February 27, 2017

For Immediate Release

Contact: Bill Crosier, Interim Executive Director  Email: [email protected],

Management Change at KPFK-FM Los Angeles

Los Angeles – KPFK-FM will have a new general manager, effective immediately.

Senior Producer Christine Blosdale will be stepping into the general manager role temporarily, for a period anticipated to be 4-8 weeks, until a longer-term interim general manager is selected. Blosdale has been a long-time employee of the station, and her success in fundraising for KPFK has been widely noted.

Interim Executive Director Bill Crosier commented: “KPFK is an important part of the Pacifica Foundation, and is our biggest and most powerful station in the second largest media market in the United States. The station has been through some difficult times recently. I want KPFK to take a leadership role, both within our radio network as it recovers, and in the Southern California media landscape as the country meets the challenges presented by the Trump administration. This change will position KPFK to do so”.

KPFK joined the 5-station Pacifica network in 1959, the second radio station to be acquired by the nonprofit founded in Berkeley, CA in 1946, and is the most powerful public radio station in the Western United States. Pacifica’s independent news, information, and cultural programming provides perspectives rarely heard in mainstream broadcast media and features the voices of artists, activists and public intellectuals.

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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 operates noncommercial radio stations in New York, Washington, Houston, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area, and syndicates content to over 200 affiliates. It invented listener-supported radio.