In the last year, with the beginning
of democratic governance, the struggle is no longer with the hijackers.
As we now attempt to bring an open, transparent, accountable and democratic
process to the station and Pacifica, some with vested interests do
not want such a process to succeed. They do not want to share power
with the community that finances the station for fear of losing the
control they have had over air time and station jobs (their turf)
for the last several years. In their attempt to defeat or slow down
the development of a transparent democratic process they have sought
to make the LSB ineffectual, claimed that LSB members have created
an "unsafe work place" and have attacked those that seek
to implement positive changes. In response to this an analysis of
the last two years was written up and signed by 35 staff members.
We encourage you to read this to understand what is going on.
The
cry that there are barbarians at the gates masks the real challenge
to KPFA's future.
We
will have to choose whether to defend the station's mission or defend
our own turf.
Dear Fellow KPFA Staffers,
An article in the Berkeley Daily Planet
tells readers that KPFA is again in crisis. And a widely circulated
letter signed by a group of KPFA staffers likens the crisis to that
of 'the terrible years surrounding the KPFA lockout and shutdown of
1999'. Such news will be greeted with dismay and frustration by KPFA's
many friends. The station and the network have only recently emerged
from that harrowing and exhausting fight for their lives and listeners
who rose to the station's defense and to the defense of its mission
with immense energy and who stood by KPFA throughout that long and difficult
struggle will certainly not welcome the prospect of another.
It is important that listeners and staff
members learn what is happening at KPFA and it's important that they
have a chance to carefully consider what recent events may mean for
the station's future. But by evoking the specter of 'the devastating
forces of the previous Pacifica National management' the staff faction's
letter misrepresents the nature and origin of the differences and the
character and intentions of the people with whom they disagree. The
moment demands of all participants that we try to inform and persuade
rather than frighten those we address. It is not necessary to pull punches
or to minimize points of difference and the example of the near loss
of Pacifica should never be forgotten but the signal to noise ratio
of that letter is not helpful.
During the Pacifica conflict the defenders
of Pacifica's mission challenged and, after tremendous effort, changed
the governance of the network and of the stations. At the heart of the
changes are new by-laws which were crafted in a long, open, and inclusive,
democratic process and which give listener-members significant power
in station governance through the Local Station Boards (LSBs). These
new by-laws embody the hope that opening station decision-making to
listener input and, to some extent, listener control will make the Pacifica
stations more responsive to the progressive community and protect them
from possible future take-over attempts.
The present conflict at KPFA is a result
of resistance from some station staffers to implementing the reforms
embodied in the new by-laws.
The signers of the letter fail to note
some noteworthy differences between the old Pacifica board and the reformers
who seem to have so alarmed them. The old Pacifica board built their
power on the disempowerment of the listeners and unpaid staff. The reformers
purpose is to bring listener input into the station's processes. The
old Pacifica board was distant, unelected, and unsympathetic to - even
ignorant of - the Pacifica mission. The reformers are long-time KPFA
listeners and staffers who ran in the recent elections for seats on
the Station Board hoping to help make the station as effective and vibrant
a progressive voice as it can be. One way many Pacifica supporters came
to appreciate the nature and seriousness of the threat posed by the
old Pacifica board was by witnessing the old board's attacks on and
eventually its attempt to eliminate Pacifica's flagship program, Democracy
Now! The reverse is true in this situation. The tension between the
present reformers and the signers of the letter was sparked by the decision
of a reformer majority on the station's Program Council to move Democracy
Now! to a better, more accessible airtime (so that listeners who work
from 9-5 can hear it).
The old Pacifica board is not part of
this dispute. The success of the KPFA community and of the nationwide
Pacifica community in overturning their undemocratic rule itself has
created new challenges. Our ability to find our way in this new landscape
will depend, in large part, upon whether we choose to name the issues
or to call names.
What's going on?
We have come to an impasse because some
staff, long accustomed to the previous unaccountable ways of making
decisions and wary of changes in the status quo, have flatly refused
to accept the exercise of listener/board participation mandated by the
new by-laws and other agreements which came out of the struggle. One
of the staff-elected representatives to the Station Board articulated
this view at a recent meeting of the Local Station Board. He told the
Board that KPFA was like an airplane. The listeners were like passengers
who should expect to pay for their tickets and then remain in their
seats leaving the crew to fly the aircraft. It is crazy, he said, to
let the passengers into the cockpit. He called the listener board representatives
and those listeners who had come to watch the board meeting and to participate
in the public comment segment of the meeting 'self appointed guardians
with too much time on their hands'. His unconcealed distain elicited
outrage among many listeners but he declined a plea to apologize and
his allies on the board refused impassioned requests that they disassociate
themselves from his offensive formulation of the proper role of listeners
in KPFA's deliberations.
