Left-Wing Darling Pacifica Radio Is Sliding Into the Abyss
...
Pacifica has a long and storied history, and still features such leading liberals as Amy Goodman, the widely known host of Democracy Now! (on which journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill are frequent guests), but it has fallen on hard times of late. Listenership, according Reese, is "extraordinarily low." During an average 15-minute period, just 700 people listen to its Los Angeles station, 90.7 FM KPFK, for at least five minutes, according to Nielsen Audio, which monitors radio ratings.
For L.A.'s other public radio stations, KCRW and KPCC, that number is 8,000 and 20,000, respectively. KPFK draws roughly one one-thousandth of all radio listeners in the Metro Los Angeles area.
Pacifica's New York station, WBAI, is even worse off, with too few listeners to register on the Arbitron rankings, and is all but bankrupt. Last year, most of the staff was laid off, including the entire news department.
Making matters worse, the federal government, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is withholding Pacifica's grant money, thanks to the network's "failure to provide documentation" for a 2012 audit.
Read the whole article at: http://www.laweekly.com/2014-03-20/news/left-wing-darling-pacifica-radio-is-sliding-into-the-abyss/?showFullText=true
bananas
(27,509 posts)Pacifica had been hijacked by assholes who wanted to make it an NPR clone, they even banned Democracy Now!. But Amy Goodman continued to produce it, and it aired on independent stations. Roy Tuckman got around the ban for a while by calling it "The Amy Goodman Hour" and airing it during his show - but management put an end to that, too. A lot of stations dropped their Pacifica affiliation - but continued to air DemocracyNow!
The article leaves all that out, and tells a whopper of a lie by claiming DemocracyNow was "privatized".
PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)please post it.
Brief NY Times article on WBAI from Feb...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/business/media/wbai-still-fighting-deficits-fires-its-programming-chief.html
bananas
(27,509 posts)Here are some articles from when DemocracyNow! was banned:
Pacifica Radio Bans "Democracy Now"
by Laura Flanders
http://www.monitor.net/monitor/0108a/democracynow.html
CHRISTMAS COUP ROCKS PACIFICA'S WBAI:
PURGE TARGETS COMMUNITY BASE, RADICAL VOICES
http://freepacifica.savegrassrootsradio.org/freepacifica/xmas/haiti_progres-wbai.html
Democracy Now! Returns to the Pacifica Radio Network, After Five Month Ban
NY Home Station WBAI defies new listener-backed board, censors live broadcast
Filmmaker Michael Moore Calls WBAI live on Democracy Now! to ask: "Where Am I?"
http://www.commondreams.org/news2002/0107-05.htm
A Dose of Democracy, Now
WBAI Listeners Get Their Station Back
By Jennifer Block Tuesday, Jan 15 2002
http://www.villagevoice.com/2002-01-15/news/a-dose-of-democracy-now/
yurbud
(39,405 posts)proverbialwisdom
(4,959 posts)erpowers
(9,350 posts)If they want to get their viewership up maybe they could bring in Stephanie Miller and let her bring a few corporate sponsorships with her. If they are really opposed to the corporate sponsorship maybe they could give her a similar deal to the one they gave Amy Goodman.
Following NPR's lead may not be such a bad thing. Maybe Pacifica should try to create more Democracy Now! type shows. Hour long show that discusses current events topics.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)Its greedy Board of Directors destroyed it by forcing them to tone down the leftism and serve corporate sap instead of catering to the Left with hard-hitting stories you don't get in the corporate media. Instead of listening to listeners they just kept making it sappier. I think this was deliberate.
Workers and listeners lost out again. What's so wrong with giving the listeners what we said we want?
Thanks for the update.