An interview with the creator & producer of Alternative Radio

Alternative Radio is an hour-long, weekly public affairs program heard around the country on community and public radio, presenting "views and perspectives and analyses that are ignored and distorted by the dominant corporate-controlled media." Programs most often include talks by or interviews with notable political, economic and cultural critics like Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Helen Caldicott, Michael Parenti and Philip Agee. Alternative Radio was conceived by David Barsamian, who continues to produce and distribute it across the continent by satellite each week. Historian Howard Zinn (well known as the author of A People's History of the United States) calls Barsamian an "ace interviewer" and "an ingenious impresario of radical broadcasting." This interview took place in Boulder, Colorado in July, 1995. Alternative Radio is available free of charge to all public radio stations off the satellite on Tuesdays at 2PM EST. If AR isn't aired in your area, ask the program director of your local station to carry it. An extensive catalog listing of quality cassette tapes is available for $1 from: Alternative Radio, POB 551, Boulder, CO 80306.

Jason McQuinn: What I'd be most interested in asking you about is your experience with starting your radio show, getting it syndicated and dealing with other radio stations. And maybe partly--since this magazine is really dedicated to fostering alternative media and helping people get their projects organized and done better--maybe you could give people some hints about the problems you faced, your original inspiration and how you got going?

David Barsamian: Well, I think first of all I don't come from any background in journalism. I have no training in radio. My skills are rather modest to say the least. I started this quite haphazardly, quite serendipitously. I moved to Boulder. The local radio station just started and they were looking for people to do programs and I started to do a world music program, which I politicized fairly quickly.

JM: When did you start that?

DB: 1978. And there was a lot of interest in my program locally. I was able to develop the skills that I have today pretty much doing that local program--on-air skills to engineering, mixing, editing, interviewing, the whole thing--with no news sources, and not a lot of talent. I'm not being humble here. I'm not a tech whiz. I mean even today I'm not on-line. But I'm being pushed to get on-line. They want to order tapes, they want to deal through email. I'd rather hear your voice quite frankly. I'd rather talk to people. I'd rather meet them whenever possible like this. Imagine us doing this interview by email. I'm digressing hear for a second, but there's a certain sterility to that, which in an era of increasing dehumanization I find not good. We need more contact, not less contact.

JM: More direct contact, less mediation.

DB: Yes, everyone's going to be in front of a screen. If not the television set, with it's sex trials and scandals, there are the other screens. The smart people are in front of computer screens, and everyone else--the masses--are watching television.

People started locally asking for my programs. And I'd give them the tapes free of charge. I was pleased, you know. This continued and--because of my experience at a very small bilingual community radio station that I was the first program director of in Alamosa, Colorado--I figured out the satellite system, that there was this whole network. No one told me about it. I didn't know about it. There was no way to find out about these things. KGNU, incidently, didn't have a satellite. Nobody knew about it. But I figured out what it was, how it worked, and how cheap it was--extraordinarily cheap, ridiculously cheap. I said, "Well, why don't I distribute some of these programs?" And that was my start. You know, a real hesitant first start. I had know idea what I was doing. I made a huge blunder initially. But I learned from these mistakes and pretty soon, by the late '80s I was doing more and more independent programming.

And then in 1992 I went weekly and that's when things really turned around for Alternative Radio, because then stations saw me as a regular, real entity. You know, it's like publishing a magazine. For radio broadcasting, scheduling is crucial. You have to know in advance. Also I made it available free of charge, which was a political choice on my part. NPR, for example, charges for its programs. So does Public Radio International. So does Pacifica. My programs are free, because again, there's less mediation--it's direct to the listener. So the whole project is supported by people like you that hear a program and order a transcript or a cassette, and then get my catalog, and hopefully order more things. So its entirely supported by listeners. There's no foundation money. There are no grants. There's no underwriting. I don't seek any. I make a joke of this: the only thing I'd accept is a MacArthur, which I'm very unlikely to be nominated for. But you know, that's the dream grant, because there are no requirements. There's no accountability. You can do anything you want.

So since I went weekly with this one-hour program it's gotten on more and more stations. In Canada, particularly, I'm on in every city from Halifax to Victoria, from coast to coast. Because Canadians are very interested in the world and they're very interested in what's going on with their giant neighbor to the south.

