Democracy Now! Re-runs
on Pacifica; Fresh Shows on WEFT
by Paul Riismandel
It's been a tough two weeks for Amy
Goodman, the host of the most popular nationwide progressive
news program, Pacifica's Democracy Now!.
The program has been in re-runs since
Tuesday, Aug. 13 when Goodman and her staff attempted
to originate the program from a studio outside of
Pacifica station WBAI, where the program is normally
produced. The Democracy Now! staff took this action
after being moved from their usual location in WBAI's
main broadcast studio to a smaller auxiliary production
studio, and after an incident between Goodman and
WBAI station manager Utrice Leid, in which eyewitnesses
say that Leid physically pushed Goodman. Since this
incident, Goodman and her staff have said that they
fear for their safety at WBAI and cannot return to
the station without strong assurances that they will
be protected.
Since Aug. 13, Goodman and her staff
have been producing Democracy Now! from their outside
studio, attempting to have it uplinked by Pacifica
for national satellite distribution, which Pacifica
management has refused to do. The show, however, has
been distributed over the Internet by www.wbix.org
("WBAI in Exile"), which has made it possible
for some affiliate stations to air fresh editions
of Democracy Now! rather than the archive re-runs
aired by Pacifica.
At local community radio station WEFT,
the volunteer Programming Committee has been trying
hard to download these daily editions of Democracy
Now! in time to air them at the program's normal airtime
of 4:00 PM weekdays. The Committee has also been airing
short announcements before and during the program
to inform listeners about the situation that is making
it difficult to air new editions of Democracy Now!
each day.
On Aug. 21, Goodman and the Democracy
Now! staff learned from the morning New York papers
that they had been suspended without pay by Pacifica
management because of their refusal to produce the
program at WBAI.
As of Aug. 24, Democracy Now! was still
in re-runs on the Pacifica network. That same day,
Pacifica and WBAI's union, AFTRA, released a joint
statement saying that they had reached an agreement
on the safety of working conditions at WBAI, and that
Goodman and her staff had been ordered to return to
work. Supporters of Goodman have been openly critical
of AFTRA, believing that the union shares too close
a relationship with Pacifica and therefore does not
adequately represent the interests of its members
and Amy Goodman.
This struggle over Democracy Now! is
the latest chapter in a more than five-year-old dispute
between the Pacifica Foundation and a diverse, organized
group of listeners, former employees, and volunteers.
The latter group believes that the 50-year-old radio
network has lost sight of its mission by forcibly
instituting a rigid top-down management style, firing
volunteer programmers and dissenting staff, and shifting
programming to the political center. The dispute reached
a new climax two years ago when the entire staff of
Berkeley, CA, station KPFA was locked out of the station
for almost a month. This situation was echoed last
December at WBAI when long-term staff were suddenly
fired over the Christmas holidays in what has come
to be called the "Christmas Coup."
