is in no way unique in being painted in the mainstream media with the single brush that makes us look the most like the dominant society. But the women’s movement, and by extension the LGBTQ movement which grew out of it, may well be the most universally blamed for our own repression.

A couple weeks ago I went to a panel at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival where Erica Huggins, a leader of the Black Panther Party, spoke. She said that one of the things that contributed to the downfall of the Party was not dealing with misogyny and sexism in the group. I have heard a few women make statements like that before, but I’ve never heard anyone say that the main reason the Party ultimately failed to make lasting change was because of such internal problems. Clearly internal dynamics, including between men and women, contributed to a culture of suspicion which was exploited by the FBI in its COINTELPRO. But if divisions had not already existed, the FBI infiltrators would have set out to create them. Most of the left recognizes that it took a mighty effort by the government to bring down the Panthers.

Students for a Democratic Society, the Free Speech Movement and other parts of the student counterculture were as white and middle-class dominated as parts of the second wave women’s movement and the post-Stonewall gay movement. But I don’t hear people using the cultural and class homogeneity of the student movements to dismiss their achievements, despite the fact that they didn’t bring down capitalism or end U.S. wars for empire.

But when the women’s movement is discussed in left-wing circles, its failures are attributed almost solely to its racism and narrow class base. Hardly anything is ever said about the concerted effort to dismantle the gains of the feminist movement, a backlash as intensive and pernicious as COINTELPRO. (In fact, it bears mentioning that parts of the women’s movement were targets of COINTELPRO.) If you listen to the mainstream media, patriarchy’s resurgence can be laid at the doorstep of male-bashing sex-negative bra-burners. If you listen to left media, you’ll blame the bourgeois biases of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.

Young women who are products of Women’s and Gender Studies programs at prestigious colleges say, “I don’t call myself a feminist because feminism is a white thing.” That’s almost the only thing they know about feminism. They don’t know that Michele Wallace, author of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman and a member of the Combahee River Collective, says “I’ve never understood how any woman could not be a feminist.” They don’t know that Egyptian doctor and former political prisoner Nawal el-Saadawi, said in a recent interview, “There are many feminisms, and I am a revolutionary anti-imperialist feminist.”

Revolutionary feminists and queer activists have an obligation to stand up for our own history. Everyone loves to believe they are doing something brand new and exciting, but the honest truth is, few of us ever are. It doesn’t make what we’re doing less valuable to give credit to those who came before us, and to those who are standing right beside us.

Twice Censored: Underreported Women's and Gender Issues of 2010

I was trying to think of what to do for last Monday's Women's Magazine, the first show of the New Year, when I ran across the Project Censored List of Top 25 Censored Stories of 2009-2010. Guess how many of those 25 stories related to a women's or gender issue?

You guessed it: NOT ONE.

Does that mean women's issues get lots of attention? I don't think so. But it does point to the masculinist bias of even the progressive media and media watchdogs.

So I built the show around a dozen or so women's or gender issues that I feel were short-shrifted last year.

Check out my list, and let me know what you would have put on yours.

The Mad Hatter's Tea Party Comes to KPFA

I hate to say it, but what is going on at KPFA is a lefty version of the Tea Party. People are using the rhetoric of freedom, fairness, workers’ rights and diversity to subvert democracy, diversity and a lot of community programming. And they are determined to destroy probably the most valuable resource the left in this country has. (They're also, in general, good progressive people. I want to say that out front. I am friendly with some of them. But I believe they are good progressive people with a very bad vision for community radio.)

They’re extremely well organized, they are extremely unified, and they have been able to get their talking points broadcasting non-stop on the airwaves. And the people who know the truth and oppose what they are trying to do are either being timid or complacent, keeping their heads down, not organizing, talking in platitudes, wanting to compromise.

And when it is done we are likely to have lost both Pacifica and KPFA.

It’s about workers’ rights.

It is about workers’ rights, but not the right to organize or have a fair contract. It’s about the right of certain workers, who run the union, some of whom are or were managers, to decide who and what goes on the air, without meddling by ignorant community members.

The “union busting” offense that Pacifica committed was laying off people at the bottom of the seniority ladder, rather than people who raise less money in on-air fund drives. This offense is specifically required by the contract and rearticulated by the union negotiators when the contract was renewed last spring. (Tracy Rosenberg, who participated in the meeting where the two possible sets of layoffs were discussed, outlines the choice in an open letter. [I have some issues with Tracy, who has used her positions as both a KPFA rep to the Pacifica Finance Committee and Executive Director of Media Alliance, to wage political struggles against KPFA board members she has conflicts with. Even so, I found the evidence she presents pretty convincing.])

(Note: Pacifica's ED showed terrible lack of strategic sense in the way that the layoffs were done. I disagree with taking the Morning Show off the air before replacement hosts were lined up. If it's true that she has refused to talk with the union leadership, I condemn that, and I strongly disapprove of hiring Folger & Levin, a union-busting law firm, to defend against a lawsuit rather than trying to work with the union. But that doesn't change what I know to be true.)

It’s about democracy.

It is about democracy. The people who are vocally demanding their jobs back and their allies on the local station board don’t believe in it, at least not for KPFA. They insist that board elections are a waste of money. They have openly said that the only role for the elected community leadership is to raise money so that paid staff can make all the decisions about programming. They disparage unpaid staff – many of whom have been at the station much longer than most of them – and paid programmers they feel are not up to their lofty (white) standards of professionalism. (Larry Bensky famously referred to all of us as “clowns” on Michael Krasny’s Forum two weeks ago.) They disbanded the Program Council, the mechanism for community input into the programming grid, and de-recognized the Unpaid Staff Organization, which was established when unpaid staff were kicked out of the union.

