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Active Radio Pacifica's Brash Experiment Jeff Land |
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The essential book on the origins of the influential Pacifica radio network, in time for its fiftieth anniversary. In April 1949, KPFA in Berkeley, California went on the air. From the beginning, the station broadcast an utterly new combination of political commentary and cultural discussion that reflected founder Lewis Hill's vision of a radio station dedicated to creative expression and dissent. In this fascinating account, Jeff Land tells the heroic story of the Pacifica radio network, exploring not only its role in the culture and politics of the postwar world, but also the practical model it pioneered for liberatory alternatives to commercial mass media. A network of five stations (in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston, New York City, and Washington, D.C.) Pacifica has been a participant in nearly every progressive political movement of the past fifty years. The network has risked the loss of its licenses, had its transmitters bombed, seen its personnel arrested and jailed, and made errors of judgment and taste. Yet it has pioneered a number of media innovations, listener sponsorship and call-in radio among them. It has also made history: on Pacifica stations, Seymour Hersch broke the My Lai story; the FBI's illegal internal surveillance program was first publicly revealed; the Firesign Theater gave its first performance; and Bob Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind" made its public debut. Using tape archives of radio programs, interviews with participants, and unpublished material on Pacifica, Land chronicles the turmoils and triumphs of this radio network that served as a model for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. Rich in anecdote, Active Radio is both an engaging account of Pacifica's past and an assessment of its significance to postwar culture in the United States. "Pacifica's history, legacy, and shortcomings are the penetrating stuff of Land's new book. Active Radio's larger theme rings ever more true: Except for Pacifica and the rare community radio station, radio—like television and the Internet to follow—has contributed little to 'lasting understanding' and plenty to narrow interests of the monetary sort." —Mother Jones “Land’s study succeeds in showing how Pacifica prodded and reacted to the various progressive social movements of the Cold War era. Fascinating reading.” —In These Times "Active Radio is an evenhanded, sympathetic account of Pacifica Radio. It is an insider's narrative about just how Pacifica was so groundbreaking and why it has been so chaotic." —San Francisco Bay Guardian Jeff Land, a longtime activist in grassroots ecological politics, has taught at the secondary and university levels since 1979. 184 pages | 11 black-and-white photos | 5 7/16 x 8 1/2 | 1999 |
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$23.50 paper