Dear Dr. FCC:

At our Pacifica listener-supported radio station, KPFA in Berkeley, some of my friends are calling the station's Interim Program Director a Stalinist, Zionist, corporate COINTELPRO agent and Hillary Obama wannabe because she circulated a memo reminding on-air programmers not to urge listeners to go to demonstrations and events.

Doesn't this go against KPFA founder Lewis Hill's mission of advocacy journalism? People keep telling me that the FCC has some rule about this? Is that true?

Dazed and Confused

Dear Dazed:

This is not a Federal Communications Commission matter. The FCC has no rules barring programmers at non-commercial stations from urging people to go somewhere and do something, as long as it does not involve voting for a specific candidate or buying a station underwriters' product.

But the rule you cite properly addresses liability issues and KPFA's true historic mission as it was expressed and practiced by the station's founder, Lewis Hill.

First, let's go to the immediate record.

On March 16th, KPFA Interim Program Director Sasha Lilley sent a memo to a programmer in response to his urging listeners to "be there" at an upcoming anti-war rally at Civic Center, San Francisco.

"Due to issues of liability, KPFA programmers are not permitted to urge listeners to attend an event," Lilley wrote to the programmer. "If damage suits stem from injuries suffered at an event, KPFA could be held liable for actively urging participation."

Lilley's memo did not warn programmers against announcing events, or having on guests who urge listeners to attend events. It just forbade programmers, the on-air representatives of KPFA, from doing the urging themselves. This sensible policy stems from actual court cases in which stations have been held liable for calls for action.

Pacifica attorney John Crigler warns that "if the call to action forseeably will result in personal injury, the call to action may result in tort liability under state law."

Crigler cites an example of this sort of liability:

"A station sponsored a contest involving a DJ who drove around town offering clues as to his next appearance and a prize to the person who reached the location first," Crigler writes. "Egged on by the DJ, two teenagers raced each other to the DJ's next location. One of them struck and killed a pedestrian, whose estate sued the station. The station was found liable because it could reasonably have foreseen that encouraging reckless behavior was likely to result in injury."

Now to be fair, most KPFA programmers who urge their listeners to "be there" at an anti-war demonstration do not anticipate violence taking place at the gathering. And the chances are that the event will be peaceful.

But allowing programmers to make this decision on their own exposes KPFA to the eventuality that some broadcaster who should have anticipated violence at an event will urge the public to attend it anyway.

Suppose, for example, that the Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom, decides to curtail the city's Critical Mass bicycle riding event, citing a recent ruckus between cyclists and an SUV driver. If a KPFA programmer urges his or her audience to "be there" at a civil disobedience protest of the move, and more mayhem takes place at the action, KPFA could indeed risk liability for the call.

The programmer should have known better than to tell listeners to "be there" at an event that a reasonable person could anticipate might turn ugly.

Most KPFA programmers are perfectly capable of and do exercise good judgment around these issues. But not all of them, and that is why a general prohibition on on-air host calls to action makes perfect sense.

As for the claim that Lewis Hill stood for advocacy journalism, I am sure that Hill thought that advocacy journalism was a fine thing. But that was not what he created KPFA for.

Lewis Hill and his pacifist associates launched KPFA in 1949 to get people to think for themselves:

"In radio broadcasting operations to engage in any activity that shall contribute to a lasting understanding between nations and between the individuals of all nations . . . " reads item three of Pacifica's original five purposes.

Lasting understandings between individuals, Hill believed, came from dialogue, from different people with different ideas exploring complex problems together in conversation.

Review Hill's on-air KPFA commentaries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. You will rarely, if ever, finding him haranguing the audience with calls to action.

Take for example KPFA's historic broadcast of Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl in 1957. After the station played excerpts of the work, read by Ginsberg, Hill summoned to the studio Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom the San Francisco police department had recently arrested for selling the poem. Some of Ferlinghetti's supporters joined the discussion too.

But over the airwaves, Hill expressed disappointment that his staff had been unable to summon the police to this roundtable as well.

"We are therefore confronted by the fact of agreeing with one another, fundamentally, upon the issue of censorship posed in this case," Hill told the listeners. "And for that reason, let us hope that our program can confine itself principally to information, rather than mutual congratulation upon our agreement upon the issue."

Even in his most polemical moments, Hill scrupulously avoided telling his audience what to think or do. Take his passionate 1950 statement in opposition to U.S. intervention in the Korean civil war, a move that he called the beginning of World War III.

"I am speaking to myself, were there any question," Hill said:

This is my answer. I am going to oppose World War III, and the Oakland loyalty oath, and the government purges, at every place where they touch upon my life and provide a tangible opportunity to oppose them. Whether I speak against them is not important. What I do is important. I am going to refuse to fight the war. I am going to refuse to support it by making ammunition for it, or loading the ammunition on a boat for it, or helping sail the boat. These are definite and particular things which the American government in the near future is going to demand that I do. I am going to refuse."

Note that Hill took pains not to tell his listeners what to do about the Korean War and World War III. He only said what he planned to do. Hill hoped that KPFA would, by providing a wide range of perspectives in constant dialogue with each other, help people make their own decisions.

And while he hoped that his listeners would, like him, oppose the national security state, Hill and his associates had a word for phrases like "be there" - propaganda.