KPFA

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KPFA (94.1 FM) is a radio station in Berkeley, California, USA. Launched in 1949, three years after the Pacifica Foundation was created by pacifist Lewis Hill, KPFA became the first station in the Pacifica Radio network and the first listener-supported radio broadcaster in the United States. Previously, non-commercial stations were licensed only to serve educational functions as extensions of high schools, colleges, and universities. This departure into listener-oriented programming brought many detractors as KPFA aired controversial programming. The first interview with anyone from the gay political movement was broadcast by KPFA, as well as Allen Ginsberg's ground-breaking poem Howl in the 1950s. In the 1960s KPFA and Pacifica were accused of being controlled by the Communist Party, and several challenges to its license were waged, none of them successful.

KPFA sister stations are WBAI, KPFT, KPFK, and WPFW. Pacifica continues today to be a listener-supported network of stations. The main KPFA transmitter is a 59 kilowatt class B, though there are also two smaller boosters, KPFA-FM2 in Bonny Doon and KPFA-3 in Oakley. KPFB is a smaller station, also in Berkeley, that covers areas of Berkeley that KPFA can't reach. It also carries some separate programming specifically for its Berkeley audience. KPFA programs are also rebroadcast by KFCF in Fresno.

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Timeline

  • 1946 Lewis Hill moves from Washington DC to the San Francisco Bay Area and begins work toward creating the first listener supported non-commercial radio station in the United States.
  • 1949 Pacifica first goes on the air April 15 as KPFA 94.1 fm in Berkeley CA.
  • 1950 Hill and others criticize the Korean War. Hill pledges on air not to cooperate with the war and to resist if drafted.
  • 1951 Pacifica receives the first major foundation grant (Ford Foundation) for the support of a non-commercial broadcast operation.
  • 1953 Philosopher/author Alan Watts begins a regular program on KPFA that continues until his death in 1973.
  • 1954 An on-the-air discussion of the effects of marijuana results in the California Attorney General impounding the program tape.
  • 1955 Poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti bring the Beat Generation to the airwaves. A few years later the FCC questions Pacifica's broadcast of some of their works as "vulgar, obscene and in bad taste."
  • 1956 Pacifica wins its first broadcast awards for a program on the First Amendment by Alexander Meiklejohn and a children's series of -Robin Hood- by Chuck Levy and Virginia Maynard.
  • 1957 Pacifica/KPFA wins its first George Foster Peabody Award for "distinguished service and meritorious public service" for programming that takes strong issue with McCarthyism.
  • 1958 Nuclear war and the arms race are debated on the air by Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling and Edward Teller, the "Father of the H-Bomb."
  • 1960-1963 The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS) investigate Pacifica programming for "subversion." Suspected writers include Bertolt Brecht, Norman Cousins, Carey McWilliams, Dorothy Healey, and W.E.B. DuBois.
  • 1960 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requests a tape of a Pacifica broadcast of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti that it found "in bad taste" with "strong implications against religion, government, the president, law-enforcement and racial groups"-- and demands full information on Pacifica finances and governance.
  • 1962 The FCC withholds the license renewals of KPFA, KPFB, and KPFK pending its investigation into "communist affiliations." Pacifica was never ultimately cited in any of these or subsequent inquiries. Ironically, the FCC chair later denounces the broadcasting industry for not defending Pacifica during its investigation of the foundation.
  • 1962 Pacifica trains volunteers to travel to the South for coverage of the awakening civil rights movement. Andrew Goodman, son of the Pacifica president, is murdered in Mississippi with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.
  • 1963 I. F. Stone and Bertrand Russell take to the Pacifica airwaves, leading a long list of luminaries to oppose the war in Vietnam at this early stage of direct U.S. involvement.
  • 1964 The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) renews the licenses of all three Pacifica stations after a three-year delay.
  • 1966 Leaders of organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) discuss the future of civil rights over Pacifica stations.
  • 1967 Pacifica broadcasts a live interview with Latin American leader Che Guevara months before he is killed in Bolivia.
