RadioPoetics.org

San Francisco Bay View -- 16 February 2008 by Rip Robbins
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Rip Robbins is the manager of KSVR 91.7 FM at Skagit Valley College in Mt. Vernon, Wash.
Original article at: http://www.sfbayview.com/20080216907/News/Web_Exclusives/How_to_reverse_...
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HOW TO REVERSE DECLINING AUDIENCE AND FUNDING
AT KPFA AND OTHER PACIFICA STATIONS

Pacifica stations boast of their support for Black and Brown revolutionary voices of the past like Paul Robeson, the Black Panthers and Cesar Chavez. While such voices are rarely heard today, some brave programmers like Fidel of Divine Forces Radio on KPFK in LA here interviewing POCC Chairman Fred Hampton Jr. are succeeding in attracting new Black and Brown listeners.

One Pacifica affiliate raises four times the funds from Spanish-speaking farmworkers as from English speakers

I was a Pacifica board member - representing affiliate stations - for the past two years. The Community Service Grant (CSG) income from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has dropped from about 5 percent of overall budget to about 3 percent. At least two of the stations are the cause of the reduction.

The CFO (chief financial officer) at Pacifica is well aware of the reduction of CPB funds and works to meet the grant requirements in a shallow manner that certainly does not provide for any meaningful role for the Community Advisory Board (CAB, a prerequisite for CPB funding).

I and others suspect that the monthly and quarterly financial reports issued have actually used CPB money to cover other deficits, which would be illegal under CPB rules, but directors at Pacifica were unable to get any specific accounting of the CSG for any of the stations during hearings last September.

And now the CFO is basically in solo control of all finances, with no supervision and without any open records policy. I am happy to send a typical Pacifica CFO report to anyone upon request to demonstrate how little can be understood in it.

The directors in charge usually congratulate the CFO on his fine work and move on to more interesting business, such as who insulted who at the last Local Station Board (LSB) meeting and what the Pacifica National Board (PNB) will do to punish someone about it.

The latest executive director to swing through the revolving door of leadership had just enough time at the job to decry the crazy accounting, wondering why it was so cryptic, saying that financial reporting software was simple and commonplace and asking why the board was accepting these confusing and jumbled reports that seem to violate normal practices. Legal expenses for pending lawsuits do not have set-asides in the operating budgets for potential settlements, restricted building fund gifts appeared to be used to cover monthly payroll etc.

I did not pursue the matter at the board level but did get a response from the CPB that the financial reports required each year are public documents. However, as expected, they were hesitant to provide them, and I did not try to force that issue. (I have my own station to run. If Pacifica people don't care about it, why should I?) Most of the board directors at Pacifica don't have a clue about the rules, regulations nor opportunities offered by the CPB in regard to the Community Service Grants.

Most station staff and listener reps think the CSG is a simple handout and loudly complain when the CFO announces reductions in the grant amount as has happened in the past two years. Some have claimed that they believe the CPB is cutting Pacifica due to political reasons.

However, it seems to me from my observation over the two years that most station reps do not want to address the decline in listeners that has been the singular reason given by the CPB for the reduction in support.

The actual reason as indicated by CPB criteria for reducing a Community Service Grant is the decline in listeners and/or the failure of a station to reach a minimum level of listeners in its signal area. Another measure is the ratio of membership to potential listeners.

The formula for determining minimum listener levels is based on population per square mile within the primary signal contour.

WBAI (Pacifica's station in New York City) can claim about 225,000 listeners, according to the CFO public report in January 2008, but that is considered such a small amount for a Manhattan-based signal that reaches so many millions of people that CPB has reduced the grant to WBAI because it is saying that the station is not being successful at using the money to increase audience.

Of the 225,000 claimed listeners, fewer than 10 percent are members. Each election cycle, stations such as WPFW (Pacifica's station in Washington, D.C.) and WBAI and probably others employ mysterious manipulations to reach the bylaws-mandated 10 percent quorum for the listener elections.

In 2006, WPFW mysteriously received five empty ballot envelopes on the last day of the extended election period in order to meet quorum.

With such small membership, these Pacifica stations are not meeting the low standards set by CPB for a "successful" station.

The majority in power at the LSB (Local Station Board) at WBAI claims that their audience is actually much larger but does not get reported - a "ghost" audience. They claim that Arbitron is, by default in its methodology, an organization that does not and cannot adequately survey minorities.

