A KPFK Pledge to Listen to Listeners

As bitter as it got, it must seem like a mere playground spat--the infighting and turmoil that beset the left-leaning Pacifica radio network and its Los Angeles outlet over the past several years. The station’s new general manager is used to dealing with more than pickets, angry phone calls and spam.

Eva Georgia was a pioneer in community radio in South Africa during the apartheid era, when she was harassed, threatened at gunpoint, and had colleagues killed and kidnapped while they all sought to expose police corruption, the AIDS epidemic and violence against women and children. On Monday, she takes over KPFK-FM (90.7), and pledges to re-connect the community-supported station with alienated listeners.

“I’m extremely excited about the prospect. There’s a lot to do,” said Georgia, 34. “It will take time, and I hope that people will allow us the time. It’s important that the process of democracy and transparency continue.

“We have to keep chiseling away at this big iceberg,” she said. “Pacifica has a rich history and it has so much potential. It’s electrifying.”

The Pacifica Foundation, started by pacifists in Berkeley after World War II, originated listener-supported radio and evolved into a five-station network devoted to progressive politics and social-justice issues. But the foundation has been embroiled in conflict for several years, with disaffected listeners and even foundation board members suing the organization. They alleged that a majority of the board was steering the network to the political center, ignoring the listener-supporters, firing longtime staff without cause, and even moving to sell the valuable broadcast licenses. The sides settled the lawsuits in December, and since then the new regime of former dissidents has overhauled the organization.

Georgia replaces a pair of interim general managers, who themselves replaced general manager Mark Schubb, fired in January after clashes with the new Pacifica board.

“We thought her selection sends an important signal. We’re serious about building a democratic organization,” said Dan Coughlin, the Pacifica Foundation’s interim executive director. He noted that Georgia played no part in the fight against previous management. “We’re not engaged in cronyism or purges. We’re really trying to select the person who is best for the network. Just because you were a reform activist doesn’t mean you’re going to get a job now.”

A 13-member search committee consisting of staff, listeners and Pacifica board member David Fertig sifted through nearly 50 applicants and chose three finalists, Georgia and the managers of a community station in Moab, Utah, and a college station in San Jose. Coughlin made the final selection.

“She stood out, both with her experience in community radio and her commitment to Pacifica and KPFK. She really shined,” Coughlin said. He also cited her background in “managing a station in a highly charged environment.”

Ironically, Georgia had been trying to get a job at KPFK since she moved to Long Beach from South Africa in 1999, but could never get an interview with previous management for openings as news director and program director. Now she’ll be the one hiring for those jobs, which she said still haven’t been filled permanently.

Programming disputes and the lawsuits estranged KPFK from many supporters, with the station refusing even to air meeting notices for its listener advisory board. So, in addition to improving staff morale, Georgia said she wants to embrace and enlarge KPFK’s audience, and get more active in the community.

The community station she started in South Africa, Radio Atlantis, not only aired programs about sexual abuse, but also worked with government, labor and social organizations to create safe houses for battered women, and sponsored education programs for schoolgirls.

“How else do you define community radio? It has to have the community participation, not just on the air, but in community outreach,” she said. “That is just so important, that we don’t just talk the talk, but find solutions to the problems in the community.”

Georgia’s Commitment Convinced the Committee

Fertig, an Altadena-based employment discrimination attorney, said that commitment is part of what swayed the selection committee.

“She not only spread the news, but helped address the problem,” he said, whether it was mediating between factions involved in gang violence, or opening a forum to discuss community problems in Atlantis, the black township where she lived, which at one time had the world’s highest murder rate and 47% unemployment.

As a teenager, Georgia started writing for newspapers in her hometown, Cape Town, until she noticed her articles were being censored. At 21 she started her own community paper in Atlantis, north of Cape Town. Then she decided to fulfill a lifelong dream: “Since the age of 10, I said I’d be in radio. I’d run home from school and listen to radio serials.”

Gathering support from community groups and the area’s powerful South African Clothing and Textile Workers Union, she finally received a government license and went on the air in 1995. The station became so integral to the community, factories played it nonstop during the workday, and workers went on strike when employers shut it off.

Radio Atlantis hosted numerous party candidates before an election, and investigated the background of the politicians they were going to be interviewing--standard practice in American journalism, but risky behavior at that time in South Africa. The research led to drug and prostitution ties, and threats and intimidation from those being scrutinized.

When 8- to 12-year-old black children began disappearing, their bodies later turning up dismembered, Georgia called the police racist for not pursuing the cases more diligently. That brought 200 officers swarming the radio station. Then, when police arrested a suspect on what Georgia thought was flimsy evidence, she put the accused on the air to give his side--angering the citizens of Atlantis.

“Even if you don’t agree with somebody,” she said, the sides ought to have a forum to air their views, and discuss their differences peacefully. Then “the listeners should decide for themselves.”

But the dangers persisted. A police commissioner investigating corruption died in a mysterious car crash, while a journalist subpoenaed to testify about what he had uncovered was murdered the day before the hearing, she said. Georgia herself was accosted at a stoplight by an assailant who put a gun to her head, and her home was ransacked. And a friend working with her to uncover corruption disappeared without a trace.

It was 1999 and Georgia finally reached a breaking point. Fearing the violence would reach her family if she kept muckraking in South Africa, she fled to the United States and was granted asylum by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She moved to Long Beach, where she had friends, and managed an HIV-prevention program for youth at the Gay & Lesbian Community Center of Long Beach.

“I never wanted to leave, to let them get the upper hand, but I also had my family to think of,” she said, adding that she hasn’t seen them in three years. “It was, to me, worth it to risk everything to give a voice to the community. And I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

Fertig said Georgia is committed to broadening KPFK’s audience, to appeal not only to “lefty liberals west of La Cienega,” as he said, but to Latinos and blacks and Asians. “We’ve got a really diverse audience, and need to get that on the air more.”

Under new management, the station has held consecutive record-breaking fund drives, raising $719,000 in February and $618,000 last month, Coughlin said. Fertig said those figures prove that once-disgruntled listeners are returning to the station, and that new ones are responding to programming changes. Much of that money has gone to repair transmitter and antenna problems that have kept the station broadcasting at reduced power for more than a year.

But over the next two weeks the station’s new transmitter will get up and running, boosting the signal from 8,000 watts to 28,000 and finally back to its original 112,000 watts--what station officials have long boasted is the strongest signal west of the Mississippi.

As with almost all matters at Pacifica, Georgia’s selection was not without controversy. The manager of Bush Radio, another community broadcast outlet in Cape Town, wrote Pacifica officials saying that his station was the first on the air, not Radio Atlantis as a Pacifica news release about Georgia had said. And he criticized her move in 1997 from Radio Atlantis to Cape Talk, a commercial talk-radio station in Cape Town. But Georgia said she made the choice simply because the commercial station gave her a more powerful outlet for her advocacy and investigations.

“I grew up in a highly politicized community with a lot of activists,” she said. “We were willing to put our lives on the line to tell the truth.”