Family Feud

So diligently has Goodman internalized her identification with the oppressed that she has come to believe herself to be one of them. When it comes to the Pacifica wars, Goodman is hobbled by a whopping martyr complex that plays on the air as the irritating whine of the career victim. Thus WBAI, from which she was exiled for five months in a dispute with the old Pacifica board, became "the station of the banned and the fired." This continued throughout KPFK's mid-February fund drive, when her show (which had not been broadcast here while she was fighting with the board) sometimes aired three times a day, in which she peppered her energetic pitches with requests for cash to help restore a "plundered network."

Goodman has played a key role in shaping the on-air narrative of oppression worked up by KPFK's new regime during the fund drive. If that wasn't dreary enough to listen to, the station also saw fit to boost the fund drive's final hour by peddling the video of Mike Ruppert, a defrocked cop who sought to convince us that the CIA was behind the attack on the World Trade Center. Dave Adelson, a LAB member who told me he saw no reason to condemn the hateful rhetoric of the black separatists on the air even though it made him "cringe," nonetheless leaped to interrupt a Grateful Dead show and excoriate programmer Barbara Osborn for the crime of paying tribute to Cooper and asking listeners to call in their response to his suspension. Starr, who was initially seen by the opposition as a nice fellow who was in over his head, is by now so thoroughly in the pockets of the LAB that he allowed this intrusion. When the public-affairs programmers, led by Beneath the Surface's Suzi Weissman, handed him a forthright letter of outrage over the Mike Ruppert debacle, he responded that, in the context of a rebuttal, the program made "compelling radio." Thus does the loony left come full circle and join hands with the meshuggenehright. If confirmation were needed of what Christopher Hitchens has called the "ardent confusion" of the ultraleft, this is it.

The sad part of all this is that there is nothing visibly new about the new regime at KPFK. It's a classic and possibly terminal case of the divorce of thought from action in that part of the left that refuses to grow up. All the signs are that, now the first flush of victory is over, the station is sliding back to the vapid populism that distinguished it before Schubb arrived, when programming was carved up by putative interest groups and any nut or bigot with a grievance could grab the airwaves if he or she yelled loud enough. Programming collectives, which bring people together solely on the basis of their ethnicity, age or gender, can only aggravate such separatism. Someone has to be responsible for making good radio that won't bore listeners to death. In the unlikely event that a new manager with vigor and vision is hired, he or she will have his hands tied behind his back if he tries to lift things out of the uncertainty and confusion that already prevail at the station. "We were here for the listeners," says one employee sadly. "Now we're here for us."