Urban Unrest

18 March 2008 | Programming | Ernesto Aguilar

This past weekend, Winter Soldier II took place in Washington, D.C. The event was modeled after the 1971 Winter Soldier investigations of the Vietnam War era. Significant event, an unpopular war and plenty of audio/visual materials. You might assume media coverage of Winter Soldier II would have been more significant, but it wasn’t.

Slate has a piece on Winter Soldier, as does Wired News. AlterNet, The Indypendent and others have postings on Winter Soldier. In addition, The Winter Soldier liveblog has plenty of testimonies and more. Check it here.

However, Winter Soldier was left out of all corporate media. On Pacifica stations, it was not fully carried live as some expected.

Former Pacifica Executive Director Greg Guma writes a bit about the Winter Soldier II broadcasts on his blog. He notes:

The event also revealed Pacifica’s continuing struggle over how to handle special national broadcasts. Decisions on whether and how to air the hearings were handled by individual Pacifica stations.

Good points from Greg. Many stations had different carriage at different times. I have received a handful of questions asking how carriage works.

Issues such as the importance of the programming, the breaking nature of coverage, external station pressures (KPFT, for example, had just ended a 19-day fund drive the week before), and effectiveness all come into the mix. With a few exceptions, Pacifica does not mandate programming by stations. The so-called ‘must carry’ rule has been controversial in the network for years. And it should go without saying that virtually all live programs are important, and anti-war programming is valuable too.

Today on KPFT, we’ll air a Winter Soldier II preview program during Open Journal at noon. It’s a teaser for next week, when KPFT is set to air a week of highlights from Winter Soldier II, Monday-Friday next week, then concluding Monday, March 31.

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