If there’s one small blessing in the whole Pacifica crisis, it’s that things haven’t yet degenerated to the Pacifica of the early 1990s, when Nation of Islam lieutenant Steve Cokely claimed Jewish doctors were inoculating babies with the AIDS virus.  There’s still time to nip the new wave of bigotry in the bud; listeners appalled by the new Pacifica do have options.  Pacifica’s five stations receive more than $1,200,000 of taxpayers’ money every year from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the same group that funds NPR and PBS.  In 1992, Congress required the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to report on the quality, objectivity, and balance of the public broadcasting programs it funds, and take this into account when making grants.  Yet KPFK slants so far Left, it considers The Nation conservative and Jewish hosts are leaving rather than hear anti-Semitic slander on the air. When the head “Feminist Magazine” claims Pacifica’s news coverage is “one-sided to the point of actually distorting the facts,” it’s clear there’s a serious problem. Fortunately, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has established an e-mail address – comments@cpb.org – and a toll-free phone number – 1-800-272-2190 – to take comments on taxpayer-funded public broadcasting. When large numbers of complaints are received on the balance and objectivity of a program, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is compelled to investigate.

Pacifica’s staff and supporters can hear the anti-Semitism on their stations for themselves.  They know that people at their stations have been fired or removed from the airwaves for political reasons, and not just by previous boards.  They know their stations aren’t being run democratically, and they know they serve the programmer more than the listening audience.  They are repeating every misstep allegedly made by the board they ousted.  They’ve become what they hate, or rather, what they pretended to hate, because their long struggle to take control of the board wasn’t really about democracy, or censorship, or “serving the community.”  We see from their actions now the term “democracy” merely shielded the ugly politics their fight was really about, a crude racial identity politics based on hatred of whites, Jews and America itself. Their is a politics based on raw anger.  Now that they’re in power, the radicals at Pacifica will maintain the façade of democracy just enough to attract donations, as their newly-established committees of “inclusion” ensure everyone attached to the station thinks in lock-step with their leaders – or suffers the consequences.

From all accounts, KPFK-FM is no longer a very pleasant place to work, and less appealing to listen to.  John Davis, host of the cancelled Heartfelt Music, said the new management was “strident, with no sense of humor.”  Although he had worked with leftists so extreme they went to jail rather than turn over communications from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the police, John could still get along with them, still work with them – but not these leftists.  Last year was the first time in 32 years that John felt he was sacrificing his principles by working with extremists.  John thinks the programming changes are a mistake; his own listeners, many of whom share the station’s left-wing slant, told him they didn’t want political rhetoric seven days a week.  In a long departing missive, Tom Nixon seemed to concur.  The day his show of 29 years, “The Nixon Tapes,” was cancelled, he was given a business card at an art show.  On it was written this: “As soon as an imperative is placed on art (it should be political, it should be beautiful, it should be subversive), one has already robbed it of its freedom.” It appears Pacifica, through its insistence on hard-edged radicalism and tolerance for anti-Semitic extremism, is draining art of its freedom before attempting the same things on the United States. ”