And the point is that this can be done by anyone. I'm not a genius. And I have no money. I entirely went into the red. In fact, every program I do goes into the red. I have to produce the program. I have to rent the satellite time. I have to distribute it. I have to Fed-Ex the tapes to the satellite uplink. And I do all these things--it's all expenditures--in the hope that enough people will buy the cassette and the transcript to justify it, to cover for it.

JM: And that usually happens?

DB: Yes, it happens more times than not. And with more stations, most recently I've been on some major NPR stations, which you'd think would shy away from my programs.

JM: In what cities?

DB: In Seattle, Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, even in Boston--very tough to crack. And I think part of the reason is that I'm really the only one known to people who's doing this. In fact, as an individual, I think I'm the only individual doing this and ending up being able to support what I'm doing. And in fact expanding. There's Pacifica, but that's an institution. You know, they have presidents, and vice presidents, and general managers and all that.

JM: In your opinion what are the reasons why there aren't a hundred different people and groups doing some kind of political programming that has some sophistication and intelligence to it? Why is it totally absent?

DB: Well, I think it's lack of information. People don't realize how easy it is to do this. And how economical it is, radio being supremely a media of economy, unlike TV where you have astronomical costs and distribution costs. Radio is relatively simple. Just sit down with someone with a microphone to do an interview and put it on the air. I was just in Chicago in June and there's a group there that wants to start a community radio station. Where do you live?

JM: Columbia, Missouri.

DB: KOPN [in Columbia] used to be one of the strongest community radio stations in the country.

JM: Fifteen years ago.

DB: Yes, it's changed significantly in the last few years.

JM: It disgusts me to listen to it. I don't listen to it any more.

DB: And you already had a mainstream NPR station there, KBIA...I can't get on KOPN. I used to be there all the time....

JM: KOPN went on the air in 1973, I think it was, and the first couple years of operation it was wide open. You could get on the air. They were looking for warm bodies. You could start your own show. You could learn the skills. You could get into just about any subject you wanted to. You could talk about it; you could explore it from a variety of angles. Every year after that the control has gotten tighter. It started out as a station that was basically run by all the people that were involved. All the programmers, people who did anything at the station were always welcome at station meetings. It was directly democratic. There was a station manager, and a program director, but they had a certain limited power because they had to face down twenty or thirty or forty people who would show up at the meetings. But there was a slow process over the years where the board of directors started as a totally powerless entity and gradually grabbed more and more power. Increasingly, the board looked for people who had a name in the community of some sort to lend prestige to the station and an image of stability so that it would look like the station was something that should be able to get grants and such. And as a result the board of directors became increasingly liberal and less left or radical oriented. And pretty soon there were....

DB: Purges.

JM: Purges of anybody who had the wrong attitude about the station, about who should be let in. Because originally anybody could come off the street and be invited to come in and talk. People were starting to be excluded. Punk rockers got in trouble a lot because they would let people come in and maybe have a beer or something, or let them say the wrong words on the air. Pretty soon, political programs, radical programs were gone. Then liberal leftist programs were curtailed. Then even Pacifica News. It became a question of "Can we afford this?" But at the same time they could afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars for General Electric-sponsored Marketplace and Monitor Radio. They thought these would bring in up-scale listeners who would contribute more to the station and make it increasingly economically viable. And of course spending the twenty to thirty thousand dollars for those two particular things meant that they had their excuse that they could no longer carry any other alternative programming, real alternative programming, because they didn't have the money. So my question to you is, this seems to me like it is possibly a somewhat typical progression among a lot of stations around the country that I've seen--for example in Seattle or maybe it was in Portland....

DB: KCMU in Seattle, you're right.

JM: ...and then there have historically been battles of control for Pacifica stations and other stations around the country--there's this huge pressure to become more conservative and I'm wondering if you're noticing is that a widespread phenomenon? Is that something that's going to cause problems for you at all?

