PACIFICA GROUP EXERCISES RIGHT TO EDITORIALIZE

Nearly two years after winning the right to editorialize, the Pacifica Foundation took to the airwaves on KPFK and its other four FM radio stations this week with its first official organizational viewpoint on current affairs.

Utilizing a right it won in a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in July, 1984, the nonprofit, non-commercial Pacifica group began broadcasting Wednesday night an editorial condemning the apartheid government of South Africa and its “repressive militaristic policies.”

The editorial, delivered by Pacifica board chairman Jack O’Dell, calls on listeners to contact President Reagan, “insisting that his Administration break with apartheid immediately and absolutely.”

The editorial was scheduled to continue running through Monday on KPFK-FM (90.7) and Pacifica’s other stations in Berkeley, New York, Houston and Washington.

“This was the first time an issue came up that we felt we had a chance to make a difference where millions of lives are involved,” Sharon Maeda, Pacifica’s executive director, said in an interview Friday.

She said the editorial was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary Monday of the Soweto uprising in South Africa and was intended to put pressure on the government there “to minimize the bloodshed” that might ensue.

It was written and recorded before South African President Pieter W. Botha’s declaration of a nationwide state of emergency Thursday.

Pacifica was one of the parties to a 1979 lawsuit that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1984 that noncommercial radio and television stations receiving federal funds could not be barred by the government from airing editorials. A 1967 law had imposed that restriction.

“It was always our feeling that we needed to protect our rights on First Amendment grounds whether or not we chose to exercise them,” Maeda explained Friday. “It was never our plan to broadcast editorials on a daily or even a weekly basis. But the principle needed to be there for the time we felt compelled to use it.”

Meanwhile, Maeda said that the State Department had informed Pacifica Thursday that its reporters would no longer be allowed to attend briefings held there for foreign broadcasters because they had violated restrictions about using recorded comments on the air.

No mention was made of the editorials, she said, but she contended there might be a connection since Pacifica had been using the taped comments in its reporting for several years.