The Slow Motion Take-Over at KPFA
This article from 2004 chronicles the first attempt at corporatization of sister station KPFA, first of the Pacifica stations. A similar account could be written about KPFK, or WBAI, or the other Pacifica stations. Sadly, the same thing has been recurring over the past few years at all those stations — staff firings, locks being changed, purges and banning of programmers and elected representatives, arbitrary programming changes. Many listeners who have started tuning in only in the past 3-4 years are completely unaware of this history and of the kind of cutting-edge, inspiring radio they are missing out on.
Pacifica Radio–the old regime’s legacy at KPFA
http://la.indymedia.org/news/2006/10/183318.php
Pacifica Radio–the old regime’s legacy at KPFA
by repost Sunday, Oct. 15, 2006 at 12:57 PM
The slow motion takeover of KPFA began in 1992 and reached its climax
in 1999. During those years, the highjackers recruited assistants,
trained proteges and created a culture which permeates the station to
this day. It’s the background of today’s ongoing struggle at KPFA’s
Local Station Board (LSB).
“If we’re not careful, we’ll end up where we’re headed.”–a Lakota
proverb
WHY DID STAFF INSIDE KPFA NOT PREVENT THE 10-YEAR CORPORATE RAID?
August 27, 2004
by Maria Gilardin [KPFA area]
Dear All,
This is my response to the letter from KPFA staff (July 22, 2004),
attacking members of the current KPFA Local Station Board. I had hoped
that I would never have had to write such a letter. Feel free to re-
post. I’m not on any of the Pacifica lists, just on alliance and grc
Maria Gilardin
DURING the slow motion take over of KPFA that began in 1992 and
reached its climax in the attempted sale of KPFA and the lock-out of
station staff in 1999 we, community members and members of Take Back
KPFA and the Coalition for a democratic Pacifica (CdP) waited, first
patiently and then with more and more anxiety for a letter or
statement from staff, alerting the community to the hijacking of KPFA
and Pacifica.
That letter was never written. Had not three courageous programmers
finally gone public KPFA listeners might never have known and the logo
of another network might be disgracing the building on MLK Jr. Way
today.
As somebody who picketed the Pacifica National office in Berkeley
dozens of times in those seven years, who attended protest rallies
when staff was kicked out, who was present at countless KPFA Local
Board meetings where the restructuring of Pacifica became apparent to
anybody taking the trouble to go and listen, I was amazed – as were
many other Pacifica activists – at the passive, fearful silence, not
to mention instances of outright support for those changes, coming
especially from the long – time paid KPFA staff.
Since 1992, and for seven long years we put flyers into staff mail
boxes, issued press releases to the media and copied them to staff;
even setting up a micro power radio station outside of KPFA and tuning
the receivers inside KPFA to the pirate frequency. We wrote messages
in chalk on the sidewalk for you to see when you came out – and saw
you leave through the back door. We called you personally on the
phone, asked friends of yours to intervene and help rescue KPFA and
Pacifica before it was too late. But save for the one exceptional
action by three staff members, none of you who were there did anything
for almost seven years – until the summer of 1999.
When Dennis Bernstein and two others called attention to the 1997
union contract that was signed as a sweetheart deal with KPFA
management, they were denounced by staff. Much later, when Nicole
Sawaya was fired and her firing protested by Larry Bensky, Robbie
Osman, and Dennis Bernstein, no unified support for Nicole came from
staff who returned to the station without her.
From 1992 to early 1999, respected programmers went on the air,
supported the purges of 1995, when 165 community programmers were
dismissed all at once, and maligned Take Back KPFA and the CdP.
The New Pacifica is just 6 months old. When the National and Local
Boards were seated in February of this year the time of hijacks and
take-overs finally ended. This should have been a time to celebrate.
NOW, all of a sudden, in July 2004, you are writing a letter claiming
that the newly elected board–or at least some of the members–are
your enemy. Others have dealt with some of the complaints. I am
addressing those of you who signed the letter.
I am troubled by the signatures of unpaid staff whom I know, respect,
and like. Why would you have signed a document that is largely based
on incidents you did not take part in or witness? I asked some of the
parties accused and their recollections differ considerably from the
statements in the staff letter.
I am addressing the question of the presence of “saboteurs from former
Pacifica Executive Director Pat Scott’s regime” on KPFA staff because
I think these parts of the letter are addressed at me.
It is easy to blame Pat Scott for everything. Bertolt Brecht wrote in
his poem on history: (Julius) “Caesar conquered Gaul. Did he not at
least have a cook with him?” Pat Scott could not have done what she
and those who followed her did, if she had not had a lot of help. And
having knowledge and not acting on it is a serious matter. There are
issues of integrity, ethics, and responsibility involved. I am, of
course, excluding all those who signed this letter who played no part
in this. I am addressing those among paid staff of the period of 1992
to 1999, many of whom are still there, who were the supporters of the
take-over.
