In the early morning hours of Saturday, December 23, 2000 programming at radio station WBAI-FM in New York City suddenly ground to a halt. Utrice Leid, a well known producer and host of the afternoon program "Talk Back," went on the air to announce that she was the new general manager of the station, replacing long time administrator Valerie Van Isler. "There are no SWAT teams here," announced Leid to the stunned listenership at 1:40 a.m. "This is not a coup."

But it sure looked like one. Leid and managers from WBAI's Washington-based parent Pacifica Foundation changed all the locks in the station, installed security guards, restricted access to a list of "approved" persons, then fired and banned key producers and staffers from the station. Also fired were Program Director Bernard White, who hosted the popular morning show "Wake-Up Call" and the show's producer and WBAI shop steward Sharan Harper. They were awakened early Saturday morning by a courier informing them that they had been sacked and that if they came to the station, they would be arrested.

WBAI staffers and listeners immediately protested the move, calling it a "Midnight Massacre" and a "Christmas Coup." " We deplore the [Pacifica] Foundation's coming in secret in the middle of the night at the start of a holiday week-end to change the station's locks, and the illegitimate installation and imposition of new station management," protested WBAI staff members, including "Democracy Now!" host Amy Goodman and "Afrikaleidoscope" producer Elombe Brath. "We deplore the firings, the bannings, the presence of security guards in the station, and the denial of access to personal property belonging to staff."

Listener-sponsored WBAI in New York City has long been an independent voice for community and activist groups in the New York area and internationally. Through its programming—particularly through "Democracy Now!"—it has helped fuel resistance to the World Trade Organization, the death penalty, police brutality, violence in East Timor, injustice against immigrants, and media disinformation about Haiti, to name just a few issues.

The station's radical programming and grassroots character has increasingly vexed the rightward drifting Pacifica Foundation, which owns WBAI and four other radio stations around the country. The Pacifica National Board is moving to centralize control and soften the left-wing content of WBAI and other stations. Some board members have advocated taking corporate funding for programming.

Pacifica Radio was formed in the 1940s by radical writers and conscientious objectors to World War II who started the network as a forum for marginalized voices and a vehicle to promote peace and social justice. They started broadcasting out of KPFA in Berkeley, California, in 1949 and pioneered the concept of listener support through contributions, shunning commercial advertisements. The formula worked and, in addition to KPFA and WBAI, Pacifica Radio now owns KPFK in Los Angeles, KPFT in Houston, and WPFW in Washington.

In the 1980s, Pacifica managed to secure funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a federal agency funded by the U.S. Congress, despite the opposition of some Republicans. But the additional support turned out to be a double-edged sword. Since the mid-1990s, the CPB has prodded Pacifica to end its radical programming and to wrest control of its stations from local listener boards. Congress had sharply objected to Pacifica's airing voices like that of famed journalist, former Black Panther, and death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal.

In 1998, Pat Scott, who was the Pacifica Board's executive director, "solicited an opinion from the CPB, which then began to directly interfere in our governance structure, which they had never done before," explained Mimi Rosenberg, the co-host of "Building Bridges" a labor-oriented program. "The result was that the national board completely severed its relationship with the Local Advisory Boards [of Pacifica's member stations] for fear that CPB funding would be lost."

"Previously, each local Pacifica station elected two of the national board members. Gradually, some national board members began to seat their friends and allies as at-large board members. With the at-large seats they could put on the board whoever the hell they wanted," Rosenberg added. "Then finally, you had a bylaw change which resulted in a board which was 100 percent self-appointing."

To make matters worse, the national board's executive committee began to illegally make decisions without ratification by the full board, a move that is now being challenged in court.

In March 1999, the crisis between the national executive and local stations exploded. Pacifica fired the general manager of KPFA and a number of other producers. Listeners and the community objected, and Pacifica closed down the station for 23 days. Pacifica reopened the station only after 10,000 people joined in a single protest in the summer of 1999.

The model Pacifica station for most national board members is KPFT in Houston, which now operates as a music station with a "sound of Texas" play list. Previously, the station was politically engaged: it was bombed twice by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Now, the BBC occupies its top morning news slot.

