Larry Bensky, a Fixture of Left-Wing Radio, Is Dead at 87

Larry Bensky, a radio journalist whose reporting on major political events made him the signature voice of Pacifica Radio, a network of progressive, listener-supported stations, died on May 19 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 87.

His wife, Susie Bluestone, said he died in home hospice care.

Mr. Bensky’s gavel-to-gavel coverage of the congressional Iran-contra hearings of 1987 put the Pacifica network on the map, earning him a prestigious Polk Award for radio reporting.

Mr. Bensky, who called himself an activist-journalist, brought leftist views to reporting — often on people and issues under-covered by other news outlets — which he hoped would, as he often put it, “stir things up.”

That was hardly a fringe view in the progressive ethos of the Bay Area, where he was based, though he still managed to transgress the boundaries on a regular basis. The free-form rock station KSAN, the voice of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, threw him off the air for interviewing workers who had been fired by one of the station’s sponsors.

He was later dismissed from his longtime home, the Berkeley station KPFA, for on-air criticism of decisions by the station’s owners, though he was reinstated after broadcasting over a pirate radio signal from the street outside. He was known to 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 nation’s first listener-supported radio station, the first to broadcast Allen Ginsberg reading his poem “Howl” and the first to open its airwaves to Patricia Hearst, who denounced her parents as “capitalist pigs” during her kidnapping.