The time line below gives the most important events in that slow
motion take-over of KPFA and Pacifica, during which anyone present
should have been aware of fundamental change taking place in the
structure of the station, the bylaws, the governance, and the national
office. It was a very serious matter, involving the plunder of
millions of dollars of listener money over those many years. The time
line shows how benefits accrued to those who collaborated, and lists
the many missed opportunities to protect KPFA and Pacifica from the
takeover. For the most part names have been withheld by me to still
protect the guilty.
We, who worked for years in the Save KPFA and Pacifica movement, have
never addressed that most important question:
Why did staff inside KPFA not prevent the 10-year corporate raid?
Many of current paid staff were inside the station between 1992 and
2002. You saw what was going on from day to day. Some of you held
positions directly assisting the hijackers. And if you did not see it
you saw us picketing the station, pleading with you to act. However,
instead of ringing the alarm you ignored us and persecuted the lone
whistle blowers inside the station.
You could have prevented the take over. We did not want to blame you.
We were sure that ultimately even the collaborators would welcome
change. Even those who helped Pat Scott and those who followed her
could not have been happy in that role. We understand that he amount
of intimidation was immense. Not everybody has the guts to stand up.
We thought you would be relieved to live and work without fear and
compromise.
However, now, just five months into the new era of Pacifica, many of
the names of those who collaborated with the old regime appear on the
staff letter of July 22, 2004. I know that the mainstream media feels
empowered to re-write history, but when it happens at KPFA it must
become a cause of wider community concern.
I am writing this because there are now two stories, two parallel
narratives. The inside and the outside story of KPFA and Pacifica and
they are totally different. Collaborators have become heroes, victims
made perpetrators; actions and in-actions reverse their order. Michael
Moore is right. We are living in fictional times. But we cannot allow
fiction to invade KPFA.
Here is a list of some of your missed opportunities to save KPFA and
Pacifica:
In June, 1993, KPFA was picketed by African-American programmers from
KPFK in L.A. They were protesting Pacifica Executive Director Pat
Scott’s purges at our sister station. They had hoped for help from
you–none was forthcoming.
1994: Pat Scott changed the face of community radio by voting as a
member of the CPB task force to peg CPB funding to Arbitron ratings, a
decision that almost defunded KPFK and several other community
stations. There was not a word from staff.
February 1995: Pacifica program directors were told to mainstream
programming. The staff of KPFA voiced no opposition. Instead
management at KPFA began to prepare the purges of August 1995.
March/April, 1995: Pat Scott hired the American Consulting Group,
listed by the AFL-CIO as a notorious union-buster, to break the KPFA
union (United Electrical Workers). Did nobody notice that they were
there?
May 1995: Bill Mandel was fired for deviating from his subject matter
and breaking the “Gag Rule”. More than 60 people picketed the station–
no paid staff among them. Some of you went on the air and said it was
a good thing to fire people who had been there so long and were “old”.
Now, that some of you have been there for almost as many years, “term
limits” is no longer talked about.
June 1995: The National Board began to hold secret meeting in
violation of CPB funding guidelines. For the next two years, Take Back
KPFA activists picketed at National Board meeting sites, often
struggling to raise enough money to send representatives to other
cities. There was never, in all these years any participation from
paid staff until it was almost too late in 1999, until your own
sinecures were threatened.
August 1995: All 7 to 8 pm weekday public affairs slots were replaced
with music and 165 programmers, many of them community activists, were
removed from the air. Some were informed, as they went on the air,
that this was their final program. (The large number of 165 was due to
the fact that these evening slots were programmed by collectives:
Native Americans, Gay community, the Women’s Department, Pacific
Islanders etc.) This mass removal changed the demographics at the
station in a dramatic way, since a substantial number of the evening
programmers were people of color.
In the context of the 1995 purge four KPFA departments were eliminated
without resistance from paid staff.
The Women’s Department had as department heads, over time, an African-
American, a Native American woman and a Latina. The Third World
Department had an African-American woman as the long-time department
head and the Public Affairs Department had an African-American
department head and later two Latino directors. KPFA paid staff also
agreed to the firing of the last FOLIO editor, and the termination of
the FOLIO department, ending publication of, not only a literary
supplement, and reference guide and resource, but an essential form of
monthly outreach to KPFA’s listeners, continuous since the station’s
founding in 1949.
All three programming departments (Third World, Women, and Public
Affairs) had a degree of diversity. They also allowed for community
participation in the programming of KPFA that no longer exists in the
tightly controlled “air-strips” and remnants of PA programs that have
become the private property of a host. Several paid staffers voiced
approval of the demise of these departments on the air.
