Geiser

GEISER: As
listeners around the country know, you’re facing a struggle in which your own
voice is limited. What is happening at WBAI?

GOODMAN: WBAI
is the home base of “Democracy Now!,” which is our daily national grassroots
news magazine. My unions, both nationally, AFTRA, which is the American
Federation of Television and Radio Artists, as well as United Electrical,
which represents the WBAI staff—AFTRA represents the Pacifica staff—have filed
grievances against Pacifica management and WBAI management for harassment and
censorship. We are facing a very chilling environment at WBAI since what many
call the Christmas Coup 2000, when Pacifica management came in, changed all
the locks at the station in the middle of the night, and installed the new
general manager. Hours later, a letter was sent to our program director,
Bernard White, who I’ve co-hosted with on “Wake-Up Call” for eight years. Then
the long-time producer of “Wake-Up Call,” Sheran Harper, got a letter saying
that she and Berbard had both been fired, and that they would be considered
trespassers if they came to the station. This caused a tremendous uproar and
that was only the beginning. That day we all went down to the station,
hundreds of us, the producers tried to go into the station, and the police met
us and said, “You’ll be arrested if you go inside.” This was a selective
lockout through that weekend. From that point on, more and more people were
banned. A long-time labor show “Building Bridges,” was canceled. A
congressperson was in the midst of an interview and he was taken off the air
by the general manager. We don’t even know how many people are banned, we only
find out when they come to the door—we now have security guards at the door,
which we’ve never had before—and people are turned back. It’s a very chilling
environment and we never know who’s next.

Pacifica is
an issue that’s been discussed on the House floor because it’s a vital voice
for freedom of speech in this country. Talk about both the support of the
founding principles of Pacifica that’s surfaced and the role that Pacifica
needs to continue to play.

Pacifica began
more than 50 years ago as the only independent media network in this country.
Founded by a man named Lew Hill, who was a conscientious objector in World War
II, he came out of the detention camps and said, “There has to be a media
outlet that’s not run by corporations that build a drum beat for war,
corporations that profit from militarism and war, but run by journalists and
artists.” And that was the original philosophy of Pacifica. The first station,
KPFA, went on the air in 1949 and now we’re a five station network.     

Major Owens, a
long-time Congressperson from Brooklyn, New York, went to the House floor, and
he harshly criticized what was happening at WBAI. It hampers what we can do as
reporters when we feel there’s things we can’t say. A gag rule has been
imposed. Sometimes I’ll be doing “Democracy Now!” and the general manager will
storm into the room. When we first aired Mumia’s commentaries, in 1997, we
were pulled from the 12 stations in Pennsylvania, run by Temple University,
and they ended our contract with us, even though we were the most popular show
on their network. In that letter they said, “It’s inappropriate to air the
voice of Mumia Abu-Jamal.” We feel it’s critical to go behind bars and hear
what people have to say.

But what’s
happening at WBAI is the local manifestation of a larger national struggle to
restore Pacifica to its original mission. That goes to who is on the board of
directors and the kind of direction that is being laid out from the top,
looking at the corporate interests they represent, looking at how Pacifica is
run. It’s supposed to be a democratic institution, so I think it’s very
important for people to be involved: at the five stations, with their Local
advisory boards—Los Angeles, Berkeley, Houston, Washington, and New York—and
on the national board. Our national board should reflect the people we cover,
the communities we come from. The long-time, proud tradition of Pacifica is
airing the voices of union activists and people fighting for racial, economic,
and social justice around the world and it’s those voices that should also be
present on the board of directors of Pacifica.

As many
people around the country fight to restore Pacifica to its original mission,
and as many people also fight to build the community radio movement, what is
the mission of community radio in the context of today’s globalized media, and
in the corporate-dominated mainstream media environment?

I’m deeply
disturbed that National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting in general is
going the corporate route, taking more and more corporate underwriting. I
think they call them enhanced underwriting credits. You even had NPR News
being brought to you by the government of Kuwait. It’s mind boggling that this
is the direction public broadcasting has gone.

But Pacifica
has always been different, and I very much hope it remains that way. But not
just Pacifica, community radio stations around this country are part of an
independent media movement. The corporate moguls want to gobble them up.
They’re very valuable real estate, in a sense, but they’re much more valuable
as public treasures, as a library of the air. These are the public spaces that
no matter how much money you have, you can go to a place and there is an
archive there, going back in time, and also the voices of today, young people,
older people, on all different issues. We must preserve these spaces.

To really forge
a democratic society, we need to have unfiltered information. Media comes from
the word mediation, but with all the uprising we’ve seen in the last year—of
course the Battle of Seattle, the growth of the independent media movement,
the Independent Media Centers—what people have tried to do is reduce that
mediation as much as possible so that people on the Internet, people around
the world can experience what’s happening as unfiltered as possible. But it’s
very important that we don’t view these global uprising against corporate
power through a corporate lens: through the lens of the Nuclear Broadcasting
Corporation—that’s NBC owned by General Electric, or Disney’s lens—which is
ABC, Time Warner-AOL —that’s CNN, or Viacom—that’s CBS. Having people go to
cover these events and cover their own communities on a daily basis, with
their video cameras, with their pens and pencils, with their tape recorders,
and then get them on the Net, get them on community radio stations.

