A Conversation for a Crisis in The City
J.T. the L.A. Storyteller Podcast reaches episode 99 and eyes the future
If Los Angeles is fractured for its sprawl, its political and cultural left has only magnified the city’s discordant or disunited character. Similarly, when it comes to news and media from the progressive side, there are many options, but spread out or in a disconnected form that’s hard to trace. Starting in my teens, then, I relied for many years on KPFK 90.7 FM for an alternative to mainstream news and commentary, particularly via the indefatigable Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” program, and later, through Sonali Kolhatkar’s “Rising Up,” both of which I continue to hold in high esteem.
I even remember the fundraising campaigns for KPFK (because just who can forget), which encouraged listeners to pitch in so as to keep the airwaves in L.A. free and accessible for working-class people. For quite a while, in my mind, of course $20 could help stop the Bush and Cheney administration’s private interest profiteering; now, as our Substack team makes monthly calls to Los Angeles to support our own humble publishing platform, of course $5 a month can only go so far for three sets of eyes on gentrification. The payment does, however, help stop our team from working to tell stories on the issue for free anymore (we thank you and ourselves for this, dear subscribers).
I also remember the heterogeneous identity of the KPFK/Pacifica news organization, which became especially clear when I registered how differently evening programs sounded from morning shows; essentially, the flagship and more polished shows ran through the AM, while more grassroots and lesser known programs took up the PM hours. What I gleaned from the toggling nature of this was that KPFK was for the left; and that the left contained the voices of Black, white, Latinx, Indigenous, young, aged, and more people, epitomizing the sound of a metropolitan and even global listenership (on this note, a shout out also goes to Global Village Thursdays with John Schneider).
Today the station remains multitudinous in character (and in fundraising mode). But a lifetime since I first tuned into the programs that inspired my own publishing platforms, I can see how the same diversity and progressive values which make the left a natural fit for so many metropolitans are also what make it difficult to sift through; put another way, with so many identities and varying needs and interests, more often than not, it appears the left is rather impossible to organize. This is not just the case locally, either, but also nationally with the Democratic party (which I’m not arguing is an outright replica of L.A.’s local left, but just the mainstream alternative to U.S. conservative politics).
Enter J.T. the L.A. Storyteller Podcast, featuring yours truly, an L.A. born and raised storyteller from central Los Angeles. Episodes discuss policy-making, including gentrification, housing and homelessness, urban planning, and more of the issues shaping Los Angeles today.
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