Abstract

Beat the Devil

The article focuses on the struggles at radio stations Pacifica and KPFA, in which on July 13, 1999 the network's national directors called in goons to haul out staffers at the Berkeley station, claiming insubordination. KPFA, founding flagship station of the Pacifica string of five FM stations, is even older than the Voice, having been established by Lewis Hill in 1949. Hill was a pacifist with noble ideals. He saw KPFA as a sanctuary from the iron heel of absentee corporate ownership. The Pacifica directorate, headed by Mary Frances Berry, is intent on streamlining Pacifica into a mini-mutant of NPR, with a niche sales pitch of parlor radicalism, bearing about as much resemblance to the real thing as does today's dockside Monterey to John Steinbeck's Cannery Row.