November, 1995: Brian McConville, investigator from the Inspector
General’s office of the CPB (Corp. for Public Broadcasting) launched
an investigation into the violation of open meeting rules of the
Pacifica National Board. Following Pat Scott’s intervention with his
boss, he was fired 17 days later and the investigation is suspended.
At the time, both management and staff never bothered announcing that
the meetings were even taking place.
May, 1996: The presence of the American Consulting Group at KPFA, and
Pacifica, was exposed by Take Back KPFA. The producer of the labor
program on KPFA did not have the courage to mention its presence in
KPFA’s union negotiations while interviewing a union activist on the
role of the ACG in preventing union organizing at the Lafayette Park
Hotel The rest of the staff also maintained radio silence concerning
ACG’s role at the station.
December, 1996: CPB’s Deputy Inspector Mike Donovan was fired after
attempting to continue the investigation into the violation of open
meeting rules of the Pacifica National Board. No word from staff.
Unconcerned with anything outside of the station’s front door, paid
staff probably didn’t know about it.
1996-1997: The union at WBAI, the United Electrical Workers (UE),
refused to submit to Scott’s order to kick the unpaid staff from the
union. While the WBAI/UE fought all the way up to the NLRB for
inclusion of the unpaid staff in the bargaining unit – and even
initially were victorious at the New York level (Feb. 1997) – KPFA
paid staff knuckled under to Scott and left the UE and joined the CWA
(Communication Workers of America), breaking solidarity with their
sister union members in New York, and as well as with KPFA’s unpaid
staff who they unceremoniously booted out.
There was, however, a pay-off. In return for two-tier pay raises, job
protection and a pension plan, staff agreed to NOT go on strike, NOT
do sit down actions, and NOT employ work stoppages, slow downs or
boycotts, sympathy strikes or corporate campaigns against management.
A courageous letter signed by three dissident staff members and former
union stewards appeared in the S.F. Bay Guardian in October 1997,
pointing out that: “CWA members granted management the absolute right
to fire at will all on-air personnel hired after Sept. 1 1997. ”
And “The new agreement, which both CWA and Pacifica have called “win-
win,” creates the same kind of unfair two-tier pay system that BART
and UPS workers successfully opposed in their recent strikes. It
specifically states that management can hire temporary workers for as
low as $7.50 an hour for work for which other employees receive a
substantially higher wage. ”
Paid staff gave up all these rights at a crucial time where any such
action as a work stoppage, slow down or boycott, sympathy strike or
corporate campaign would have exposed the hijacking of Pacifica and
the enormous financial fraud committed by the leadership.
March, 1997: Community members hired a lawyer to fight to retain the
rights of local board members to sit on the National Board while
Pacifica began to change the bylaws to make the National Board self
perpetuating and exclude station board members and staff from the
National Board.
1997: National Board meeting in Oakland: Take Back KPFA had a sizable
picket outside the Oakland hotel where the board was meeting. Inside
Mary Frances Berry was voted in as the new chair of Pacifica. KPFA
representative and Board Secretary Roberta Brooks attempted to have a
motion entered into the minutes as passed that had not been approved
at the last meeting. A Take Back KPFA member held up a tape recording
of that meeting to prove it. At that moment KPFA paid staff entered in
their new CWA T-shirts. They read a prepared statement regarding their
personal pay issues and left. We ran after them, pleading with them to
stay and listen or to join the picket line outside. One and all, they
refused.
With the exception of KPFA, the media were beginning to take interest
in the story, and articles were posted and disseminated via the
internet. While the urgency of the KPFA/Pacifica issue became
increasingly apparent, paid staff kept completely silent.
The last chance for KPFA staff to write a letter came and went in
February, 1999 when Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and Ed Herman wrote a
moving appeal, alerting the public to the imminent danger. We–the
activists on the outside–hoped that, finally, staff would have the
courage to put their names to that letter. They did not sign on – not
even under the wings of luminaries such as Chomsky, Zinn and Herman.
That was the last chance to rescue KPFA and Pacifica before the
lockout and occupation of the station by security guards. In
retrospect it is evident that paid staff only began to act when their
personal jobs were at stake. It is sad to say that a large number of
paid KPFA staff seem to be people who see this not as a station that
belongs to the community, accountable and inclusive, but as a place to
pick up a pay-check.
When on July 14, 1999 armed guards, hired by Pacifica, tried to arrest
Dennis Bernstein after he disclosed the attempt to sell KPFA on Flash
Points, Dennis tried to find a way to warn listeners of the take-over
by running upstairs to the news department. Mark Mericle was just
reading the headlines and was getting ready to lead with a story on
health care. As Dennis tried to get his attention and removed the feed
reel with the story from the tape deck, Mark refused twice to deviate
from his schedule. Only when the board operator opened the microphone
and the sounds of the struggle went on the air did Mark report on what
was going on.