You’ve been
very involved in covering the mass mobilizations, the new manifestations of
this growing global justice movement. Talk about what your experience has
been, both in the historic collaboration you did this summer with Community
Access Television covering the political conventions, and the events in
Washington, DC and Seattle.

What we did at
the Democratic and Republican Conventions was very exciting. A large team of
people from Pacifica radio and Free Speech TV, which is an independent TV
distribution group in Boulder, Colorado, were able to broadcast “Democracy
Now!,” expanded to two hours every day, to a vast audience. So we need to
broaden the space for there to be dialogue and debate, we have to use all the
different avenues of communication: the Internet, TV, radio. My love is still,
always, radio. In 1994, when the Zapatistas first rose up in Mexico, I went
down to San Cristobal de Las Casas and I went to the first news conference of
Subcomandante Marcos, and the Zapatista leadership. They held it only for the
radio reporters and Marcos said at that news conference that was held in the
cathedral in San Cristobal, that the reason he did that was because radio is
so important. It is still the most intimate medium, the most affordable one,
the one that most people have access to. Though I’m excited about the
Internet, that’s still a select group of people who get to hear that. The
intimacy of radio, the simplicity of it, that you can just take a microphone
and a little tape recorder, and the privilege and access it gives you to go
into someone’s home, to come up to someone, but in a very non-intrusive way,
talk to them about the most serious and difficult situations, and also be part
of celebrations or whatever, and convey that to a larger audience is still
just awesome to me.

How would
you characterize the fundamental difference between how you go about
journalism and how Tom Brokaw does?

First of all, I
don’t think that the ultimate in journalism is interviewing someone in high
office, getting access, and really making a trade off that I don’t think is
worth it. You have reporters at the White House, the Pentagon, and the State
Department who basically spew the state line in the hopes that they will get
some kind of leak or some kind of special access without being critical. I
also think that when you have these news anchors on television, they should be
flashing the amount of money they make. People should understand the economic
strata they come from. They represent such a minority in this country and they
interview their friends, basically. Cozying up to power, often going back and
forth from government into something that’s not even journalism, but TV. For
example, take someone like Pete Williams. He was the spokesperson for the
Pentagon in the Persian Gulf War; he was the one who helped to design the
censorship of the media, the rules about how the media would cover the war.
Then he becomes a chief correspondent for NBC. This is unacceptable.     

It’s most
challenging to go where the silence is and say something, to go to places that
are not being covered, but where the U.S.—as a U.S. journalist—is deeply
involved, like East Timor. We have to go to places where the U.S. government
is supporting military dictatorships and regimes, where U.S. money is pouring
in.

The biggest
story today is PLAN Colombia: $1.3 billion going to reinforce a human
rights-abusing military and its paramilitary death squads that is not about a
war on drugs. It’s about reinforcing the military, not only there, but in
Latin America in general. We have to hear from the people who are suffering as
the U.S. says the coca crops must be eradicated by fumigation—it’s actually
Monsanto Round-Up pesticide that’s being used. People are getting sick,
animals are getting sick, all sorts of crops are dying. We want to hear from
people who are the victims of the paramilitary death squads. We want to hear
from people at the bottom who are the victims of U.S. foreign policy. We’re
not as interested in going into a U.S. Army tank, as we often saw the
celebrity journalists doing, in the bombing of Yugoslavia. You might see a
Diane Sawyer getting into a tank or a plane—“How does it feel?” Well I want to
know how it feels to be a target.

As we move
into the Bush administration, what is it that the role of the media should be
in the next four years and what is the role of “Democracy Now!” going to be?

We have a
tremendous task ahead of us. The oiligarchy has ascended. You have George
Bush, failed oilperson, you have vice president Dick Cheney, former CEO of the
largest oil services corporation in the world, Halliburton, you have the
National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, who has a Chevron oil tanker
named after her in Nigeria. Oil is a major story today: whether it’s in
Colombia, with the U’wa fighting Occidental’s drilling, or in Nigeria with
Chevron, Shell, and ExxonMobil, whether it’s in Burma with Unocal, and all
throughout the Middle East.

You have George
Bush Sr., who goes around the world, both as the former president of the
United States, and as the father of the current president, but also, along
with James Baker, the former Secretary of State, for the Carlyle Group, which
has now become one of the largest weapons manufacturers, largest
telecommunications groups as they buy up companies: this is a private equity
group. They’re going around making a fortune, building empires—this was
actually an expose that was done by the New York Times recently—as
world ambassadors. It’s unabashed, yet rarely is it talked about in that way.
We have to show what are the corporate interests that are driving government
policy. Of course, you have a person who’s ascended to the presidency—I’m not
going to say elected, I continue to call him the President Select—who, as many
people held up signs at the inauguration protests, is the “Texacutioner.” This
is the man who was governor of Texas, who presided over more executions than
any governor in U.S. history. What kind of message does this send the world?

We have to
document what’s happening in this country—a kind of structural adjustment
program like those people are protesting around the world—and we have to look
at U.S. foreign policy. We have a big job ahead of us.                       Z

The video
of this interview is available at www. rockymountain.indymedia.org. Nell
Geiser is a junior in high school in Boulder, Colorado. She is a journalist at
KGNU community radio in Boulder and interned with “Democracy Now!” during the
Summer of 2000.