Uri Avnery on Breivik, A moment of silence, please, for Lewis Hill

I urge you to click on this website.  Avnery’s piece is powerful, relevant, and as usual,

beautifully written.  The moment of silence is for the anniversary of the death of the founder

of Pacifica; indeed, the founding of public radio, throughout the U.S. and - I think - the world.

There’s much more to Lew Hill; some of which can be found via Google, Wkipedia, et al.   -Ed

 

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From: Jan Tucker [mailto:admin@janbtucker.com]
Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 4:05 PM
To: Jan Tucker
Subject: Uri Avnery on Breivik

 

http://janbtucker.com/blog/2011/07/31/uri-avnery-on-strange-political-bedfellows/ Jan B. Tucker J.B. Tucker & Associates, PI-10143 P.O. Box 433 Torrance CA 90508-0433 Tel:  213.787.5476 Fax:  310.618.1950 http://www.janbtucker.com http://www.janbtucker.com/blog AIM:  janbtucker Twitter:  janbtucker Facebook:  Jan B. Tucker Myspace:  Jan B. Tucker

 

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-----Original Message-----
From: Carolyn Birden [mailto:cmcb007@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2011 4:52 PM
To: wbaielections@yahoogroups.com; Alliance List; NewPacifica@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [alliance] A moment of silence, please, for Lewis Hill

 

My calendar ( from Autonomedia ) says that Lewis Hill took his own 

life on July 31, 1957, but Wikipedia and Hill's wife Joy Hill note the 

date as August 1, 1957.  So you might want to create a moment of 

silence and reflection on both days, one for the man himself and one 

for his creation, Pacifica.

 

The article at the link below is a wonderful piece: we have not come 

so very far after all, it seems.  We still have the same conflict 

between means and ends, as anyone listening to our fund drives can 

deduce.

 

Carolyn

 

 

 

from    http://www.whitings-writings.com/lengthening_shadow.htm

 From "Cracking the Ike Age", The Dolphin No.23, Aarhus University 

Press, Denmark

©1992 John Whiting May be quoted in part with credit as below:

 

THELENGTHENINGSHADOW:

Lewis Hill and the Origins of Listener-Sponsored Broadcasting in America

 

By John Whiting

 

An excerpt from "THE GOOD OLD DAYS"

 

 

Lewis Hill arrived at a theory which he set out to prove: a non-

commercial radio station could survive if two percent of its potential 

audience could be persuaded to pay a voluntary subscription to support 

it. He was convinced from the beginning that the paying audience would 

be predominantly middle- to upper-class liberals.

 

This "2% theory", as Hill formulated it, was to be one of the 

philosophical as well as economic cornerstones of Pacifica Radio. In 

its early years, Pacifica was never remotely proletarian except in 

sympathy:

 

Here [is] perhaps the most profound implication of the theory of 

listener-sponsorship. As a general rule, it is persons of education, 

mental ability, or cultural heritage equating roughly with the sources 

of intellectual leadership in the community who tend to become 

voluntary listener-sponsors. In the KPFA experiment this 

correspondence was  empirically unmistakable, although the subscribing 

audience apparently touched every economic stratum. It is thus clear 

that the 2% theory, when we speak of supporting serious cultural 

broadcasting by this means, represents also a way of extending the 

legitimate functions of social and cultural leadership [emphasis 

Hill's].Obviously, to earn systematic support from the community's 

intellectual leadership, the listener- sponsored station must give the 

values and concerns of that leadership an accurate reflection at their 

highest level...Because the resulting broadcast service is public, the 

community at large-no doubt by slow accretion and assimilation--is 

enabled to participate in the best aspects of its own culture as few 

communities have done before. (HVL pp.13-14)

 

This is both a statement of intent and of history, for Lewis Hill 

wrote it after KPFA had been on the air for eight years. Although the 

ends were democratic and egalitarian, the means, and even the broader 

cultural premises, were unambiguously, unashamedly elitist. The 

history of Pacifica Radio, and then of National Public Broadcasting in 

America, is a saga of conflict among those who wished to shift the 

emphasis towards one pole or the other.

 

 

 

Carolyn M. Birden

917 520 1268

 

Director, Pacifica Foundation

Elected (Listener) Delegate WBAI

 

WBAI  99.5 FM  New York

WBAI.org and PacificaFoundation.org

 

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