Witch Hunts Redux

 

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Berkeley-Houston’s KPFT, usually the quietest and smallest of Pacifica’s five radio stations, exploded into witch hunt mode this week after a dust-up about frequently absent board member Maria Elena Castellanos trying to “rescind” her resignation a month after submitting it. After the Siegel/Brazon majority in Houston supported the absurd claim, the board doubled down and proposed suspending 4 members of the independent faction for six months for sending emails advocating that Castellano’s resignation couldn’t be taken back a month afterwards per Pacifica’s bylaws – which state board seats become vacant upon the occurrence of a resignation. The targeted board members include Bill Crosier, the former president of the Houston Peace and Justice Center, George Reiter, a professor of physics at the University of Houston, long-time KPFT volunteer Teresa Allen and Prison Show producer Hank Lamb, a former Siegel/Brazonite who broke with the faction in July of 2014 after telling them to “cut the crap” and calling for Margy Wilkinson’s removal as board chair.

The proposal for the suspensions (which in practical terms constitute expulsion from the boards altogether as the Houston board removes members after the failure to attend three consecutive meetings) can be found here.

It states “The following persons (Allen, Crosier, Lamb and Reiter) submitted emails supporting ejecting Ms. Castellanos from the LSB to the official KPFT LSB email list, presumably to influence other LSB members to vote likewise. The named current KPFT LSB members are to be suspended from the KPFT LSB until November 31, 2016. Furthermore, all named persons are to be removed and banned from the KPFT LSB email list for the duration of the suspension”. 

Crosier, the top vote-getter overall in KPFT’s 2015 election (Teresa Allen was second) has frequently appeared in this publication, attempting to speak reasonably to an increasingly irrational board majority. He penned a response to the threat to expel him from Houston’s local board and the national board of directors, which can be found in its entirety here. It includes copies of all the emails written on the subject of Castellanos and her non-resignation. Readers are encouraged to read the whole thing, but here are some brief excerpts:

“Many wonder why the intense distrust and divisions continue in Pacifica’s governance. When I was first elected to the PNB, I’d heard the stories, but thought that somehow maybe I could bring the factions together. I’ve tried to be respectful to everyone, even when I disagreed with them. But gradually, after watching how people voted over the first year on the PNB, it became clear that members of one faction (that I call the financial irresponsibility faction) almost always voted against motions designed to improve our financial situation – motions to amend the budgets to reduce spending, or to promote financial recovery, to rebuild our reserves, etc. That faction was quick to throw out progressive or radical rhetoric whenever challenged on this, but never satisfactorily explained why we should not get our financial act together. Instead of dealing with our growing financial problems that were clearly leading Pacifica to insolvency, they would go into attack mode against those of us who questioned what was happening and when we tried to do something to save Pacifica from financial ruin”.

“What’s been happening, on both the PNB level and on our LSBs, are attempts to muzzle those who speak out against failures of fiduciary duty, about violations of the Bylaws, about ignoring the impending financial collapse, and about holding onto power at all costs. Is this why we’re on the LSB? To silence the whistle blowers?

“This motion is apparently based on the e-mails that we sent to the LSB following Joseph’s note to us on May 1 in which he specifically asked George, Teresa, and I for our recollection, resolutions, and opinions on Maria Elena’s resignation, since we had seen numerous LSB resignations while we were on the LSB in the past. It seems peculiar that our responses to his request were used against us. I must confess, though, our objections were primarily such apparently vile things as quoting from the Bylaws and telling newcomers of how resignations had been handled in the past. Read the e-mails and see for yourself. The motion seems clearly designed to censure us for providing the information he requested of us, It then went further by calling for us to not attend LSB meetings until November in an attempt to bypass the Bylaws procedures for removal from the LSB”.

On May 16th, WBAI engineer and program host Max Schmid announced on-air that Pacifica had not issued payroll checks to WBAI employees. There has been no on-air or written response to Schmid’s assertions by Pacifica management or the national board of directors to date. The five Pacifica stations have all been in fund drive this month and have reported $700K in pledges since May 1. WBAI’s semi-monthly payroll obligation totals $18K.

WBAI, which remains on the chopping block and has probably only been saved by the FCC’s failure to issue a license renewal to Pacifica for the last 23 months, has been having an especially dismal fund drive, with pledges totaling only $110K, or about $8K a day. This has been the station’s status quo following a catastrophic 2015 when listener support plunged by over $900K in a single year after Mario Murillo was hired by Margy Wilkinson to direct the station’s programming. Murillo’s return of many Siegel/Brazon-affiliated programmers from WBAI’s Justice and Unity Caucus, along with the frequently-reported severe premium delivery backlog, resulted in a financial tsunami for WBAI under Wilkinson and successor Lydia Brazon. WBAI Listener support declined from $2.2 million to $1.3 million in the 12 month period of October 2014 to September of 2015.

The NY station has struggled with logistical problems ranging from having Internet service turned off on May 11th in the middle of its fund drive to heavy costs from the call center, an outsourced phone answering service that has already sucked up $38K of the station’s dwindling income in the first six months of the year.

WBAI’s local board has not met since 2015 due to the Siegel/Brazon majority’s refusal to seat the 1st runner-up from the 2015 election to the board’s vacant seat trying to prevent the independent majority WBAI’s members voted for. The national board has not seated WBAI’s elected representatives, leaving the national board illegally constituted per the bylaws, and the NY station without independent input at a time when its broadcast license is being eyed as the last remaining source of cash with Pacifica’s declining membership numbers and sabotage of public broadcasting grant funding from the CPB. A NY legal complaint about the exclusion of WBAI’s board members will have its next hearing on Friday May 20th in Kings Country Supreme Court in Brooklyn, NY.

