It’s election time at Pacifica Radio again. Your annual contribution lets you pick the board at your local station. That’s pretty unique for a media outlet. How do you handle this grave responsibility? We are here to help with voting info, some news, endorsements at our local station (Berkeley) and a few opinions to chew on as you make your decisions. We hope it’s helpful! Please remember to vote by September 30th. We can’t just let a noisy few shape our community institutions. These are community decisions and all of us make them together.
ENDORSEMENTS
This election season, we are only endorsing at KPFA as a publication. We know that may be annoying, but we encourage you to listen to the debates, read candidate statements, and think about the issues we’ll discuss below as you consider the candidates at your station. For the Northern California folks: we are recommending the following listener candidates for the KPFA election (in alphabetical order)
Cheryl Davila, Edward Escobar, Nayvin Gordon, Elizabeth Milos, Pathma Venasithamby, Rich Stone, Stan Woods, Steve Zeltzer
HOW TO VOTE
Your ballot link should arrive by email today (August 15th). You have until September 30th to complete it. If you are a current member at your station, and don’t receive a ballot, you can request one here. If you would like to hear more from the candidates, you can tune into or stream on demand candidate discussions that will be broadcast as follows:
KPFA – Aug 18 @ 11-2 PM PST, KPFK – Aug 14-18 @ 2-3 PM PST (In English) & Aug 14-17 @ 830-1030 PM PST (En Español), KPFT – Aug 11 & August 18 @ 7-8 PM CST, WBAI – Aug 19, 26 & Sept 2 @ 4-6 PM EST, WPFW – Aug 28 @ 5-8 PM EST
Pacifica uses ranked choice voting, which is a system of proportional representation that allows you to rank the candidates you like in order so that your vote isn’t lost if your favored candidates have already been eliminated. So pick up to 9 listener candidates (or 3 staff candidates if you are a member of the staff) and put a #1 next to your favorite, #2 next to your second best and so on. Don’t stress out about it. Your vote will automatically transfer to your most favored candidate that is still in contention. Just make sure the candidates you like most get the highest rankings on your ballot. You can access a voter guide here.
FIXING THE PACIFICA STATIONS
We know you are worried about KPFA and Pacifica. And probably a bit frustrated because you’ve been voting for a long time now and it doesn’t feel like things are getting better. We’re not going to start by yelling about mismanagement and try to tell you who the “bad people” are. Those are factors, but they pale beside the big issues. So let’s not get distracted and let’s talk about what’s wrong at KPFA and what needs to be fixed. Two priorities.
#1 – UPDATE THE TECHNOLOGY. KPFA is losing large amounts of members and social influence at the exact same time as the podcast world is exploding. Weird, huh? There’s a reason for that. Things have changed. Audio is now available on demand, on any subject imaginable and our station still doesn’t have a searchable archive by subject matter. So if you are a college student doing a paper, a community activist looking for stories, or just a hobbyist looking for stuff you like, you can’t find the interviews or discussions or music on KPFA that you want or need – unless you happen to know the exact date and program when it aired. That’s crazy. And unhelpful. It has to be fixed. And it has taken far too long. KPFA and all the Pacifica stations have fallen behind. Valuable treasures are hidden and basically lost and the station’s content isn’t easily findable and usable by media customers who expect to be able to access content they need. The station needs to join the 21st century audio universe, and sooner rather than later.
#2 – WHAT’S THE MISSION. Every media outlet and organization has a brand and a mission. This is who we are and this is what we do. KPFA and Pacifica are still working with a 1946 mission, which is generally ignored. So if your question is why all the fighting – well, that’s why. Lack of clarity. Is KPFA an NPR-lite public broadcaster? Is it a repository of left and radical wisdom that says the things that mainstream public media would never allow on the air? Is it aligned with the Democratic party in the two-party horse race of American politics? Is it the place where the voiceless can have a media voice? Is KPFA decidedly and consistently anti-war (as the 1946 mission says it is)? The board implements the mission. That is what you are voting for. And the clearer the message sent by the voters, the easier the way out of the woods will be. If you want an anti-war station, vote for it. The candidates endorsed here have a clear sense of the mission, and KPFA and Pacifica need that now.