  • 1968 Pacifica Radio News (originally the Washington News Bureau of WBAI/New York) is established in Washington DC.
  • 1970 Sister station KPFT in Houston goes on the air and is bombed off twice during its first year by Ku Klux Klan attacks on its transmitter tower. After months of inactivity by federal agents and Houston police, Pacifica mounts a media campaign. Federal agents ultimately arrest a Klansman and charge him with plotting to blow up KPFA and KPFK, as well as the actual KPFT bombing.
  • 1973 Pacifica provides gavel-to-gavel coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings.
  • 1973 Third World programmers at KPFA organize to demand a programming department with paid staff and control over some airtime. The station management opposes this effort and obtains a court order banning Third World project coordinator Jeff Echeverria from the KPFA premises. The Third World programmers file a challenge to KPFA's license on grounds of discrimination in hiring practices. The lawyer representing them is David Salniker, later to become KPFA manager and Executive Director of Pacifica.
  • 1974 The Symbionese Liberation Army delivers the Patty Hearst tapes to KPFA/Berkeley and KPFK/Los Angeles. KPFK manager Will Lewis is jailed for refusing to turn the tapes over to the FBI.
  • 1974 In the summer, KPFA staff and programmers go on strike to demand more democratic decision-making process, the reinstatement of the fired Third World staff, and the firing of station management. After KPFA is off the air for one month, Pacifica agrees to most of the strikers' demands. In the fall, KPFA formally creates the Third World programming department with a paid department head and control over some airtime.
  • 1979 Pacifica, the League of Women Voters, and congressman Henry Waxman (D, CA) challenge the constitutionality of the prohibition on editorializing by non-commercial broadcasters.
  • 1981 KPFA/Berkeley creates a Women's Department with a paid director and control over some airtime. Ginny Z. Berson (a member of the collective that created Olivia Records) becomes the first director of the Women's Dept. (Women's programming had been done on KPFA since the early 1970s by a collective called Unlearning To Not Speak.)
  • 1982 Pacifica provides the only continuous live national coverage of one million people demonstrating for jobs, peace, and freedom in New York's Central Park during the U.N. special session on disarmament.
  • 1982 After years of development by women and people of color, the KPFA Apprentice Program is formally established as an intensive training program in broadcast skills. It is now the most comprehensive program of its kind in the country.
  • 1984 The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Pacifica's favor that non-commercial broadcasters have a constitutional right to editorialize.
  • 1987 Pacifica's coverage of the Iran-Contra affair, anchored by KPFA's Larry Bensky, is carried by 33 stations and wins two national journalism awards.
  • 1990 Pacifica's ongoing coverage of the preparations for and conduct of war in the Persian Gulf reaches listeners on dozens of public stations throughout the country.
  • 1990 The KPFA News wins multiple awards for their round-the-clock coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area.
  • 1991 KPFA/Berkeley moves into its newly constructed building in September.
  • 1992 KPFA's Flashpoints program, headed by Dennis Bernstein, becomes the third-most-popular program on the station (after the Morning Show and the Evening News). Flashpoints evolved from the daily Persian Gulf War updates.
  • 1992 KPFA's Noel Hanranhan begins recording the commentaries of Pennsylvania death row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 2002 she produces an anthology of his essays titled "Live from Death Row."
  • 1992 Senate Republicans put a hold on funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, claiming "liberal bias" on a host of issues, including environmental coverage. A bill is passed imposing "objectivity and balance" conditions on CPB funding. Almost alone among broadcasters, Pacifica protests any content-conditional funding, pressing CPB to shield all news programming and editorial integrity of individual producers--which CPB agrees to in its implementation protocols. Pacifica observes that no other broadcasters, commercial or religious, are any longer subject to access and balance requirements of the now-repealed Fairness Doctrine--making public broadcasters alone subject to editorial restrictions. Immediately after passage of the content restrictions, CPB Board member Victor Gold targets KPFK for strident African American programming and controversial speech aired during Black History month, by filing an FCC complaint.