DB: Well let's take the example of KOPN. Alternative Radio used to be broadcast there on a regular basis, on a weekly basis, free of charge. As far as I'm aware the last two years, maybe longer, they're not putting the program on the air. Now why? Is that because I charge them? No, it's free of charge. So there must be something in the content of the programming that they find objectionable. And I wonder what that is? And yet you tell me that they had money and interest to broadcast Marketplace. It is grotesque. It is the business report of corporate capitalism. It's really obnoxious. I couldn't make a defense for it in the same way I could for All Things Considered or Morning Edition, or even Monitor News. There's KUVO, a bilingual station in Denver, which we hoped was going to be an alternative to KCFR, which is a big mainstream NPR-type station. And they too broadcast Marketplace, not once, but twice a day. They're pandering to the yuppies who drive Saabs and Volvos. And hope they're going to sign the big checks for them in support to pay for their salaries, to support their careers. A lot of this is institutions become kind of fossilized bureaucracies. And people have jobs and want to keep their jobs. There aren't a lot of jobs in radio. There are very few. It's not like, "Oh, I'm out of here," and there are 18 jobs out the front gate. It's not that way. The people who make decisions at KOPN know that. It's very, very limited. I don't want to ascribe motivation; I don't know the situation; I don't know them personally. But individual career interests can come above community interests. Now, ostensibly they're there to serve the community. That's why the station was created. But what has evolved at some of these stations is that they've become like job programs. Pacifica is notorious for that.

JM: Do you think this is an increasing trend. Or do you think there's still some life in community radio and alternative radio?

DB: There's still some great radio being produced at WMNF in Tampa, and KGNU in Boulder and KBOO in Portland. So there's still some life. But you can't be indifferent to these trends. They have become somewhat pronounced in the last few years--an increasing unwillingness and refusal to do radical politics.

JM: Is there anything that people can do on a local basis for their radio stations?

DB: Yes, they can get actively involved. These radio stations are supposed to have community advisory boards. They can become members of those advisory boards. They can attend the board of directors meetings. I know that's boring. But you can raise issues as members of the community objecting to programming and asking the question, "Why is KOPN broadcasting Marketplace, which is underwritten by General Electric."...These people who are making these changes and defending them, they're doing the same thing as the right wing is doing. "Fiscal responsibility. We've got to get our books balanced." So you have a social engineering project effected under the guise of fiscal responsibility. Now, who's against fiscal responsibility? We've all got to balance our books. We've all got to live within our means. We don't want to saddle the next generation, our grandchildren--who are these grandchildren?--with debt. But I think it's somewhat disingenuous. I mean you can't ignore fiscal reality. The station needs to be viable. Do they have to sell out to be viable? I just named three stations that are fairly successful and that have kept their integrity. There are small stations like WERU in Blue Hill Falls, Maine, that is one of the best community radio stations in the country, serving a relatively small demographic area. But they do very creative work.

JM: So, I guess my question, too, is then considering the case in Columbia, is it necessary to form a coherent and open pressure group, or something like that?

DB: That's one possibility. Or a more radical notion is establishing a new station.

JM: Which is only an option in areas where there is spectrum available.

DB: That could be changing technically very soon.

JM: But is it going to be economically feasible to get those frequencies?

DB: They'll probably go to the highest bidder. The FCC is going to expand the frequency spectrum.

JM: They're not going to expand the educational, non-commercial spectrum?

DB: I think that will stay in the 88 to 92 area.

JM: What do you think of the possibilities of pirate or micro radio?

DB: Well, that's already proven to be successful in Berkeley with Steven Dunifer. There's a guy in Springfield, Illinois, Mbana Kantako, an African-American, who just bought some Radio Shack equipment and started broadcasting into his project, an African-American project, a group of buildings where he lives. And he's been harassed and had visits from the police, and FCC warnings and the like. He's still on the air, he's on 24 hours. I just met him in Chicago.

JM: Do you send him Alternative Radio?

DB: Yes, I send him my stuff. We network that way. And, again, I offer these things free of charge. I want to get the stuff out. I think the more people who hear it, the wider the network. So it doesn't help me to keep stuff on the shelf. It helps me to get it out, to get the word out. There's a guy in the Berkeley hills who's doing micro radio. These are modest attempts to get around the gatekeepers, to do end runs around program directors and station managers...So in that way it's a creative response and it's definitely doable.