To reach the KPFT ideal of soft, non-controversial programming, Pacifica's leadership has also advocated selling WBAI, which could fetch, according to The New York Times, between $150 to $200 million for its frequency—99.5 —in the middle of the FM dial. In a 1999 e-mail that went astray, Pacifica Board member Michael Palmer, a corporate executive with the real estate firm CB Richard Ellis, discussed the sale of KPFA versus the sale of WBAI. "My feeling is that a more beneficial disposition would be of the New York signal as there is a smaller subscriber base without the long and emotional history as the Bay Area, far more associated value, a similarly dysfunctional staff though far less effective and an over-all better opportunity to redefine Pacifica going forward. It is simply the more strategic asset."

Palmer added, "The Executive Committee, at a minimum, should have access to experts (whether from Wall Street, NPR/CPB, Microsoft or otherwise) to get a strong reality check (me included) about radio and Pacifica's position in it so that informed decisions can be made."

The Christmas Coup at WBAI comes in the wake of mounting attacks by Pacifica on Goodman's daily national program "Democracy Now!" The Pacifica network, which has ties to the Democratic Party, cracked down on Goodman after she interviewed Green Party candidate Ralph Nader on the floor of the Republican National Convention last summer. Pacifica claimed that Goodman violated journalistic ethics by conducting the celebrated interview at the Convention and yanked her press pass, preventing her from providing the same sharp coverage of the Democratic Convention. Management then imposed a new set of "work rules" on her, including the demand that she clear all speaking engagements with Pacifica bosses and provide them each week with "a list of possible shows the following week and a short status report on each."

While presenting itself as a left-wing network, the Pacifica Board's composition has slowly moved to the right in recent years. This conservative makeover of the National Board fundamentally results from the bypassing of the earlier structure controlled by Local Advisory Boards, which were in turn elected by community listeners. "One of the most crushing series of blows to the U.S. left, and to democracy in this country, has been the gradual transformation of the five station Pacifica Radio network from locally based and left-oriented stations into centrally controlled, mainstream institutions," said media critic and author Ed Herman in a recent interview.

Ironically, this year, WBAI is in better financial health than ever, running with a $71,000 surplus after its fall fund drive raised $921,000, the most successful campaign in the station's history. "We had achieved all the big goals for the station," Van Isler told Haiti Progrès. "We had balanced the budget. We had paid down all past debt from the move of the station [from mid-town Manhattan] in 1998, one of the only Pacifica stations to do that in two years."

For these reasons, many feel that Pacifica's claim that WBAI management needed to be replaced overnight is disingenuous. "The real reason for Valerie's ouster was that she was no longer politically useful to the National Board," said Ray Laforest, a Haitian activist and WBAI Local Advisory Board member.

New Interim General Manager Utrice Leid has insisted that this is an internal issue that is being blown out of proortion. It is true that many producers at the station had disputes with WBAI local management over the years. But the conflict now is much larger and deeper than a mere personality clash between station personnel, as Leid and her defenders argue. All evidence suggests that Pacifica is exploiting internal rifts among the WBAI staff to grab power and disembowel the station of its progressive politics.

To Van Isler's credit, WBAI in the past decade has increased its audience, achieved the first million dollar fundraiser in community radio history, improved the quality of its shows, and won over 40 top awards in US journalism, more than any other Pacifica station. Prestigious George R. Polk Awards have gone to Robert Knight for his reporting on Panama and to Goodman and reporter Jeremy Scahill for their reporting on Chevron's human rights abuses in Nigeria.

WBAI achieved this unparalleled record of success not by killing its community ties, but by nurturing them, which was Pacifica's original mission. The strength of these ties was evident on January 6, when hundreds of protesters gathered in the streets in front of WBAI's studios at 120 Wall Street in Manhattan to denounce the "Christmas coup" and the larger offensive to politically eviscerate WBAI. On December 27, almost 1,200 people turned out for a community meeting to discuss ways to turn back the coup.

"The founding purpose of WBAI, and the original Pacifica, was to provide a voice for the voiceless, to provide substantive analysis and contrary thought to the mainstream, unencumbered by commercialism, government, and corporatism," Mimi Rosenberg said.

This article was excerpted from a longer one that appeared in the January 10, 2001, issue of Haiti Progrès. www.haiti-progres.com