To me it is odd that Hip Hop/ Rap stations seem to have plenty of Arbitron survey results, that the Haitian radio channel which broadcasts on an FM side-carrier channel (SCA) - which requires a special receiver - reports to have MORE listeners than WBAI. More Brazilians dance in the street in NYC during their annual mid-town street fair - an estimated 600,000 in 2006.

Leaders of the majority-in-power at the WBAI LSB claim that membership is low because their audience is too poor to contribute anything.

Hmmmm.

My station has undocumented migrant farmworkers for listeners, and they come to our fundraising dances and pay $25 for a ticket to dance to local dj's because they believe in KSVR. We make nearly four times the revenue from the Spanish-speakers as we do from our English-speaking audience.

If a station is truly providing a public service, the public will support it. That's my philosophy.

Several of the Pacifica stations now allow non-paying members, although I consider that to be an oxymoronic situation. Personally, I consider the adjustment to allow non-paying friends of those running for office to be the largest example of cronyism and corruption of the new bylaws, far surpassing the questionable use of legal mailing lists to simply mail out political literature. Mailing something cannot result in stuffed ballot boxes, but signing up friends as non-paying members is absolutely leading to skewed democracy within the organization.

I'm no defender of the CPB, and I actively fought the HSP (Healthy Station Project) created by the CPB and NFCB (National Federation of Community Broadcasters) in the mid-1980s at the college station I was at in 1989-90. We lost the struggle and all got dismissed - but I take the grant at face value. The purpose for the Community Service Grant (CSG) is to provide some financing to improve programming and services in order to increase audience.

KSVR received its first CSG last year, and we are having no problem with interference from CPB, no arm-twisting to conform to any HSP, but we will need to demonstrate some positive results next year from the infusion of money. With five new programming series in production and a bunch of new equipment for our staff, I predict KSVR will definitely increase audience because of better programming, better marketing and internet services, and improved mechanisms for bringing in more of our community to participate.

We are not simply targeting the few leftists in our conservative rural area - preaching to the choir - after all, we have been airing Democracy Now! and similar programs for over 10 years. We are quite comfortable with our position as the voice of progressives in our community.

Our new approach is to bring more of the "silent" majority into our tent.

For instance we now have an interview show featuring folks from the fraternal orders - Rotary etc. - and chambers of commerce from area towns that airs right in between progressive political discussions.

More and more we find that we now we have "mainstream" listeners - who tune in to hear their friends or about their organization activity - exposed to those progressive radio programs which come on right before and afterward.

These folks are the ones we believe can benefit the most from our programming, which is not heard on the stations these folks usually listen to.

Isn't that the hope of the Lew Hill mission? (Lew Hill founded the Pacifica network and its first station, KPFA, in 1949.) To engender more discussion among more of the population? To share more viewpoints, not the same viewpoints ad nauseum?

I just don't understand the lack of success in building audience that Pacifica stations are experiencing, even though I understand program change takes time, except that the problem must be endemic to the procedures and processes regarding new program development and implementation, the purposeful ignoring of listener measurement data and/or the lack of inclusion of new voices by those who are in control.

One important factor at KSVR is that management and volunteers are willing to fit these new programs and adjustments of shifts into our schedule for the betterment of our community. These changes are ongoing at KSVR, starting way before we got any federal grant. This concept of program schedule flux seems to be a major obstacle at most Pacifica stations.

The Pacifica governance-heavy committee structure actually kills the potential for much change, since the committees are filled with special interest folks elected in partisan bickering among the supposed "democratic" masses. It is my understanding that the same folks who are in the majority-in-power at several stations are the same folks that sit on the committees that make these decisions, resulting in a system of decision-making that is actually quite autocratic instead of independent.

Many of these representatives think that their friends' shows MUST be on the air or else the Pacifica Foundation has failed in its Lew Hill-driven mission, which never called for decision-by-committee anyway.

A mistaken perception by many in Pacifica, is that with a truly democratic process, everyone gets their way. I continually read posts that claim that if only Pacifica would employ REAL democracy, things would repair themselves.

Duh, that's really wrong.

There is a difference between getting your VOICE heard in a debate and the implication that what you said will be included in the final determination or outcome.

In most democratic voting actions I have witnessed in my life, a significant portion of the group does NOT get their way. However the unwillingness of the "losers" in a particular vote inside Pacifica to concede and the unwillingness of the faction in power to accommodate different perspectives is the underlying explanation for the complete stasis of the Pacifica governance experiment at both the local and national level.
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