JM: Besides Pacifica and Great Atlantic Radio Conspiracy...

DB: Great Atlantic is not broadcasting. I'm not sure that they're still producing. I know they have an archive. But I haven't seen or heard of them in quite a period of time.

I'm involved with a new program called Making Contact, a weekly half-hour that's produced in San Francisco. And that's on about 70 stations now. That's more of a magazine format covering multiple issues, unlike Alternative Radio which tends to be focussed on one issue. It's geared towards activists--what people are doing, not just describing the problems, but giving local responses and providing contact information and the like. So that's been a new development. Norman Solomon was instrumental in that. We need more programs. If the satellites were flooded with progressive programs maybe these program directors who are so gun shy, such milquetoasts, would be more inclined to take a program and broadcast it. There's no evidence for that. It's just a hope on my part.

JM: It doesn't seem like their economic position would be changed by all that, or their likelihood of attracting the yuppie listenership that they want. So I would wonder about just the availability changing anything.

DB: On stations that are considered very mainstream NPR stations around the country the response to Alternative Radio is spectacular.

JM: Well sure, they've got listeners.

DB: Well, the numbers are there, and also the stuff jumps out of the radio. It's like nothing else they've heard. It has such distinction, such singularity, that people are startled: "What did he just say?"

JM: Listeners are treated like they are adults and human beings.

DB: Yes, so the woman who heads the Oregon Public Radio said to me that Alternative Radio gets more response--97% of it positive--than any other program they put on their network. This covers the whole state of Oregon, from the top to the bottom. And the response I get from listeners...like: "I couldn't believe I was hearing this. I always suspected these things." "I thought there was something about the U.S. invasion of Panama that didn't make sense, and now I heard it verbalized for the first time." "Thanks for being there. You're a support." A day doesn't go by that I don't get a letter from listeners, and calls and faxes. That's very gratifying. And when I travel around the country people come up to me and say, "I listen to your program. Thanks for being there." That's very heartening, very encouraging. This is step-by-step media. This is not million-member audiences. It's building an audience and it happens one at a time.

JM: You're familiar with the Federation of Community Broadcasters, does that organization have any promise? I'm not that familiar with it, but it seems to me that it's maybe one of the major expressions of the conservative tendencies within community radio.

DB: There have been those criticisms in recent times. It's called the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, the NFCB. There's a journal out of Washington state called Radio Resisters Bulletin. It's carried a number of very critical reports about the activities of the NFCB and the direction they want community radio to go in, which seems to be more driven by Arbitron ratings and market share and audience share, predictability and uniformity, and seamless programming, and those kind of buzz-words which are often not just associated with NPR, but with commercial radio. NFCB is the umbrella organization which all these community radio stations are under. I'd like to see NFCB become more progressive in its political orientation and galvanize, provoke the stations into becoming more political. They're becoming less political.

JM: What could ever influence NFCB to become more activist than the individual stations? It seems less likely to me than that individual stations might become more activist.

DB: Yes, they are a membership organization. Supposedly they respond to the wishes of the membership. But we know of instances where that's not always the case. Direct instances where volunteers of the stations have been 86ed, just cut out.

JM: It's frequent. Any time there's any kind of central organization, it almost always ends up being more conservative than the individual stations maybe on average that would make it up. And usually it's the place where the more conservative stations have more power and influence than less conservative stations and such. And it seems that almost it has to be grass roots individual stations that would have to be forced into having a more open attitude towards what they were carrying.

DB: There's a staff of two or three people. They just moved from Washington D.C. to San Francisco. There was some criticism of that movement that I heard, that stations need representation in Washington, not San Francisco.

JM: Do you need more help for what you're doing to get Alternative Radio together on a bigger scale? Or do you have adequate support in your community here? Do you have any economic or organizational problems?

DB: Well, I'm not very organized, believe it or not, even though I do a weekly satellite program. That forces me to be organized. I've got to produce a tape every week. There's no two ways about that. But I don't have a mailing list. I don't have a donors list, like a Fortune 500 list that I can dip into. And I definitely need help with computer skills so that I'm able to identify people that are interested in something, like say, environmental issues or indigenous issues and alert them that I've got these two new programs out, would you be interested in hearing them? I'm not that organized at this point. I'm a two-person organization.

