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News :: Miscellaneous |
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NPR/CPB Plot Government Takeover of Pacifica |
Current rating: 0 |
by Commandante Lucas
(No verified email address) |
29 Mar 2001
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I greabbed the excerpt below off the Progressive Review site, http://prorev.com/indexa.htm
The link provided below has been broken since I found it.
Hmmm, I wonder if it means something that the information that Dan supplies is suddenly hard to get...
News "fit to be suppressed" ???? |
Dan Coughlin
[From a speech at a rally in Berkeley CA, March 24, 2001]
A couple of things happened [when I was news director] which are pretty interesting. I think one was in June, end of June in '99, after a Pacifica Board meeting. And [Pacifica executive director] Lynn Chadwick came to me, and she said, "Oh, Dan, it's really great, we're meeting . . . Mary and I are meeting with Kevin Close."
And I thought, wow, that's interesting, you're having lunch with Kevin Close. Kevin Close is the boss of National Public Radio. And he comes from Voice of America, from Radio Free Europe in fact. He was responsible for . . . he was a journalist with the Washington Post, went over to Radio Free Europe, was responsible for the shift of Radio Free Europe from Munich to Prague, part of the eastward expansion of NATO and the eastward expansion really, of US imperialism. And he, from Radio Free Europe, became head of NPR. And they were meeting with him to discuss the KPFA crisis.
A little while later, Lynn said to me, "Well, we met with "Uncle Bob," as she used to call Bob Coonrod, the head of CPB. And Bob Coonrod also comes from VOA, and he was in charge of things like Radio Marti. And she said to me, "Dan, you know it was really interesting? . . . We had this meeting with Uncle Bob, and you know what? He promised to give us some money to see us through the KPFA thing" (to defeat the KPFA struggle). And she said, "You know, all these years we've been asking CPB for money and they say they never have any. And here you are, now, they're ready to give us money!"
And whether this is true or not, whether CPB in fact ended up giving money to Pacifica, fact is that Bob Coonrod, according to Lynn, told her that and she interpreted that obviously as political support.
I was also told by the executive director to tone down the news coverage. CPB wanted me to tone down the news coverage, to be more "balanced" as they put it. Especially this was at the time of the war against Yugoslavia, and they didn't want to hear, as the present management of Pacifica used to tell me, "about 'our boys' dropping bombs and killing babies in Iraq. We don't want to hear about that on our airwaves. We don't want to hear about the police brutality."
Whenever we used to do a piece on Mumia Abu Jamal, they'd joke, "Oh Dan . . . why don't you guys get a direct ISDN line to Mumia's cell. Wouldn't that be easier for you?" The belittling, the pressure, the demands, the repression, about what we're covering . . . What is happening here is political repression in the network. And we, many of us who have been in the network for several years, feel this quite directly. And it's not hidden. It's told to us openly . . .
Editor’s Note: The link below wasn’t working when I posted this. I hope it gets fixed so we can hear the whole story about what Dan was talking about, government covertly seizing control of one of the strongest voices in opposition to illegal and immoral policy. |
See also:
http://www.radio4all.org/freepacifica/spin/0325coughlin.html
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the link now works |
by nicky
ahcopter (nospam) uchicago.edu (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
29 Mar 2001
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just so you know, i tried the link this morning (March 29), and it's not broken anymore...it works. |
