Originally posted December 17, 2014
Berkeley-A listener representative from Houston has resigned from the Pacifica personnel committee in disgust, citing severely flawed hiring practices. Richard Uzzell submitted his letter of resignation, which can be found here. In the letter, he provided two examples. The first statement is that board chair and current interim executive director Margy Wilkinson (who is not on the search/personnel committee) ran separate private ads for the executive director position. She directed the application materials to herself at the national office, instead of to the search committee. The private ads had different deadlines and requested different materials from the applicants than ads run by the personnel committee, which was the only body authorized to collect candidate materials. The second statement was that after the committee developed a survey for candidates to be scored numerically on a list of qualifications for the position, members of the rogue board majority, upset that a favored candidate or candidates had not scored high enough, narrowly passed a motion to include several applications with low scores in the semi-finalist pool, including some not even ranked in the top half of the 25 applications.
It has also been reported that more than a third of the search committee did not fill out the scoring surveys, meaning several hire committee members may have “voted” without reviewing the resumes. Personnel committee chair Janis Lane-Ewart largely corroborated Uzzell’s statements calling his letter “an informative and valuable description of the process.”.
The Siegel-Brazon faction has been implicated in other collapsed/flawed hiring processes around the network, including the 2012 KPFK PD search, where the incumbent interim confronted members of the search committee saying he “knew how they had voted” and the 2014 KPFA PD hire where the local station board passed on a pool of candidates as “recommended” without knowing the names or looking at the resumes of the candidates.
A pending complaint to the CA Attorney General Registry of Charitable Trusts by 8 former board members can be found here (in a slightly updated version).The AG is responsible for California charitable compliance. Pacifica members can send a note to the AG here.
At an uneventful national board meeting on December 11th, the board approved the contentious WPFW move to a temporary K street location in Washington DC. The $60,000 cost of the move will reduce WPFW’s $200,000 building purchase fund to under $100,000 after the second temporary move in the past two years. In some meeting repartee, WBAI listener rep and PNB secretary Cerene Roberts divulged she was a “member” of WPFW, the DC station, in addition to her own station WBAI. Not to be outdone, interim ED Wilkinson declared she was a member of all 5 Pacifica stations. When a PDGG board member inquired if multiple memberships meant the individuals were voting in multiple station elections at the same time, they quickly backtracked. Since Pacifica’s membership databases are not linked, it is possible that individuals can sprinkle $125 and vote in all 5 station elections. Although the network’s bylaws forbid such a process, it is difficult to prevent in practice without extensive database work by elections staff.
Pacifica’s stalled 2013 audit remains stalled, with the auditors refusing to continue until all of the documents and schedules they requested are available. The audit delay is expensive, with every station but KPFK in Los Angeles looking at a six-figure income loss from Corporation for Public Broadcasting grants funds withheld as a result of the late 2013 audit and the inability to start the 2014 audit, which should be beginning now.
All five Pacifica stations are doing December fund drives, but numbers aren’t generally available from station management yet. In Berkeley, management has sent an increasingly panicky set of emails to station staff after the fund drive numbers fell well short of goal (so far). GM Quincy McCoy said he was desperate to keep the doors open and PD Laura Prives said the station was barely able to meet payroll last week. The apparent disastrous state of the finances at KPFA is rather abrupt, with the station announcing $690,000 in pledges only 8 weeks ago when the last fund drive ended.
All over the country, protests against police brutality have broken out in sustained social unrest marked by daily protests and ongoing shutdowns of roads, bridges, stores, shopping malls, transit stations and police stations. Pacifica has had a patchy time covering the outpouring of protest with some superb work and some startling omissions. At Berkeley’s KPFA, where there has been an internal conversation about calling the police on African-Americans since August 2008 when unpaid staffer Nadra Foster was beaten severely by Berkeley police in the station’s lobby. At the time, the Siegel-Brazon faction on the local board (then called “Concerned Listeners”) refused to investigate. Save KPFA-affiliated national board rep Sherry Gendelman said she “tipped her hat” to station management for calling the police on the young black woman. In an article from shortly after the incident, Dan Siegel is quoted as saying “It seems the police overdid it. It’s not what I expect from the Berkeley Police Department. I expect them to act in a reasonable cautious manner”, a somewhat odd statement from a civil rights attorney. Six years later, most Berkeleyans (and many Americans) do not expect the police to act in a reasonable cautious manner with unarmed black people.
As protests flamed in Oakland and Berkeley, KPFA was often not on top of the ongoing events. Shortly after the failure to indict Officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the station turned to a pre-recorded program. As protestors massed in Berkeley in early December, often marching right past the station or massing by the thousands a block away from the station, listeners were often unable to get up to the minute information on what was happening from the Pacifica station. On December 8th, when more than 1,000 people were marching just a few blocks from the station, news host Mark Mericle reported there were less than 200 people protesting. Upfront host Brian Edwards-Tiekert was desperately casting about for Twitter updates to retweet on KPFA’s account on the evening of December 10th, 30 minutes before thousands of protesters closed Interstate 80, going so far as to try to sign up for the Twitter feed of Tracy Rosenberg, the former board member Edwards-Tiekert’s faction spent $25,000 trying to throw off of KPFA’s board. Several listeners told the station of the problems including Danel Borgstrom, Don Macleay, Thomas Payne and CAB members Carol Wolfley and Robin Collin.
It wasn’t all bad though, as several staffers rose to the occasion, with strong efforts from Hard Knock Radio and Flashpoints (which hosted a special protest program on Saturday December 13th despite being a M-F program) and several members of the unpaid staff including Women’s Magazine producer Lisa Dettmer, whose phone was smashed by the Berkeley PD and former Morning Mix host Sabrina Jacobs. The station’s fundraising effort which began on December 8th in the thick of the protests, leaned heavily on their efforts (here is book interviewer Richard Wolinsky pitching the upcoming protest coverage from former Morning Mix host Jacobs, Hard Knock Radio and Flashpoints and saying there is nowhere else listeners can get programming like this). Wolinsky, who is loosely affiliated with the Save KPFA/KPFA worker group (the local wing of the Siegel-Brazon faction) doesn’t mention that faction’s consistent track record of actively trying to replace these programs with syndicated ones, cut their budgets, halve their airtime and remove them from AM time slots.
Pacifica-in-Exile has previously mentioned the issue of “Walmartization” within Pacifica, with episodic outbreaks including a $10/hour board operator position advertised at the non-union Texas station in October and occasional proposals to cap employees at one hour below the weekly threshold (18-20hrs) for health insurance benefits to cut them out of the benefits plan. Recent director inspections revealed that one long-term employee at KPFA has been kept at minimum wage for almost two decades. For the last year records were provided (the fiscal year ending 9-30-2012), the employee was paid $8.56/hour for 19/hrs a week. The minimum wage in California in 2012 was $8.00/hour. The current living wage for nonprofits doing business with the City of Berkeley was set at $13.71/hour in June of 2014. Several Pacifica board members, past and present, have been active in the movement for a $15/hour minimum wage.
On the witch hunt side of things, the KPFK local station board failed in their attempt to kick LA listener rep Kim Kaufman off the board, wasting at least 5 hours of meeting time over the last two months in the failed attempt, one of a string of failed attempts. In Washington DC, listener rep Luzette King did vacate her seat. She had ceased attending local and national board meetings in protest months ago. A replacement will serve from January 14 to January 31, when the term ends.
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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.