By Dan Coughlin

The "Christmas Coup" at WBAI last year did not occur in a vacuum. In the last 15 years there has been an incredible process of media consolidation. And this process has nowhere been more dramatic than in the radio broadcasting industry. While it's easy to see the San Francisco Examiner leave the streets, or New York Newsday, it's less obvious when Clear Channel and Viacom gobble up every radio station available on the market. Over half of all radio stations in the country have changed hands since the FCC last relaxed ownership rules in 1996. One effect of this process is that Pacifica Radio's five FM licenses, which were once almost worthless, are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is this commercial context that is affecting not just Pacifica but all major public broadcasters— just like corporate interests all over the world are affecting public telecommunications, public libraries, public health, public education, publicly owned companies of all kinds. This is a process that we variously call globalization or privatization. And, as a public entity, Pacifica Radio is not immune from this process.

Public broadcasting in the United States does not really exist anymore. And this is not just because of the corporate underwriting of PBS's Lehrer news hour, or most public television and radio for that matter. Public broadcasting has been tied for years to multinational sponsors like GE, Archer Daniels Midland and Merck. But now these broadcasters are linking their futures directly with private corporations.

Recently, one of the most significant developents in public radio is the joining of Public Radio International (PRI) and National Public Radio with auto giants and telecommunication outfits to develop satellite radio. By year's end, many new cars will be installed with a radio receiver that will receive digitally streamed broadcast programming from satellites.

Daimler-Chrysler has invested about $100 million in one of these ventures; the Blackstone group, a major Wall Street firm, has put up $200 million. This has profound implications for content because Daimler-Chrysler is not investing in digital broadcasting to have NPR or Pacifica talk about Daimler-Benz's labor record under the Nazi regime during the '30s and '40s, or the pollution of a Daimler-Chrysler Jeep plant in Toledo, Ohio.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced last year that it was providing NPR with $1 million to develop programming for this private venture, yet another example of how the public till is raided for private profit. So public broadcasters are unambiguously tying their future to the Daimler-Chryslers, Fords, Lucents, Sonys. They have not linked themselves to local communities, not to the farm workers of the California Central Valley, not to the new movements against the globalization of capital, or even the educational and religious and rural organizations that fought for and created public broadcasting in the first place.

As Pacifica Radio News Director from 1998 - 99, I found myself in meetings with representatives from Microsoft, PRI and CPB. They were telling Pacifica about news coverage or how to restructure the network or how to sell stations or how to subcontract out station management if a sale is not politically possible or why to receive corporate underwriting, or why to shift entirely to webcasting.

This might be shocking to some, but it is the federal government, corporate America and powerful broadcasters that were and are shaping many Pacifica policies. At the barbecues, at the cocktails, at the public radio conferences, these are the people who are buttonholing senior Pacifica managers and trying to shape Pacifica policies and all of radio broadcasting in the country, not just public broadcasting.

Alongside this restructuring of the industry is also a dumbing down of the content on public TV and on public radio. Even Pacifica is feeling these same pressures. Public broadcasters, Congress and corporate America have put pressure on Pacifica to conform, to tone it down, to supposdly be balanced, to keep Mumia Abu-Jamal off the air. "Balance" to them is Coke versus Pepsi, Republican versus Democrat. It's not that if you have a General Wesley Clark on your program, you should have a peace activist as balance. The very idea of the media as the fourth estate, as a check and balance on the government, is unacceptable. To be critical of power is unacceptable; you're just supposed to regurgitate what power says uncritically, and that's considered reporting.

But there is an alternative. We do not have to become allied with private interests or become Washington-centered. We do not need to listen to the finger-wavers telling Pacifica to go main-stream and abandon its mission of peace and social justice. Instead of cutting off our community roots, we need to deepen them. Instead of dumbing down, we at Pacifica need to smarten up. Instead of just trying to sit at the table in the castle, we need to go to the cottage. And we have very successful models of this approach within our network.

WBAI, for example. Over the years, it's successfully reflected the social and political currents changing this country: immigration, police brutality, the African diaspora, student sweat-shop activists, the international human rights movement, globalization, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence.

At the same time, WBAI sharply increased its audience over the last decade and had the first million-dollar fundraiser in community radio history. It achieved these milestones not by killing its community roots, or by abandoning Pacifica's mission. Quite the reverse: It strengthened its mission and community ties.

Too often the Pacifica debate is framed between those who want to improve the quality of programming and build audience, and those who do not. The issue, as I see it, is instead: How do we build for the future, how do we improve the network, how do we improve our programming, how do we build audience? This debate has important implications for how the network is organized and what kind of programming we do.

We at Pacifica need to have a democratic media organization, one that starts from the bottom up, one that is accountable, a media that can deepen and grow through participation and representation, not by exclusion and repression.

We need to deepen our relations with communities and broaden our political work at the grassroots in order to ensure that Pacifica Radio stays true to its mission: A voice for people trying to change the society in which we live.