Brian Edwards-Tiekert, the principal spokesperson of this “Save KPFA” movement and one of the laid off hosts, was quoted in a recent article as saying, “Fifteen hours of airtime were dedicated to candidate forums for the local board. We spent more time covering KPFA’s election than Afghanistan’s and Iraq's elections combined.” Fifteen hours a year doesn’t sound like too much democracy to me. If that’s more time than we spent on the Iraq and Afghan elections, that might say something about our coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan, but it doesn’t say anything about the value or lack thereof of KPFA elections.

It’s about diversity.

The union is on the warpath because the hosts of the Morning Show were laid off. The person who has been most vocal, and whose job is the reason that there can be no peace (Brian Edwards-Tiekert again), is a white man. He and the people who support him have used the fact that a number of people of color chose to accept severance packages to make it seem that they are standing up for diversity at the station. In fact, at least some of those people of color left because those same people made them feel unwelcome. That’s not conjecture – one of them told me that personally. He said the show he helped to start, Hard Knock Radio, probably the single most unique show on KPFA, is devalued because they can’t raise much money through on-air promotions. They could raise a lot of money through concerts, but KPFA management (not Pacifica) would never agree to front money for security, venues and fliers for concerts, though they frequently put on speaking events, often taking a loss in order to get a recording they can use for premiums during fund drives. When the “Save KPFA” team goes on and on about how the Morning Show raises more money than anyone else, that’s in part a dig at Hard Knock.

A year and a half ago, the clique that runs the union and the station proposed eliminating Women’s Magazine to make room for a weekly “greatest hits” version of Letters to Washington. They did eliminate an hour of Music of the World for the daily version of Letters. In September, the station managers, who were part of that clique, proposed eliminating Hard Knock Radio and Flashpoints. If that had happened, they would not be picketing or screaming about injustice, despite the fact that the programmers on those shows have much more seniority than the Morning Show staff who were laid off.

The producers of Poor News Network, which airs on the Morning Show once a month, recently wrote in an open letter, “Throughout our tenure on KPFA we have consistently faced internal harassment and a varying amount of disrespect from paid staff on the show, saying we were airing ‘too much Spanish’ and/or our people didn’t speak correctly, even to the point that when we were supposed to produce a second show per month, which Andrea Lewis fought with for, it was vetoed in the end for not being ‘professional enough’.”

It’s about local control.

It is. The people who are protesting and picketing at KPFA feel they would be better off independent of Pacifica and the other four stations. They don’t care if people in Houston and DC lose their Pacifica stations, they don’t care if Free Speech Radio News or even Democracy Now can continue broadcasting, as long as they get to keep the money they raise locally. (FSRN and Democracy Now are funded by Pacifica, out of the money they get from the five member stations and the affiliates. People in the know have said that Democracy Now might be able to survive on syndication fees alone, but FSRN never could. It is a source of news that is not heard anywhere else, and a source of income and training for local journalists all over the Global South.)

If KPFA cannot pay its bills and Pacifica cannot raise the money to bail it out, the entire network goes into bankruptcy. This part is rumor, but I am pretty confident of it: that is what the ruling clique hopes will happen. They are amassing a war chest to buy the station by encouraging people to withhold money from Pacifica and put it in a separate fund instead, as was done in 1999. This idea did not spring up only after the layoffs – many people believe the $375,000 check that was supposedly misplaced by the previous General Manager was intended for this purpose.

But there is no guarantee, and in fact it is unlikely, that that is the way a Pacifica bankruptcy would end up. It would be up to a bankruptcy judge who would not be bound by Pacifica’s mission statement or any other concerns. The chair of Pacifica’s board recently wrote, “The outcome of bankruptcy hearings will not be five progressive stations running their own affairs, but more likely two commercial stations and three new Christian radio channels.”

Of course, they may hope to force Pacifica to sell KPFA to them under threat that otherwise, they will take the whole network down. If they succeed, they will not only be free of the “albatross” of Pacifica’s expense (though they will have to assume a lot of expenses that are now paid by Pacifica including insurance, licensing fees and auditors). They will also be free of those pesky bylaws and the democracy they foist on us. They will be able to do away with the local station board and the Program Council and get all us scruffy unprofessional “clowns” off their airwaves.

In the recent board election, the top vote-getter was Mal Bernstein, of the “Save KPFA” slate. In an on air candidate forum, he stated that the “core shows” on KPFA are the Morning Show, Against the Grain, Letters to Washington, Sunday and the evening News. Notice anything about those shows? Notice what that “core” does not include? If he and his allies win this fight, we can assume that what we will hear is more time devoted to shows like those, and less time to shows like Hard Knock, Voices of the Middle East, La Raza Chronicles, APEX and Full Circle.

A friend recently asked me, “Who is organizing for the real left/people of color at KPFA?” The sad answer is, I fear, no one.

No doubt, the KPFA Tea Party (or should I call them the Tiekert Party?) will dismiss me as exactly the type of conspiracy theorist/snake oil huckster they are trying to banish from our airwaves. You may choose to believe them, but keep this in mind: the other Tea Party also denies that its rise has anything to do with racism.