JM: And nobody's coming forward to say, "Hey, can I get involved?"

DB: That hasn't really happened too much. I've got one person working for me, and then I do a lot of it. I answer the phone a lot. What has changed in the last couple of years though--it's been very positive--is that I've developed a network of producers around the country who are sending me tapes. So let's say someone speaks in Jacksonville, a place I've never been and probably will never go to. Let's say you're there. You make a good recording. It's Jesse Jackson, or it's Philip Agee, or it's Allan Nairn, or Barbara Ehrenreich. And you send me the tape and I produce it. And I'm able to pay you something, an honorarium. And the program gets out to a wider audience. So I've got now a coterie of producers around the country, in some of the major cities particularly, that are sending me tapes. A lot of people come through Boulder and Denver. We're not a complete backwater here. And I get out a lot. I travel a lot. I mean I'm in Boston and New York. I was in L.A. in May, and I'll be in San Francisco tomorrow.

I'm also a hunter and gatherer. I'm out there hunting stuff, bringing it back and cooking it--producing it, and then distributing it to a wider audience. I'd rather encourage people. It's easy to throw up your hands in despair and say, "The odds are overwhelming. I can't possibly make a difference." Well, if that's what you subscribe to, then indeed that will be the result. And you'll never even have the satisfaction of resisting, of trying to create a genuine alternative, to posit something that's outside the corporate domain, that's really proactive rather than reactive.

JM: One other thing that interests me, too, is the fact that--I don't know what it might be--but probably 95% of the talk radio shows are at least conservative if not extreme right wing. There's got to be thousands of talented left-wing or liberal or anarchist or communist people who can talk on the radio who'd be extremely interesting to bounce questions and comments off of. Why is there nothing out there?

DB: Molly Ivins would be great. Ralph Nader would be great. Nader wanted to do a program for PBS. They turned him down. Why? Because they have a whole list of radical left speakers on PBS? Hardly. It's all right wing speakers. It's highly tendentious.

JM: Why do community radio stations not have talk radio programming?

DB: They do. They absolutely do. They have call-in shows. They have discussion shows. Why doesn't the left have stars à la Limbaugh and North, G. Gordon Liddy, and Bob Grant and the others? It has a lot to do with corporate capitalism and corporate control of the media. Would you put me, if you were a Capital Cities/ABC--which owns Limbaugh incidentally..., would you give a program to someone who would undermine your position of power and authority, who is saying that corporate capitalism leaves a lot to be desired, that corporate control of media is anti-democratic and is narrowing public debate? It's very unlikely. And if you did, you'd probably lose your job at the next board of directors meeting when the shareholders would turn out and vote you out of office for your insane decision of hiring a radical.

JM: Well, that's obvious that it's not going to be on a major public radio or commercial radio station. But the community radio stations, can you name a few talk radio people that you consider really good or politically astute.

DB: Mario Murillo and Samori Marksman in New York. They're both at WBAI.

JM: And do they get syndicated amongst other community radio stations? Or why doesn't it happen?

DB: No, they're local. It happens because of money primarily. What would I like to do? I'd like to have Alternative Radio on every day. Why should it be on once a week? Why can't it be a daily program? Why does there just have to be one hour in one week out of 168 hours in a broadcast schedule devoted to something out of the mainstream? That doesn't build. It not only doesn't build an audience, it doesn't sustain these ideas. Because they're not being reinforced. There's no intersecting with other ideas.

JM: If you could suggest one format or approach to somebody else starting something similar, working up towards doing a weekly show that could be carried by satellite, what would it be?

DB: Call-in. Absolutely. A live call-in show with an 800 number. Get the disenchanted. Get the disaffected on. Get the right-wingers on and challenge their assumptions, that the media for example are run by left liberals, that welfare cheats are destroying the country. And engage them in dialogue. You can't turn away from these people. The reason I love being on Oregon Public Broadcasting, and on WBEZ and some of these other mainstream stations, is because I am reaching the non-converted at that point. I'm going outside the choir. I mean, you and I are sort of kindred spirits, and I don't want to ignore you. I want to share the information I have with you. But if it only stays with you, if it doesn't get to your grandparents and parents who may have completely different political views--and I suspect they do if they're like mine, then I haven't really expanded the spectrum. I'm talking to myself. You know, "I'm great." "You're great. "Terrific." "Good work." "Love your journal." "Like your program." That's good too. I'm not dismissing that. We need that. We need encouragement.