If you would like to support either or both of the legal complaints filed by Pacifica members, you can visit the Clean Up Pacifica Project for more information.

KPFA’s local station board is convening a secret retreat on May 22nd at an undisclosed location. An email was released by KPFK PNB rep Michael Novick to the KPFK local station board indicating the subject of the retreat was finances including budgets, volunteer numbers, interdivisional loans and transfers and the creation of a network wide task force. You can see the email penned by former IED Wilkinson and distributed by Novick here. Corporation for Public Broadcasting open meeting requirements insist that all meetings of the board and committees must be noticed, and admit the public to discussions not focused directly on personnel or contractual issues. The CPB’s statement can be seen here with this proviso: “Note that deliberations do not require any formal action or vote. Any discussion of public broadcasting issues that may influence the opinions of members makes it a meeting“. Pacifica’s compliance officer reiterated  CPB guidelines on Pacifica’s meeting records website at kpftx.org: Therefore no issues which pertain to public broadcasting may be a part of a legitimate retreat. Since Pacifica is in the business of public broadcasting, that means there can’t be any discussion which would pertain to the operation of any Pacifica stations or the Foundation itself. Of course, if it’s a real retreat for the purpose of getting people to work together, that’s not a problem. If there’s any another purpose, it could affect our standing with the CPB. And cost us a lot of money. Bottom line: Retreats are for how committees work. Never about station issues”.

Pacifica’s 2014 financial audit, last promised for the second week of May, and now the latest Pacifica financial audit in history, has still not made an appearance. It isn’t clear if the reason for the holdup is missing information or Pacifica not paying the outstanding bill, last described as $75K, with more to come. Monday’s failure to cover WBAI’s $18K payroll suggests funds are not available. The Pacifica National Board has not been able to explain why none of the $11 million+ dollars that passed through their hands in the last 12 months is available for crucial operational costs. The latest report back on the FY 2014 audit can be found here. The CFO says the accounting records are in “no state” to begin a 2015 financial audit.

Although it has not been announced to Pacifica’s board of directors or anyone else, the network appears to have hired Lynne Serpe, a NY-based Green Party activist, as the 2016 national election supervisor. A notice on Pacifica’s website asks for applicants for the local election positions and asks candidates to direct their applications to Lynne Serpe at the email address nes2016@pacifica.org.

At KPFK’s local station board meeting on March 15, the local board overwhelmingly passed a motion condemning the exclusion of WBAI’s elected representatives to the national board. The local board also called for SoundExchange music rights logging to be improved by program director Alan Minsky, noting that supervision has been so lax that some programs, notably overnight profanity fest Safe Harbor, aren’t being archived due to DJ’s not logging the songs played and ripping off artists of royalties due. KPFK’s independent majority, who won an overwhelming victory in the 2015 election, have been frustrated with Wilkinson-appointed general manager Leslie Radford’s refusal to reverse programming changes that have demonstrably reduced revenue in the affected slots without reducing payroll costs, including drive time at 8:00am and late nights from midnight to 3am. In this exchange with local board member Ken Aaron, Radford indicates that she intends to keep ignoring the sentiments of the last election per direct instructions from ED Brazon. Brazon later stated the only programming mandate from boards she intends to  implement is the directive to put more spanish language programs on the 5 Pacifica stations.

Listener support totals for the Safe Harbor block, a melange of midnight to 3am programs based on the liberal use of on-air profanity, totaled an anemic $1,180 after 24 hours of broadcast. The former all-night program, Something’s Happening, now relegated to an abbreviated 3am to 6am slot, collected $13,821 or almost 12 times the receipts. The eclectic Something’s Happening, a Los-Angeles institution for decades, was the highest-rated overnight radio program in the nation’s second largest media market, including both commercial and non-commercial competitors, before Radford sabtaged one of Pacifica’s only programs reaching a significantly sized audience.

(original art by KPFK listener David Allen)

Pacifica stations have been increasingly grabbing premium gift products from Amazon, the ubiquitous reseller and a poster child for bad corporate behavior. Amazon, whose labor practices have come under fire, is the sole owner of corporate media stalwart, the Washington Post, and generally acknowledged to provide lousy distribution deals for content producers and undermining the independent bookstore and film distribution sectors with predatory pricing tactics. The search for the cheap can be seen in this sheet from the KPFA premiums ledger for the current fund drive underway where a note suggests checking Amazon for a lower price than the $12 charged by the distributor of the Jeremy Scahill documentary Dirty Wars. The scouring would have been successful as the documentary can be found on Amazon for $9.

A timeline of the now two year old coup by the Siegel/Brazon faction can be seen here.

This publication’s home on the Internet (www.pacificainexile.org) is starting a Resources page to provide easy one-click access to frequently searched-for and downloaded documents and files. It’s still in the beginning phases, but about two dozen documents are now available, with more to come. If you have any requests for materials you’d like to see there or for posting, send to pacificainexile@gmail.com so we can develop the most useful page possible for those “looking for that thing” moments.

However “organizational darwinism” works out, it is looking like one ugly process. To remind you to keep laughing and keep fighting for a Pacifica Radio that can not only heal itself but also help to heal the world, take 30 minutes to enjoy this Twit Wit radio satire from way back in March of 2014  when Pacifica’s national office was occupied in an effort to keep the network from being dismantled.

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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.

 

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