The chief tactic of those who are resisting
the democratization of decision-making at KPFA has been to, as quietly
as possible, subvert the reforms while paying lip service to democratization.
They are not always as open about their perspective as that staff-elected
board member was at that unguarded moment but the unfortunate fact is
that the airplane analogy is a frank expression of a widely held rejectionist
stance.
After the immense effort by KPFA listeners
to rescue KPFA and Pacifica from an isolated and self-selecting clique
it is heartbreaking to hear people who should know better argue that
the right to participate in station decision-making cannot be entrusted
to people who are 'unfamiliar with radio' (as another catch phrase of
the reform-rollback effort has it). This is plain nonsense and it is
sad to see that some of the same staffers whose willingness to disempower
listeners and unpaid staff did so much to encourage and enable the Pat
Scott/Mary Francis Berry/Lynn Chadwick assault on the network have returned
to their old analysis of who is and who is not suitable for inclusion
in station decision-making now that the threat from the old Pacifica
Board seems eliminated.
People untrained in making radio programs
should not be engineering call-in shows or asked to edit news feeds.
But KPFA's listeners and supporters are capable of making thoughtful
judgments about whether those call-in shows are covering issues that
are of importance to them and they can make judgments about whether
KPFA's newscasters or any other programmers are performing up to their
standards.
Democratization is needed for KPFA's
future health and effectiveness; bringing the perspective of listener-members
into the station's 'internal' deliberations will strengthen our work.
When has insularity ever protected a progressive institution? But reasonable
democratization is being resisted on the Program Council, at the Station
Board, and in the General Manager Hiring Committee that the board has
organized to find and vet a new manager. A militant minority of board
members backing a faction of station staffers has time and again defied
democratically arrived at decisions, disregarded fundamental rules of
order, and sought to nullify by-laws-mandated reforms and in doing so
have made democratic decision-making all but impossible. Then they point
to the mess and invite people to conclude that democracy itself has
failed.
The Program Council, Democracy Now!
and how we got into this mess
The present rift that divides staff member
from staff member and board member from board member first became apparent
at Program Council. That is where some station staff began to stonewall
the democratization that had been won during the Pacifica struggle and
that is where the rejectionists started to cover their actions by misrepresenting
the actions of the listener, unpaid staff, and LAB representatives to
the Council. It's a long story but it's worth knowing what really happened.
KPFA's Program Council is charged with
making programming decisions for the station. In the years leading up
to the Great Pacifica Crisis only paid station staff participated it
its deliberations and decisions. Today it is, at least in theory, composed
of paid and unpaid staff, community representatives who are appointed
by the LSB, and LSB members.
Unpaid staff, community, and board reps
were brought onto the Council during the time of the Pacifica Wars when
the demand for democratization was strong and the necessity of maintaining
listener support was inescapable. But once the usurping Pacifica board
was defeated such 'members' learned that their right to take part in
program decision-making had an absolute limit. Their power to participate
in decision-making was recognized only so long as they confined their
authority to decisions that did not affect the programs of long-time
paid staff.
This became clear when morning programming
became an issue on the Council. During the run-up to the war against
Iraq questions arose about the scheduling of Democracy Now! DN! is,
along with Flashpoints, the station's most popular and one of its most
politically hard-hitting programs. KPFA was airing the wartime two-hour
version of DN! broken into two parts which the station aired from 6-7AM
and then from 9-10AM, which is to say before most people wake up and
after most folks who work from 9-5 can listen. A temporary rescheduling
of DN! during the crisis was proposed but rejected.
After the fall of Baghdad and after DN!
went back to its one hour format the question of when the program should
be aired remained in the minds of several of the Council members. Council
members who wanted to discuss the question discovered that this issue
could not be raised at Program Council. To be more accurate it was possible
to put it on the agenda but never possible to get to it. Council members
tried for weeks. Weeks became months. Months became many months. After
it was inescapably clear that the question was being intentionally kept
from climbing to the top of the agenda Council members who felt it was
important to discuss the possibility moved and seconded a proposal to
begin airing Democracy Now! at 7 in the hope that Robert's Rules of
Order would be respected and a motion on the floor could not be avoided.
No help. More weeks passed. Cries of misconduct were shined on. The
subject was forbidden. Beyond a certain invisible line democratization
was a pretense.
