Against the Bland

California's Pacifica Foundation, which operates radio stations in the San Francisco area, Los Angeles and New York, is a sort of low-frequency Hyde Park Speakers' Corner, providing broadcasting facilities for almost anyone who wants to express any point of view. Graphic sexology and earnest Communism often reach the air through Pacifica stations, plus smatterings of scatology and black magic, not to mention any number of broadcasts of the plays of Shakespeare, the works of Wagner, and the theological sentiments of people like George Herbert and John Donne.

Pacifica's freewheeling forum draws many protests as well as thousands of subscribers (the stations use no commercials). The complaints piled up, and when the Federal Communications Commission sat last week to decide whether to grant or renew the licenses of the various Pacifica stations, there was an air of supreme courtsmanship about the judgment. The FCC supported Pacifica and granted the licenses, saying that if it were to throw Pacifica off the air because some people were offended, the Bill of Rights would be violated and, moreover, "only the wholly" inoffensive, the bland, could gain access to the radio microphone or TV camera" thereafter.

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