It is late May. KPFA in Berkeley, America's first listener supported radio station, is running its Spring listener marathon. So, of course, it is time for the Berkeley Daily Planet to run an op-ed piece denouncing the signal.

"If there was more excitement on the air, live or current speeches, and the news wasn't straight off the AP wire," writes former KPFA board member Richard Phelps, " . . . and the listeners felt that their concerns mattered, I know I would donate much more and I believe lots of others would also. KPFA could be so much better with progressive management that puts the mission first!"

Phelps complains that during station marathons KPFA doesn't broadcast the entirety of talks by popular speakers like Michael Eric Dyson. "I have no problem with selling the speeches and programs as long as they play them for all to hear," he writes. "The corporate media has a political wall to stop progressive speeches, programs and culture from getting to the people. KPFA has a glass sound barrier, stopping those that don't have the money from hearing these important speeches and programs."

To read Phelps, who has probably written something similar to this screed at least a dozen times in one venue or another, you would never know that KPFA broadcast Washington, D.C.'s Winter Soldier hearings live for days, gratis, and that you can download the complete broadcast archive yourself, as you can a show on the Palestinian dispossession, as you can coverage of Step It Up 2007, the largest action in U.S. history against global warming. To read his essay, you would not know that if you go to kpfa.org, you can download or listen to an almost endless supply of audio on almost every possible issue, presented from a progressive or radical perspective, and all of which KPFA streamed on the station's terrestrial signal for free.

For example, you want free audio of Michael Eric Dyson? Fine. Here's an interview KPFA programmer Davey D did with him in 2005. Here's another interview Dyson did on the KPFA morning show the same year. Here's a speech Dyson gave at an East Bay church last year. And here's a huge chunk of the Dyson speech KPFA just broadcast over the air waves.

The truth is that you can listen to a huge library of KPFA speeches, music, interviews, talks, whatever, and download plenty of it, without paying a dime to the station. KPFA just gives it away. And during most of the year 94.1 FM broadcasts vast quantities of it over its over-the-air signal for free, free, free.

But Phelps is only one of the Berkeley Daily Planet's staff of experts on KPFA. My rave/fave remains Mark Sapir, whose April 2007 masterpiece denounced the station's Program Director Sasha Lilley for various actions he did not approve, then took this amazing swing at the station's "core staff." "We should assume there are indeed COINTELPRO types operative in this environment," Sapir's over 1,500 word essay explained.

"KPFA's 'interim' managers can ignore that Homeland Security is knocking on doors and tapping computers and raiding the homes of Latinos as they blanket attack each elected [KPFA] local station board," Sapir continued. "But they are playing with fire and with the lives of millions who depend upon KPFA to not back down from its mission to be a voice for the voiceless."

KPFA's news staffer Brian Edwards-Tiekert wrote an intelligent reply to Sapir's screed. What did the Planet do? They gave Sapir space for another over 1,000 word rambling discourse about him and his six grandchildren and wuddever. " I'm not an enemy of KPFA," he declared this time. "I'm an avid listener. I've been on the air numerous times. I give KPFA enough money, sometime help with phones at fund raisers, give out and wear the bumper sticker."

That's awfully big of you Mark, considering all the COINTELPRO types you think lurk around the station, which you claim ignores the Bush administration's assault on civil liberties. More recently the Planet gave Sapir another 1,200 words to claim that even though KPFA broadcast Winter Soldier, the veterans movement "has no permanent place at KPFA." The screed also criticizes KPFA for not having regular shows on prison rights and immigrant rights.

What is this guy talking about? KPFA runs a 24/7 blog called War Comes Home that produces regular audio coverage on the lives of Iraq vets. The audio gets broadcast on the morning show and the news. The station's seven am, four pm, five pm, and news shows broadcast coverage about prison and immigrant rights every day (as do weekend shows). Here: Here's a documentary about immigrant high school kids, the Dream Act, and the Patriot Act. Download it. Here's a documentary about the prison industrial complex. Download it for free. Here's another. Just go to the Web site, hit the search engine, and play or download stuff yourself.

Is there any rant about KPFA too distorted or incendiary for the Berkeley Daily Planet to turn away? I doubt it. My guess is that a critical mass of East Bay folk, for whom snarling at KPFA has become a fetish, enjoy reading them. KPFA staff are forced to spend time writing responses. Then the Planet can publish additional nasty replies to the staff statements, attracting more readers, ads, and Google ad clicks.

I think it's cheap. The Planet's editors aren't dumb. They must know that there have been and will always be factions on the KPFA local station board who want more power and who will pander to disgruntled programmers and listeners (at least that's what I think they're doing). So KPFA's troubles will provide the paper with an endless stream of muck to rake, especially during listener marathon time. And Planet staff don't even have to write it themselves; just farm it out to the latest pontificator.

At this moment, there do not seem to be any Bay Area journalists willing to speak in defense of KPFA, to defend the station's hard working reporters, producers, programmers, and, yes, managers. They were all quite outspoken during the crisis of 1999; now they are silent, except when they want air time from the station.

And so every issue will be seized upon with passion by the station's denouncers. But no Bay Area progressive newspaper or journalist is willing to extend even a few lines of solidarity to the signal, to note that journalistic independence is just as important in a democratic environment as it is in a corporate environment, perhaps even more so. KPFA struggles against all this alone.

Doubtless the Planet's editors will disagree with my assessment of their approach. But I'll bet they're glad that there's no Berkeley Daily Planet out there covering their newspaper the sleazy, opportunistic way that I think they cover KPFA.