When Gus Newport became General Manager
the unpaid staff, listener, and board Program Council representatives,
begged him to take over as chair of the Council so that the issue could
at last come up for discussion. Gus reluctantly agreed. At long last
a meeting date was chosen for the discussion to take place and then
rescheduled to accommodate the calendars of the Council's paid-staff
members. The question of whether to change the time that DN! is aired
was to be the only item on the agenda. There would be no more avoiding
the question.
The date and time arrived as did the
unpaid staff, listener, and board representatives. There were no paid
staff. They just didn't show. None of the Council members assembled
believed it was a coincidence.
After discussing KPFA's morning schedule
for more than an hour during which those present considered analyses
of fundraising results for DN! and the Morning Show, data on how many
radios were turned on at relevant times, scheduling logistics and more,
Aileen Alfandary, who had been hosting the evening newscast, arrived
at the meeting. That meant that the meeting had a quorum. The question
was put to a vote.
The Council members present voted unanimously
(with one abstention) to air Democracy Now! at 7AM and air KPFA's Morning
Show from 8-10AM. This opened up the possibility of using the 5-7AM
slot for new voices and wider communities (consideration of an evening
or afternoon rebroadcast of DN! to accommodate listeners who had been
tuning in at 9 but might not be awake at 7 was understood to follow
shortly).
The vote was as much an effort to force
the issue onto the table as an attempt to impose a final decision. It
said to the absent Council members in effect, if you don't get serious
about discussing this issue this vote will stand. There is no reason
why the absent paid staff members could not have come to the next meeting
and moved to reopen the question. Not one Council member would have
refused. In fact, the discussion would have been welcomed. But that
would not have suited their purpose. It had been clear for months that
opening the question was exactly what they had been unwilling to allow.
Instead they chose to make an issue of
the fact that the vote had occurred when they were not present. Today
when listeners or other KPFA staff ask the station's leadership how
they justify refusing to accept the legitimate decision of the Council
they say that it is because the unpaid, listener and board representatives
snuck the decision past those who opposed the change at a moment when
they weren't looking.
But that won't stand up to the light.
The eight votes for the change that were recorded at that meeting represented
an absolute majority of the membership of the Council. Even if every
other Council member had attended and all of them had voted the other
way the motion could have carried. That means that there was no motive
for the unpaid staff, LAB, and listener representatives to rush a vote
in order to take advantage of a moment when those who might disagree
would be denied their votes because they happened not to be there.
When compelled to recognize that reality,
the no-show Council members claim that the unfairness of the decision
lies in the 'fact' that because the vote took place in their absence
they were denied an opportunity to argue their position. But that can
only persuade people who do not know that for months they had refused
unending efforts to bring the issue to the table and that afterwards
they chose not to exercise their power to put the question back on the
table.
The fact is that the decision was made
with as much open discussion as the paid staff Council members' determination
to prevent a discussion would permit.
In the face of the station administration's
later refusal to implement the decision of the Council the elected Local
Advisory Board (the Local Station Board established by the new by-laws
had not yet been formed) voted to recognize the propriety of the decision.
At a two-day retreat the members of the Program Council - meeting with
then GM Newport - unanimously reaffirmed its democratic composition
(that is the inclusion of LAB, unpaid staff and listener members) and
its legitimacy as the station's programming decision-maker. Gus Newport
publicly recognized the legality of the vote also but he resigned before
the change was implemented.
But the change was blocked. Immediately
upon rebecoming interim GM Jim Bennett, who had chaired almost all of
the meetings during which the topic of moving Democracy Now! was kept
from reaching the table, announced that he would refuse to implement
the change. After the new Local Station Board was elected under Pacifica's
new by-laws it too voted to recognize the right of the Program Council
to make such a change and instructed Jim to respect the legitimate decision
of the Program Council. The board required that the change take place
within four months. The end of that four months is only days away but
it is clear that Jim intends to defy this board too.
Thoughtful readers will ask how anyone
could expect to get away with such a global refusal to respect fundamental
rights and responsibilities.
The crapstorm that is being loosed upon
the station and its listeners, the fear mongering, the warnings about
ignorant and hostile strangers seeking to micro-manage everything, the
wholly fabricated story that the board wants to eliminate music programming,
the demonstrably false charge that board members have left the station
open to lawsuits, the sensationalized descriptions of normal discussion
and questions from board members that turn legitimate and appropriate
or even sometimes angry and frustrated statements and questions from
the board into 'egregious charges', 'slurs', 'character assassination',
'potentially libelous accusations', 'challenges', 'attacks', 'anti-worker
assaults', and 'threats' which 'demean', 'dismiss', 'ridicule', 'harass',
and 'accuse' (all of these taken from the letter referred to above)
are well suited to cover this and other blatant refusals to play by
the rules.
