New Twist to the NEA Flap--Protecting Archives : Radio: Pacifica, which owns KPFK-FM, may reject grant to support tape library where some of its raciest programs are stored.

The Pacifica Foundation--already embroiled in a controversy over restrictions on allegedly indecent radio programming--is mulling rejection of $30,000 in National Endowment for the Arts grants to protest what it sees as a multifront federal censorship campaign.

Moreover, the dispute underscores what many NEA grantees have complained may be perceived as unanticipated far-reaching effects of a provision of the arts endowment’s 1990 appropriation bill. That provision bars federal support to any arts project that is “obscene” and lacking in artistic merit.

In the case of the Pacifica Foundation, the NEA has offered money to support a tape archives that includes some of the raciest early work of such people as Lenny Bruce and George Carlin--dissemination of which might run afoul of the bitterly contested obscenity control clause. The NEA has required grant recipients to sign a certification they will comply with the anti-obscenity provisions of the money bill.

The Berkeley-based foundation, also known as Pacifica Radio, operates six unconventional stations--including KPFK-FM in Los Angeles--in four states. The stations have been challenging increasing pressure from Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to restrict “offensive” or “off-color” programming.

Pacifica has often taken on Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), author of a 1988 amendment that requires the FCC to crack down on “indecent” broadcasts. The amendment requires the FCC to aggressively ban “indecent” material.

Little known in the course of the FCC dispute, however, has been Pacifica’s status as an ongoing recipient of NEA funds--though the arts endowment support is not directly involved in Pacifica’s programming over KPFK, KPFA and KPFB in Berkeley, WBAI in New York City, KPFT in Houston and WPFW in Washington. The foundation also operates Pacifica Radio News, a network with 40 clients.

This year, according to David Salniker, Pacifica’s executive director, the NEA offered the parent Pacifica Foundation a $20,000 grant for ongoing support of the Los Angeles-based Pacifica Radio Archives, which maintains a library of more than 40,000 documentary tapes. An NEA award of $10,000 was also received for a Berkeley-based program that trains women and minority group members in the technical aspects of radio production.

In a telephone interview earlier this week, Salniker said that, while the grants may first seem inconsequential in the context of Pacifica’s $4.5-million annual budget, the foundation had become alarmed at the possible implications of NEA funding restrictions for the archives, in particular. The collection includes tapes of interviews and other materials involving political controversies beginning with the McCarthy era.

The tape collection, Salniker said, also includes largely unexpurgated interviews with counterculture stalwarts including poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist Jack Kerouac and radical political leaders Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton.

Salniker said the Pacifica Foundation’s executive committee discussed the NEA grant dilemma in early August and recommended to the foundation’s full board that the two NEA grants be rejected as a protest to the NEA policy requiring grantees to acknowledge the restrictive provisions of the money bill in writing before their grants may be paid. The full board will take up the issue in early October.

Initially, Salniker said, Pacifica got involved last year in ongoing attempts to try to set aside the FCC restrictions also authored by Helms. When the NEA obscenity oath controversy broke out earlier this year, he said, the situation struck Pacifica as not an isolated problem, but part of a broader-brush censorship fight of which the FCC component had simply been the first shot fired.

“There is a consensus within the organization,” Salniker said, “that these restrictions are an abhorrent attack on cultural freedom.”