"It's so good to hear you all again," callers told returned "Wake Up Call" producers Bernard White, Sharan Harper, Janice K. Bryant, Robert Knight and Amy Goodman. "It's Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday . . . Happy birthday."

The return of White and the others to listener-supported WBAI, comes after the Interim National Board of Pacifica Radio voted this weekend to resolve many of the issues the network has been struggling with for years.

The historic meeting took place this Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the union hall of the Hotel Trade Council in New York. More than five hundred concerned listeners from around the country piled in to the overheated room. Some had been in the very same building a year ago, when a multi-pronged campaign was launched to oust board members who seemed to have contempt for the progressive principles and grassroots structure on which Pacifica Radio stands.

The network owns noncommercial stations in New York, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles and Berkeley. Activism in every location -- and others besides -- has taken a variety of forms: civil disobedience, lawsuits, pickets, a funding boycott, a public education and media campaign.

Now, longtime movement-builder Leslie Cagan sits as Interim Chair of the Board. She leads a progressive majority. This weekend they voted to appoint a new Interim Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation, to replace the general manager of WBAI, and to fire the high-priced law firms the previous board had hired to fight lawsuits. The two advisory boards that have been warring for control of Pacifica's Houston station, KPFT, were ordered to merge and work together. Finally, to uproarious applause, the board voted to reinstate 37 members of the staff and management who had been fired, banned and suspended from New York station WBAI since December 22, 2000.

"What we've seen is a profound people's victory, not just in New York, but all over the country," New York Local Advisory member Miguel Maldonado told WBAI listeners later.

Are these victorious days for Pacifica Radio? Absolutely. Now onto the rebuilding part.

Today is Dr. King's birthday. "The end is reconciliation," said Dr. King. "The end is redemption, the end is the creation of the Beloved Community." And Beloved Community is what Pacifica is all about. The network, started more than fifty years ago by incarcerated war-resister Lew Hill, was founded on the very same idea.

King talked about differences, international and inter-personal disputes, resolved by nonviolent, inclusive means. His enemy was supremacist-thinking: the prioritizing of one human life over another. In the Beloved Community King described, adversaries worked together -- but the community was far from conflict-free.

Community radio, as Lew Hill perceived it, was a very similar place. In the world of commerce, who sells most wins. Who has most power has most influence. Pacifica's Lew Hill pioneered a non-corporate, anti-commercial model of radio where every participant had an equal share. Listeners pledge to finance the stations. Producers pledge to serve.

Since its inception, every station has been hard-put to work that equation: listeners don't always like what they hear, producers don't always care. But Hill's vision was of a place for the airing of differences, the respectful exchange of views. "The Exacting Ear," was the name of Hill's publication. A healthy society needs penetrating minds, he believed, to think and share for the good of all.

As the fired and the banned return to WBAI's airwaves and the network proceeds to heal, it's worth remembering King. Does Beloved Community mean abandoning a progressive agenda?

Lyn Gerry said earlier this year, "The people who founded Pacifica did so because they had something to say and nowhere to say it. " That has never been as true as it is today. "Pacifica is about something specific," wrote Gerry in a letter to concerned listeners. "It was not to be some sort of 'neutral' broadcasting entity, nor the tool of a political party."

A Beloved Community, where all are equal, is absolutely no neutral affair. Nor is Beloved Community only community for those whom we love.

King said that the Bible's "Good News was meant for all -- for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative." This inclusiveness is embodied in the Pacifica dream, but sometimes programming has depended too heavily on a familiar few.

Washington D.C. Local Advisory Board Member Sam Husseini has said that at times Pacifica's airwaves have become what he calls "wildlife preserves" for those with marginalized views.

After years of focusing on issues of personnel and policy, it's time for Pacifica to refocus on programming. What's on Pacifica's airwaves needs to win hearts and minds as well as comfort them. Can it do it? Sure. With the unique programming it has produced for years -- including Goodman's Democracy Now! which returned this month from exile -- and lots of time for questions and listening. There needs to be welcome room for everyone, especially those with doubts.

At last weekend's meeting, WPFW Producer Fahima Seck made a rousing appeal: "The country is at war and if we ever needed free speech and democracy it's now. We are under siege. The information is crucial. We need to put aside our differences. These are the best and worst of times."

Board Chair Leslie Cagan says that Pacifica faces debts of more than $3 million, incurred predominantly by the national office in the last couple of years. "We've taken a huge step toward returning control of the stations back to the communities they are in," Cagan said on WBAI shortly after the board meeting, but there are daunting practicalities facing the new regime.

As for programming -- "We're going to be moving forward with vision," said Dan Coughlin, interim executive director. "It's going to be a people's radio network once more."

What does that mean exactly? We may not know the details, but we know in broad strokes, and we know we need it: A struggling, difficult, justice-loving, beloved community of the air.

Journalist Laura Flanders is the host of Working Assets Radio and author of "Real Majority, Media Minority: The Cost of Sidelining Women in Reporting." Her Spin Doctor Laura columns appear daily on WorkingForChange. You can contact her at laura@lauraflanders.com

© 2001 workingforchange.com

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