Larry Bensky, a radio journalist whose coverage of major political events made him the distinctive voice of Pacifica Radio, a listener-supported network of progressive stations, died May 19 at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 87 years old.
His wife, Susie Bluestone, said he died in hospital treatment.
Mr. Bensky’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of the congressional Iran-contra hearings in 1987 put the Pacifica network on the map, earning him the prestigious Polk Award for radio reporting.
Mr. Bensky, who calls himself a journalist-activist, brings a left-wing perspective to his reporting — often about people and issues not covered by other news outlets — that he wants to, as he often says, “disrupt.”
It’s hardly a fringe view of the progressive ethos of the Bay Area, where he’s based, although he still manages to break boundaries on a regular basis. Rock station KSAN, the voice of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, threw him off the air to interview a worker who had been fired by one of the station’s sponsors.
He was later fired from his longtime home, KPFA, in Berkeley, for on-air criticism of a decision by the station’s owner, though he returned after broadcasting a pirate radio signal from an outside street. He was known to his colleagues as cantankerous, but he was also so knowledgeable about history and politics that he could broadcast for hours without notes or a script.
KPFA, founded by pacifists in 1949, was the first listener-supported radio station in the country, the first to broadcast Allen Ginsberg’s reading of the poem “Howl” and the first to open the airwaves to Patricia Hearst, who denounced her parents as “capitalist pigs” during kidnapped him.
During his 38 years at KPFA, Mr. Bensky offered live accounts of local and national events. “Larry had this incredible ability to take you to a place and let you know how he felt,” said Aaron Glantz, an investigative reporter and former colleague of Mr. Bensky, in a tribute broadcast by KPFA last week.
Working in a broadcast van called the Green Weenie, Mr. Bensky recounted the confrontation between protesters and National Guard troops in Berkeley’s People’s Park in 1969. A decade later, he reported from a phone booth on the riots in San Francisco called White Night after the lenient sentence of Dan White to kill Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first officially elected gay in California.
From 1987 to 1998, Mr. Bensky was a national affairs correspondent for Pacifica, a community-focused and often very economic station group with more than 200 affiliates, including KPFK in Los Angeles, WBAI in New York and WPFW in Washington.
There, he covered the confirmation hearings of four Supreme Court justices, the presidential nominating convention, the 1990 election in Nicaragua and the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, which some Democrats claimed was marred by lack of election rules.
During the Iran-contra hearings, Pacifica conducted a week of live testimony; during breaks, Mr. Bensky will host an impromptu talk show from the hearing room, complete with expert commentary and listener calls.
He later hosted “Sunday Salon” on KPFA, a two-hour weekly public affairs show, and co-anchor, with Amy Goodman, of “Democracy Now!” Pacifica Radio, a popular daily hour that covers news from the left. – wing angle.
But the internal politics of Pacifica and KPFA often stalled, reflecting left-wing factionalism and pressure from community-backed radio. Mr. Bensky was fired twice in 1999, the first time for his criticism of President Bill Clinton because, he later said, his views conflicted with the “liberal line of the Democratic Party.”
He was soon back on the air, but he was fired a second time after reading a statement in support of station manager KPFA, who had been fired by Pacifica executives as he sought to expand the station’s audience beyond a small group of Berkeley activists and militants. After a 30-day staff lockout over the dispute, the audience forced the management to resign, and Mr. Bensky was reinstated.
“It was the most exciting thing in my life to see how people came,” he told The Berkeley Daily Planet in 2007.
Lawrence Martin Bensky was born on May 1, 1937 in Brooklyn. He is one of two children of Eli Bensky, a lawyer, and Sally (Davidson) Bensky, a homemaker.
Raised in a Jewish household, he became interested in becoming a journalist when he read newspaper reports about the Nazi holocaust, he said in a 2007 retrospective broadcast on KPFA.
“I was one of the children who learned to read from the newspaper, because my father used to bring home six or seven days, and during World War II and the Jews were exterminated, and I was very happy. problem,” he said.
He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in 1954 and, in 1958, from Yale, where he served as managing editor of The Yale Daily News.
He was briefly a book editor at Random House, in 1962 he read a manuscript that Cormac McCarthy had sent through the transom. He recommended the work for publication and spent a year working with Mr. McCarthy on what became his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper.”
In 1964, Mr. Bensky moved to France to become editor of The Paris Review. Two years later, he returned to the United States to work for The New York Times, as an editor at Book Review and an occasional writer. But he and his superiors discovered that they were no match.
The Sunday magazine article he wrote about the anti-Vietnam War movement was never published. “I worked on this for a week, and I wrote, and they killed it because they said I didn’t have enough criticism of the antiwar movement from the other side,” Mr. Bensky in a retrospective of 2007. “I can see that I was not there by accident. “
He then took a job as managing editor of Ramparts, an unrestrained New Left magazine based in San Francisco, which he sent to the epicenter of the anti-establishment riots in the country. He had found his home.
Mr. Bensky’s first marriage ended in divorce. In 1997, he married Ms. Bluestone. Besides her, she is survived by her daughter, Lila Bluestone Bensky; five grandchildren; and sister, Joyce Silverman.
When not broadcasting, Mr. Bensky teaches journalism at Stanford University and political science at California State University, East Bay.
After retiring from daily journalism, he nurtured another long-term interest: He hosted a Sunday morning classical music program on KPFA called “Piano” and revived his love for the French language and French literature by hosting a website, “Radio Proust,” dedicated to his life and the works of Marcel Proust.