THE NEWS
Keeping Pacifica Radio going is a financial struggle. No doubt about it. The post-democratization salad days are long gone. The issues raised above about audio standards and brand confusion are at the core of the declining membership base. But the litigation-palooza isn’t helping. So even if you aren’t convinced by the diagnosis, you should be convinced by this. The candidates at KPFA who are not being endorsed align themselves with names like “KPFA Protectors”, “New Day Pacifica” and “Pacifica Safety Net” and are aggressively and repeatedly suing the organization and hemorrhaging dollars in the hundreds of thousands in futile legal fees. About the last thing you want to do when dollars are running short. It’s not okay. In fact, it’s sabotage.
Just in the last few years:
Pacifica Safety Net sued a pair of former national board members. Their lawsuit was dismissed for lack of merit and then it was appealed to the higher court. Now they want to end it, but KPFA has paid out at least a hundred fifty thousand dollars for the exercise since board members (like at all nonprofits) are indemnified unless there is evidence of some wrongdoing. Pacifica Safety Net itself, (which consists of members of the KPFA Protectors who “endorsed” their lawsuit as local station board members) is now getting angry 30-day demand letters from the Ca Attorney General because they aren’t filing their tax forms. (Which is not an advertisement for the ability to competently govern a nonprofit organization).
Even worse, the Safety Net filed a petition at the Federal Communications Commission to protest the renewal of the license of Pacifica’s New York station WBAI. The protest could potentially cause the loss of the station license, an asset worth several million dollars. It is probably the only time in recorded history that nonprofit board members asked for their own nonprofit to lose its operating license and for the government to take millions of dollars away from it. The protest likely won’t work, but it is one hell of a dangerous maneuver.
New Day Pacifica forced an election to revise the bylaws, which failed. They then filed a lawsuit to overturn the results and their request was denied by the judge. They continue to litigate because they can’t accept election defeat (which should sound familiar), and the money keeps pouring out the door. Like in American politics, where the popular vote and the electoral college aren’t the same thing, Pacifica’s election structure doesn’t put staff and members in the same pool. Which makes sense because the staff are a much smaller, and yet extremely important, group. The staff group didn’t go for the new bylaws and both groups had to approve by majority vote. Them’s the rules. Judge enforced them. But the group continues to bleed the organization because they don’t like it. Not constructive, not admirable, and not to be rewarded.
Together, we are looking at half a million dollars or more in legal fees. Your money. No results, no improvements to the radio stations, just waste. So no “Protectors”. You protect the stations by avoiding the “Protectors”. I know it can be confusing, but the lawsuits, petition and the money the “Protectors” have wasted is all too real and it should be disqualifying (at least until the “Protectors” pay it all back and withdraw the WBAI petition and apologize).
If you value being kept up to speed on Pacifica Radio news via this newsletter, you can make a little contribution to keep Pacifica in Exile publishing . Donations are secure, but not tax-deductible.
To subscribe to this newsletter, please visit our website at www.pacificainexile.org
###
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-sponsored radio.
DISCLAIMER: This is not an official Pacifica Foundation website nor an official website of any of the five Pacifica Radio Stations (KPFA Radio, KPFK Radio, KPFT Radio, WBAI Radio, WPFW Radio). Opinions and facts alleged on this site belong to the author(s) of the website only and should NOT be assumed to be true or to reflect the editorial stance or policy of the Pacifica Foundation, or any of the five Pacifica Radio Stations (KPFA Radio, KPFK Radio, KPFT Radio, WBAI Radio, WPFW Radio), or the opinions of its management, Pacifica National Board, station staff or other listener members.