TakeBackKPFK Community Radio

KPFK’s news staff has been slashed to one.  That’s one person to report, edit, and broadcast the news.  And you’ve heard the results: we “share” local news with Berkeley, usually at the bottom of the hour.  That’s roughly as relevant as reporting on Washington, DC local news in New York.
The station has been undergoing serious and necessary budget cuts, and we’re at the bottom of the financial barrel.  KPFK is barely holding its own, and the Pacifica Foundation as a whole is in worse shape.  But, like a good poker player, that’s the time to take considered chances and raise the ante.

Across the board (the Local Station Board and the candidates), there is near unanimity on this one.  Listeners speak with pretty much one voice, here and, believe it or not, at KPFA in Berkeley. The question is how to do it?  The answer is pretty simple: let’s hold a fundraiser strictly dedicated to strengthening our local news staffing and resources.  With all the fundraising we’re doing, it would be difficult to be more intrusive, so let’s make sure KPFK is spending its money the way the listeners are demanding.

About $120K would fund two full-time staff with benefits for a year, and that’s two or three fundraising days.  Then put one of those people to work training and integrating volunteer reporters from across the signal area.

And if we buy back our local news, we can provide a service you can’t find anywhere else: cutting edge local reporting.  That will bring back the listeners who’ve left, along with their financial contributions, and we can scramble our way out of the hole.  It’s a small risk, and a sharp play.

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. Read more…

Given Ms. Aaron’s predilection to sue, we take her threat in the comment below seriously.  We have removed this article at her request.

Nevertheless, we respect the original article’s assertion that naming Pacifica as a defendant in a lawsuit, with or without seeking damages, is suing Pacifica and is not without risk to the Foundation.

You might have noticed TakeBackKPFK is supporting GrassrootsKPFK. We just checked over their endorsements, and damn! some serious activists support them. If you belong to any of these groups or respect any of these people, then pay attention to who they’re supporting. We knew we picked the right people. So, once more, Wow!

The following emails, which appeared on the New Pacifica Yahoo group, say much about their author, KPFK listener candidate Christopher Bayard Condon. They’re posted here in the interest of informing and educating the electorate.  Condon is responding to a blog by Doug Henwood, host of “Behind the News” at KPFA in Berkeley. Condon, who answers to “Chris” and often signs himself as “Bayard,” is not running with a slate, but as of this writing, he remains a committee member of one of them, the Committee To Strengthen KPFK. We’ve highlighted those ideas that we find troubling, but we ask that you judge for yourself.

Photo by NoHoDamon.

Subject: [Fwd: Doug Henwood: the state of WBAI]
Posted by: “bayardcondon” lacitizensgrandjury@earthlink.net bayardcondon
Date: Wed Aug 11, 2010 9:49 am ((PDT))

Gentle Pacificans,

There are two types of people in the world; those who take responsibility and those who blame others. Now I have been a fan of Doug Henwood’s since I lived in NYC and listened to the then much better WBAI, so this is not a personal attack although I can predict that he will take it as such and respond with a personal attack. He knows a great deal about the economy and wall street, pre-911, but he knows nothing about the 911 attack, planning, execution, and cover-up; and knows even less about natural medicine.

Part of the reason he knows nothing about these things is that he, and for that matter the entire left gatekeeper leadership, Jews and Gentiles alike, have swallowed from the beginning the pre-scripted propaganda fabrication of the fictitious al-quaida and Osama bin forgotten conspiracy theory – advanced by the most powerful propaganda apparatus in world history. Not only that, but he cannot even see this apparatus and grip on the intellectual jugular of the left for having become part of it, any more than fish can see the water they swim in.

Now they can’t, aren’t big enough, to acknowlege being wrong from the beginning, played a role themselves in advancing the propaganda fabrication, and failed to educate themselves in the now conclusive body of evidence that points to, well, other parties as the perps of the 911 attack summed up in the assertion that “911 was an inside job.”

Flowing from this intellectual collapse is a failure to understand all its consequences; the purpose and meaning of Guantanamo, the preplanned attack on Afganistan, the pre-scripted Patriot Act, the plan for permanent occupation and control of central Asia, the control of the global drug trade, and, dear Doug Henwood, the control of the global financial system. In short, a failure to understand anything else and a retreat into the comfort of the collective delusional hallucination into which our media has invited us to live, permanently, for the rest of our lives. No thank you.

All this, and much more, was the objective of coup d’etat which we suffered on September 11, 2001. We, and our stepinfetchit President, are now governed by those who planned, executed, and covered-up the greatest crime in American History. Henwood, most of the so called Pacifica public affairs programmers, most specifically including Amy Goodman, cannot, will not, wrap their tender little brains around the magnitude of their intellectual failure. Nor do they have the capacity to look directly into the heart of darkness, describe what they see, and give challenge to absolute evil.

Thats why we can’t attract and keep listeners, because we are politically, intellectually, and morally irrelevant. Read more…