JM: Especially when you're not getting much help doing the things you're doing.

DB: And the converted need information. They need analysis, too. They can't just be left dangling. But at the same time I think we need a broader strategy to reach a wider audience. So you have someone like Barbara Ehrenreich writing in Time. It's every six weeks, not every week. But it's something. You have Alexander Cockburn writing in the Wall Street Journal for ten years. He wrote a column every three weeks. Did he change corporate capitalism? Probably not. But that's not a reason not to do it. We need to have a multiplicity of these voices in these types of areas. Jim Hightower started a radio program. Jerry Brown, whose politics are somewhat confused I think, also has a program. He's often described as liberal. Molly Ivins would be fabulous on television. And Nader would be terrific, too. And there are a lot of other people. Laura Flanders, with Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, is a terrific talent. I don't think there's a lack of talented people. There is a lack of opportunity. I think there's somewhat of a lack of imagination.

JM: That's what I always perceived as the main problem, is a lack of imagination, a lack of audacity to go out and try something, maybe beyond what they might have thought they could do, but to work up to it.

DB: Yes. I mean it requires an enormous leap of faith here. That's how Alternative Radio happened. Not because I looked at the books and said, "Okay, I've got to generate X amount of income to pay for X amount of expenses." I didn't even know anything about. I did nothing like that. I just started it. It just started happening. It grew and expanded. Not to say to be oblivious to those considerations. You have to be aware of certain things. But that shouldn't be a driving factor. If you're thinking about obstacles, you'll come up with a million of them. And the people you're working with will come up with another two million. So, it's more about solutions. It's more about doing things, and more about activism. Also I think these have enormous effects psychologically in a very positive way. To do something proactive is very empowering to you as well as to others. And that's very salutary. I'm talking about mental health and the spiritual well-being of a community. It's important that people are given meaningful work and are doing things that matter. I think that's vital. And a lot of the dysfunction that you see--postal clerks shooting their supervisors and husbands beating their wives until they're black and blue and those kind of things, I just picked two random things--is partly a result of a lack of meaningful work, work with integrity.

JM: A lack of meaningful work, it would seem to me, along with a lack of genuine, direct communication among people. Getting your own voice out to people, and not just completely being bombarded by commercial media.

DB: Images. We need to create what Gramsci called a counter-hegemony. We know what the hegemony is. We know what the paradigm is. It's corporate capitalism. It's unadulterated, unfettered consumerism and materialism, way beyond anything described in the Old Testament, which was considered sort of the milestone of that kind of thinking. And we need institutions. Progressive people in this country need institutions. We don't have institutions.

JM: Institutions of what sort?

DB: Institutions of learning, colleges, universities, think tanks, radio stations, TV stations, cable access, computer networks and bookstores. We need those things in order to grow. Otherwise we're completely fragmented. Otherwise we're just that leaf on that branch next to the top of the tree there, not connecting to anything else. See that's part of also the genius of thought control, the manufacture of consent, and the kind of engineering of opinion that goes on, is that you are told through the media, mainly through TV, "Go for it." "Do your own thing." "Concentrate on that." "What feels good, go for it." Right? So if you're interested in one particular subject, you focus on that. You start a support group. If you've got desktop publishing skills, you start a newsletter. And you don't connect with anything else. So forever, you remain that leaf on that branch of the larger tree that never connects to the rest of the trees of the forest. And that is a major obstacle right now, that there has been a tremendous fragmentation into what has been called identity politics.

JM: There's no community left so people look for false communities.

DB: It's my community. There aren't bridges being built to other groups. So then you just get into your cocoon. And that I think has had a very debilitating effect. I mean there are more newsletters now than there have ever been before. There's no shortage of newsletters. You don't even need two people any more to get a newsletter out. So those kinds of structures need to intersect with others. There need to be alliances. I'm doing that through the programming I'm trying to get out to the stations. E.M. Forster said it best: "Only connect."

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