The strategy seems to be to create enough
heat and raise a great enough din that staff and listeners alike can
be stampeded into reacting in frustration and fear. The hope is that
people will be persuaded to accept the suspension of democratic decision-making
and return station governance to the 'peaceful 'status quo ante (before
'outsiders' had a voice in KPFA's decision-making structure).
It can come as a surprise to no one that
the refusal of the station's administration to respect the decision
of the Program Council has caused a controversy that has spilled over
into the Station Board. At this moment almost any consideration that
comes before the board is measured in terms of opposing sides and weighed
in the context of a 'larger battle'.
An example:
The Local Station Board is required by
Pacifica's new by-laws to supervise and evaluate the station manager
and to approve a pool of candidates when a new manager must be hired.
Gus Newport recently resigned as manager of KPFA and the LSB has created
a committee to find and vet possible replacements. A nine person hiring
committee made up of paid and unpaid staff and LSB members has been
selected, the LSB members by a vote of the board and the non-LSB staff
members by a vote among the staff.
A shameless effort to manipulate this
process has been mobilized. Here's what happened.
A subcommittee of the board (the Personnel
subcommittee) - one which was not democratically chosen and which was
not given the mandate to recruit and vet a manager by the board or the
by-laws - announced that it had changed the make-up of the hiring committee
that the board had created. This committee announced that it had 'removed'
the chair of the Hiring Committee (who also is the elected chair of
the LSB) from the Hiring Committee entirely. No one can maintain with
a straight face that the subcommittee has the authority to do this.
The runaway subcommittee 'notified' the
chair of the Hiring Committee that they had excluded her from participation
in the work of the committee. Inevitably, this precipitated a clash
within the Hiring Committee.
There was no possibility that such a
move would not force the focus of the committee to change from the work
of finding and vetting manager candidates to fighting a dysfunctional
internal battle. As of this writing the urgent work of this legitimate,
by-laws mandated committee has ground to a halt.
Conclusion:
It's fair for listeners and station staffers
to ask the following question: if democratization is so adamantly opposed
by an element of station staff and if achieving it is going to result
in such conflict, is opening up decision-making at the station really
worth the cost in effort and hard feelings?
There are at least two reasons why the
reforms embodied in Pacifica's new by-laws and the democratization of
the station's programming decision-making must be allowed to work.
It is important to make certain that
programming decisions support the mission of the station rather than
the interests of the decision-makers. That necessity demands that KPFA
depend, in large measure, on democratically chosen representatives from
the station's listenership and the broader progressive community who
have no personal interest in the outcome of programming decisions (beside
the interest we all have in empowering, informing, and inspiring a progressive
movement), to evaluate and ultimately shape our programming.
It may disappoint, but it should not
surprise KPFA's supporters to learn that the station's staffers, people
whose voices have become the voices of friends and who listeners may
have even grown to think of as the very voices of progressive politics,
can be as jealous of their perks and privileges as people in other political
and social arenas. But human beings are human beings and we simply must
protect our progressive institutions by creating and fighting to defend
rules and practices that require that policy and programming decisions
be made by people who are disinterested and accountable.
Those of us who produce KPFA's programs
and whose power, pride, and perks, may hang on such decisions will have
important and useful perspective and information to contribute to such
discussions. You can be sure that we will express strong opinions. But
KPFA's airtime is a commons to be used in the common interest not a
commodity to be possessed forever or to be divided up among the loudest,
strongest, most deeply entrenched, or first in line. And for that reason
disinterested discussions and disinterested conclusions are what's needed
and those will most reliably come from disinterested decision-makers.
After long years of insular practice
KPFA's program decision-making has grown to be too responsive to the
give and take of the station's internal carrot and stick economy and
too unaccountable to the needs of the listeners, the demands of the
times, or the requirements of Pacifica's mission. The Democracy Now!
question is one example; we run our most effective audience magnet before
most people wake up and after many people who work from 9-5 can listen.
Even having a decent discussion about changing that proved impossible
because at KPFA the demands of turf and power take precedence over the
needs of the listeners or the station or its mission.
