Berkeley–Thursday’s Pacifica National Board meeting turned into a Mozart sonata after the Siegel/Brazon faction insisted on preventing both the 2016 and 2015 directors from WBAI-FM from voting in the meeting. The music, which played for more than 40 minutes on the conference call line, was preceded by numerous objections to the board majority’s actions, which included trying to seat two affiliate directors self-nominated by stations without affiliate agreements to represent the 200 affiliated stations, refusing the seat four directors elected by NY’s delegate assembly on January 26th: staffer Shawn Rhodes and listener reps Bob Young, Alex Steinberg and Frank LeFever and refusing to allow the 2015 directors from WBAI to vote in their stead, leaving the NY station completely disenfranchised. A clip of some of the meeting can be heard here.

(The clip is 45 minutes long. Pacifica in Exile apologizes for the length of the clip as we try really hard to present brief and listenable snippets, but in this case it was important to convey a bit of the long period of time spent by the independent directors attempting to address the shenanigans. The actual meeting was 2 hours 45 minutes long. We strongly recommend a listen when time allows)

Former PNB vice-chair (and newly re-elected director from Houston) Bill Crosier commented: “I’m really distressed that the PNB majority is so obsessed with retaining control that they’d disenfranchise all of WBAI and install two people to represent Pacifica affiliate stations who are not even from any of our affiliates. It was unfortunate that last night’s PNB meeting was disrupted. But neither old nor new Directors from WBAI were allowed to speak on their own behalf, nor vote, and were rudely ignored during the meeting by the PNB leadership. I was not expecting it, but I’m not surprised that they would be so frustrated that one of them chose the route of civil disobedience to tell the PNB how unfair it was to suppress representation from one of our stations, especially to not allow either the old nor the new representatives to participate in the meeting”.

As a result of the meeting interruptus, the Foundation will have no executive director as of February 1st. Current volunteer executive director Lydia Brazon’s appointment ends January 31st. The board is not scheduled to try to meet again until February 4th.

Board members had back channel communications in hopes of negotiating a compromise to end the governance breakdown and allow the national board meetings to go forward. However, a board majority member said the Siegel/Brazon faction would not give an inch and preferred to fight it out in court, using listener donations to fund the defense of their own actions.

Among the points of contention are the seating of the two bogus affiliate representatives as voting members of the board, the refusal to seat the 4 newly elected NY directors, and the refusal to allow the sitting NY directors to vote on WBAI’s behalf if their colleagues couldn’t.

It seems likely given the speed of the negotiations that many, if not most, of the national board members associated with the Siegel/Brazon board majority may not have been consulted regarding the not giving an inch and wanting to fight things out in court.

WBAI host and alternative health author Gary Null, filed a copyright infringement, piracy and premiums fraud lawsuit in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York (federal court). The civil action #1:16-CV-241 was filed against the Pacifica Foundation and individually against WBAI general manager Berthold Reimers, ED Lydia Brazon, former ED Margy Wilkinson, former ED John Proffitt and former local station board chair Mitchel Cohen. The suit requests injunctive relief, statutory fines and says the behavior has been ongoing for at least a decade.

The complaint can be read here.

At troubled KPFK in Los Angeles, where a massive arbitration is underway with the SAG-AFTRA union, Pacifica lost the first round, resulting in the immediate payment of at least 18 months of withheld seniority pay to almost two dozen unionized employees. The arbitration is continuing.

The station is experiencing a significant backlash from the late night program change that eviscerated the Southern California station’s trademark late night programming curated by Roy of Hollywood. The station has been inundated with calls and emails of protest and dozens of member donors saying they will never pledge again, as well as a landslide election victory for the slate opposed to the direction of current general manager Leslie Radford.

A petition to restore the popular overnight program curated by Roy of Hollywood (Something’s Happening) can be found here.

The replacement program “Safe Harbor” is predicated on the gratuitous use of profanity (the name refers to the FCC policy of not enforcing prohibitions against broadcast indecency and profanity during the very late night hours). A few brief samples can be heard below.

Safe Harbor 1: “Saying Whatever The Fuck They Want”.

Safe Harbor 2: Shit, Goddamn, Fuck Yeah: The Listeners Revolt.

Safe Harbor 3: “Sex Education Baybee or The Phone Guy is Falling Asleep”

Safe Harbor 4: The Dopest Guest

Safe Harbor 9: The Only Call: Safe Harbor’s Community Conversation

The Safe Harbor programs have been held back from the station’s web archives (which have been broken for much of the past five months). The missing archives make it difficult for listeners to retain the programs without taping the program themselves off the terrestrial broadcasts. The archives may also be suppressed because the new DJ’s brought in by Radford and her roommate Adam Rice have not been logging songs played during the three hour late night broadcasts for Sound Exchange, which collects royalties for Internet streams of copyrighted musical works. Failing to log the songs played rips off the artists whose works are played on Safe Harbor of royalties due to them from Internet listenership.

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Started in 1946 by conscientious objector Lew Hill, Pacifica’s storied history includes impounded program tapes for a 1954 on-air discussion of marijuana, broadcasting the Seymour Hersh revelations of the My Lai massacre, bombings by the Ku Klux Klan, going to jail rather than turning over the Patty Hearst tapes to the FBI, and Supreme Court cases including the 1984 decision that noncommercial broadcasters have the constitutional right to editorialize, and the Seven Dirty Words ruling following George Carlin’s incendiary performances on WBAI. Pacifica Foundation Radio operates noncommercial radio stations in New York, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and syndicates content to over 180 affiliates. It invented listener-supported radio.