The battle for Pacifica was not over when staff returned to the
station after the 1999 lockout. Paid staff returned without Nicole
Sawaya and accepted the appointment of Jim Bennett by the Pacifica
National office in her stead.
Silence among the paid staff fell again on the station at the end of
1999 as the fight over the dissolution of the national hi-jack board
of Pacifica continued. Most of staff did not participate in the law
suits, in the pickets of National Board members, or in the boycott of
Pacifica National News. Staff was very late in supporting Free Speech
Radio News – started in a garage in Berkeley – and even late in
supporting Democracy Now!
While members from community organizations, most notably from the CdP,
were arrested at picket lines, and organized and financed the first
two rounds of elections for a KPFA Local Station Board, staff retained
their silence. Staff as a whole did not allow the Local Station Board
to report on the developments of the bylaws via regular Local Station
Board reports. Listeners who depend on the station to keep them
informed about such things had to wait for sympathetic programmers to
offer time.
KPFA staff as a group refused to participate in the boycott of
Pacifica National. From 1999 until removal of the last hijackers from
Pacifica’s national staff in 2002, KPFA transferred to that office
hundreds of thousands of dollars of listener donations used to fight
the community and the lawsuits.
The crucial period from early 2002 until very recently saw KPFA and
Pacifica under judge’s orders to develop a new set of bylaws. The
Local Station Boards and committees, several dozen people at each
station worked, very hard at consensus. At KPFA the board held
meetings at the station to make it easy for staff to participate in
the writing of the bylaws. One staff member participated.
Listeners wrote into the bylaws unprecedented rights and
representation for staff on the local and national boards, giving them
25% membership on all boards. Under the old bylaws staff
representation was zero.
Community stations across the country interviewed members on the
bylaws committees, and even participated in the process. But staff at
KPFA for which the bylaws were written maintained an almost uniform
silence.
The story repeated itself in changes concerning Program Councils. Many
community stations have such councils: Madison, Wisconsin; Portland,
Oregon; and the GRC (Grassroots Radio Coalition) contributed from
their experience. KPFA staff almost entirely ignored the debates over
responsibility and rights of Program Councils and then sabotaged the
outcome by not attending meetings or overturning decisions taken in
them.
In the years from 1999 to today, KPFA staff had unprecedented freedom
to run the affairs of the station as they pleased. Pacifica’s national
office no longer interfered. There was an in-house General Manager who
was willing to cooperate fully with paid staff. There was no Program
Director for most of that time. KPFA paid staff was in charge — and
is now.
If there have been no significant changes in all these years, is it
because KPFA is already perfect? Even the paid staff majority would
not say that. Even friends of staff, such as Doug Henwood, say –
terrible to hear – that “KPFA is irrelevant”. KPFA is known as Pat
Scott Radio because it still operates under the same system of NPR –
derived structures, in violation of the founders intent, and with a
paid staff lacking in diversity as it was in 1995.
KPFA, as a station, in spite of its freedom from interference by the
National Board, has not participated in the media democracy movement,
in the resurgence of community radio via the GRC, the micropower
movement, Indy media or other efforts to free the air and open access.
As a station with a huge staff and unprecedented resources KPFA has
been unable even to conceive of what Amy Goodman has actually done,
initiating a national media collaboration involving] radio (ranging
from community to NPR stations) with television and the internet.
Democracy has a hard time coming to KPFA in spite (or some would say,
because of) the leanings of so many paid staff members towards the
Democratic Party. There can hardly be a clearer indication of
entrenched and reactionary power, than more than a year’s adamant
resistance to shifting the station’s most popular and respected
program, Democracy Now! to a time when most working people can hear
it. Ownership of airtime, turf and power have also prevented an open,
honest discussion over strategies to produce the best possible
programming for the station as a whole.
To those of you who read through this long and critical letter, please
consider what is truly most to your advantage, and that of the
community you have obligated yourselves to serve. Please support a
free and democratic KPFA.
Maria Gilardin
———————-
The KPFA staff letter that Maria is responding to can be found with
the above essay at
http://www.wbai.net/eow/eow_kpfa_gilardin8-27-04.html
My name is Chuck Anderson. I am president of the O.C. Chapter ACLU, Chair of the O.C. Peace and Freedom Party, Vice President, Elders Council, Alianza Indigena, organizer and cofounder of the KPFK Support Group with seven plus years antiwar and human rights weekly street corner protesting. I am past president of O.C. Veterans for Peace, past president of The Tustin Municipal Employee Association and former Board member of O.C. Unitarian Church. I am a volunteer for Change Links, KPFK, The World Can’t Wait, member of NAACP, CAIR, ARA, AL AWDA, Viva Palestinia, KPFK Outreach Committee, a volunteer for ANSWER Los Angeles. I am a Pan Africanist, Bolivarian and support open borders, open arms and open hearts for all immigrants.