Here's another example of how the absence
of listener input distorts the station's structure and programming and
inhibits our effectiveness. Consider this question: why doesn't KPFA
have a Public Affairs Department? We have a Music Department, and a
News Department, and a Drama and Literature Department. It's possible
to imagine a Public Affairs Department that has a staff that is comparable
in size to the staff of one of our larger daily programs; let's call
it three or four full-time positions divided up among one or two full-time
and several part-time paid staffers. The PA Department staffers would
not be on-air people but people who had roots and connections in a wide
variety of political movements and Bay Area communities. Their job would
be to help people from those communities and movements produce many
forms of programming: segments for magazine programs, short term series,
thematic day long programming, and hard-hitting investigative documentaries.
A PA Department like that could be wonderful
for the political ecology of the station. It could bring activists into
the station - not just to be interviewed but to become part of KPFA's
life and process. But as things stand now it will never happen. The
old decision-making structure, controlled, as it was and is, exclusively
from within the power elite of the station has not and will not create
a Public Affairs Department like that. Starting one would upset the
apple cart; actually many apple carts. Only by incorporating listeners,
people who are not hoping to get or keep their own program, into governance
and programming decision-making can the station get beyond petty turf
protection that has (this is truly incredible) left KPFA without a Public
Affairs department for years.
Here's the other reason that we can't let
democratization be rolled back. The old board's effort to remake Pacifica,
to fire the audience and use the stations to build a new, more mainstreamed
radio empire, or to sell one of the stations and fund heaven knows what
grandiose scheme did not suddenly appear in the Spring of 1999. It first
took root in changes in station decision-making which disenfranchised
KPFA's listeners and unpaid staff and made local decision-making subject
to national oversight. KPFA's core paid staff should have, but failed
to, whole-heartedly resist efforts to disempower listeners and unpaid
staff. Only when the usurpers thought that the community had accepted
their powerlessness did they feel strong enough to try to hijack the network
altogether. That's why the attempts to discredit and disempower the LSB
are short-sighted and dangerous.
An effective, empowered, and locally
elected LSB is all that the by-laws provide to protect the stations
from another take-over from Pacifica Central. The lesson that we were
forced to learn at immense cost is that an empowered listenership is
the most reliable guarantor of the station's and the network's progressive
mission. A staff and listenership which will accept a disempowered LSB
has, practically speaking, accepted that legitimate power ultimately
resides in Pacifica Central. We should not step onto that slippery slope
again.
The station is at a crossroads. Finding
KPFA's way safely forward will require the vision and the courage to
risk taking a democratic path. The democratic decisions of the Program
Council, the necessary work of the Manager Search Committee, and the
legitimate authority of KPFA's long fought for elected Station Board
ought to be respected. If they are not respected they will have to be
fought for. The alternative is rule by an oligarchy with turf protection,
personal privilege, and spin control, occupying the place where co-operation,
open discussion, and mission driven decision-making, should be. The
end result of taking that path will not be good for KPFA or its listeners
and especially not for its mission.
Yours very truly,
Nick Alexander: Unpaid Staff Organization
Representative
Juan Amador: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Mehmet Bayram: Voices from the Middle East and North Africa: Middle
East Radio Project Collective (MERP)
Dennis Bernstein: Flashpoints
Dogpaw Carrillo: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Solange Echeverria: Flashpoints
Bonnie Faulkner: Guns and Butter
Arihua Ferriz: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Omar Flamenco: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Nora Barrows Friedman: Flashpoints
Jasmin Garcia: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Leah Gardner: Pushing Limits
Miguel 'Gavilan' Molina: Flashpoints
Nauthal Gonsalo: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Lisa Gonsalvez: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Miguel Guerrero: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Peggy Hecker: Pushing Limits
Robert Knight: Flashpoints
Esin Kunt: Voices from the Middle East and North Africa (MERP)
Norma La Brava: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Adrienne Lauby: Pushing Limits
Sandra Lemus: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Ventura 'Mr. Chuch' Longoria: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Falcon Molina : La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Leroy F Moore, Jr: Pushing Limits
Robbie Osman: Across the Great Divide
Miguel Perez: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Malihe Razazan: Voices from the Middle East and North Africa: Middle
Eastern and North African Perspectives Collective (MENAP)
Pedro Reyes: La Onda Bajita/Radio Del Barrio Aztlan
Jan Santos: Pushing Limits
Doyle Saylor: Pushing Limits
Mina Sepher: Voices from the Middle East and North Africa (MERP)
Sue Supriano: Steppin' Out of Babylon
Barmak Saemian: Voices from the Middle East and North Africa
Gulden Yazgan: Voices from the Middle East and North Africa (MERP)
Steve Zeltzer: Labor Collective, Middle East Radio Project