  • 1993 CPB Board member Victor Gold calls for de-funding Pacifica, echoing lobbying campaign orchestrated by right-wing media critics. In a unanimous vote, CPB reaffirms Pacifica's funding irrespective of program content. Senate Minority Leader Robert Dole (R-KS) threatens public broadcasting with Congressional revenge, his aide explaining: "The First Amendment, freedom of speech, doesn't apply, because we are able to put conditions on the grants of federal money. The same as we do for farmers." Pacifica launches a campaign for unconditional funding and self-defense, led by a tremendous outpouring of "fightback donations" from listeners nationwide. CPB funding narrowly escapes cuts in the House of Representatives, with program content the driving issue. A lobbying effort keeps Pacifica funding off the Senate agenda. This is the second year in which Pacifica has received no discretionary funding from CPB (only the matching funding based upon listener contributions).
  • 1993 Pacifica wins its third Court of Appeals ruling in six years, overturning the FCC restrictions on "indecent" programming as unconstitutional restrictions of the First Amendment rights of the radio audience.
  • 1993 The CPB Silver Award for Children's and Youth Programming goes to "Youth in Control," the two-hour live radio magazine of Executive Producer Ellin O'Leary's Youth Radio Project, produced weekly in KPFB-FM studios. This two-time CPB Award-winning program is a show produced by teens for teens, a project recruiting low income and minority youth, providing training in all aspects of news and music programming, and featuring live weekly. Pacifica broadcasts and special pieces on KQED-FM, NPR, Monitor Radio and Inner City Broadcasting.
  • 1993 San Francisco Foundation Executive Director Robert Fisher selects KPFA/Pacifica for the San Francisco Chronicle feature, "How To Spot a Charity That Deserves Support: Pros Pick Notable Nonprofits" (November 22).
  • 1996 Former California Governor and future mayor of Oakland Jerry Brown hosts "We the People" on KPFA, a daily talk show that features interviews with Noam Chomsky, Paolo Soleri, Ivan Illich, and Gore Vidal.
  • 1999 Larry Bensky starts a new weekly talk show, Sunday Salon, in January.
  • 1999 On July 31, 10,000 Bay Area residents demonstrate in Berkeley, demanding the reopening of KPFA, which had been shut down by Pacifica's then Chair Mary Frances Berry and Executive Director Lynn Chadwick in a dispute over control of the station. Chadwick and Berry relent and KPFA begins broadcasting again in early August.
  • 2001 KPFA programmers Davey D, Weyland Southon, Anita Johnson, and Tsadae Abeba Neway inaugurate Hard Knock Radio, a daily hip hop public affairs and music show. Hard Knock is voted the "Best Radio Show in the San Francisco Bay Area" by the East Bay Express.
  • 2001 "Apex Express" begins broadcasting on August 2, 2001. The show focuses on the political and cultural concerns of Asian/Pacific-Islanders and features interviews with poets, musicians, and community activists.
  • 2001 On December 12th, the Pacifica board and dissident groups sign a settlement that leads to the democratization of the Pacifica radio network. KPFA listener-subscribers win the right to vote for representatives on their local station board.
  • 2003 C.S. Soong and Sasha Lilley's Against the Grain, a noon interview show, begins in March. The program interviews internationally renowned scholars and writers on politics, economics, and literature.
  • 2003 "Pushing Limits", KPFA's disability program, begins in June with five documentaries on topics ranging from making Taco Bell more accessible to disability pioneers within the Black Church.
  • 2004 On June 16th, KPFA and Pacifica sister station WBAI in New York City air a national broadcast of James Joyce's novel Ulysses. 100 actors read the book around the clock in celebration of Bloomsday.

Source: KPFA website http://www.kpfa.org/2ab_hist_files/2m_hist.htm Many people have contributed to this chronology over the decades, including Vera Hopkins, Elsa Knight Thompson, Sharon Maeda, and Matthew Lasar.

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External links

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Further reading

  • Lasar, Matthew (April, 2000) Pacifica Radio: The Rise of an Alternative Network (American Subjects Series). Temple University Press. ISBN 1566397774
  • Lasar, Matthew (January, 2006) "Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio's Civil War" Black Apollo. ISBN 1900355450
  • Walker, Jesse (June, 2004)"Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America".

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