Originally posted May 23, 2015
Berkeley- Former Board chair Margy Wilkinson, who deposed her predecessor in March of 2014 and then served as Pacifica’s interim executive director for most of the last 15 months pulled a last-minute fast one a day and a half prior to new ED John Proffitt’s arrival in Berkeley, by appointing former board member and factional crony Leslie Radford as the new permanent general manager at Pacifica’s LA station KPFK. The maneuver has thrown Pacifica into chaos and incited an uprising at LA station KPFK.
The KPFK staff and programmers have been demanding a meeting with the station’s local board and so far the board is refusing to meet with the workers to discuss the sleight-of-hand hire of Radford. ED John Proffitt offered to fly down to LA for the meeting, but the Siegel-Brazon faction that dominates KPFK’s local station board has been intransigent and refuses to schedule or attend the meeting.
Uprising host Sonali Kolhatkar sent out the following appeal:
From: Sonali Kolhatkar
To: LSB
Subject: Re: Calling an Emergency Meeting of the KPFK LSB
Dear KPFK LSB members,
On behalf of the KPFK staff (and I believe also a huge chunk of programmers), I am asking you to hold an emergency meeting on KPFK’s premises sometime in the next week. As you well know, the recent decision by iED Margy Wilkinson on the GM hire has caused an unprecedented wave of anger, panic, and heartbreak at KPFK. In my 13 years as a staff member I have never seen this level of outrage at any decision. As the representatives of listeners and staff, you need to hear what we have to say. If we are supposed to be democratically run, then you will not ignore this”.
In what appears to be Radford’s first move, she has returned to station premises a former board member from her faction (Ian Johnston) who was banished from KPFK after showing up brandishing handcuffs and threatening to make citizen arrests of members of the KPFK staff. Johnston was removed from his last local station board meeting by police. Staff members targeted by Johnston have already stated his presence at the station constitutes a hostile work environment for them.
A public petition was launched at Change.org and now has 573 signatures.
Pacifica in Exile generally supports financial transparency, but with some limits. Rogue majority-affiliated KPFT PNB rep Adriana Casenave has no such limits. Casenave filed a directors inspection request for such a vast quantity of canceled checks from her home station in Houston that Wells Fargo Bank charged $3,000 to do all the copying. KPFT’s listener-sponsors will have to pay for it as Casenave, a national finance committee member, has not offered to. The almost-700 pages of documents have been sitting at KPFT for two months waiting for Casenave to pick them up. She hasn’t.
KPFT’s recent fund drive ended 17% short of goal and the station is borrowing money to replace its damaged transmitter.
At Berkeley station KPFA’s local board meeting on May 9th, which was almost shut down by anti-vaccine activists objecting to censorship of public affairs program Guns and Butter (more on that below), an altercation broke out between staff representatives on the board when PNB treasurer and Upfront host Brian Edwards-Tiekert laid into apprenticeship co-director Frank Sterling. Edwards-Tiekert accused Sterling (who is on the payroll for a mere 4 hours a week) of self-interested advocacy and a “personal agenda” in pressing KPFA to support the apprenticeship program, which trains women and people of color in media production, and to use a video stream channel Sterling developed to provide more multimedia coverage of community events. KPFA has previously apologized for limited coverage of the Ferguson-related Berkeley protests in April, which in some cases marched right by the station’s downtown Berkeley location, as KPFA continued to broadcast music. Sterling, who has had previous run-ins with management over such events as the Block The Boat action at the Oakland Port, the California March for Climate Leadership, and the Mayday ILWU port stoppage in support of Black Lives Matter responds to the attack and speaks eloquently to the characterization of his advocacy for community engagement as “selfish” on this sound clip from the meeting.
Long-time KPFA listener-sponsor Marc Sapir, after hearing the clip, sent a note to KPFA station management asking for the return of a program council and noted “All the guy [Frank Sterling} has tried to do is get coverage of some political protests that most listeners would want to hear about, but he suffered a personal attack by a staff member backed by another Station Board member. That audio reveals a Tammany Hall type politics which has no place if Pacifica is to survive and thrive”.
KPFA program director Laura Prives has been resistant to the video channel project, objecting on the basis that “KPFA is not C-SPAN”, a comment that seems a bit tone-deaf to the emerging demands on media institutions to provide multimedia content across platforms, including real-time audio/video from breaking events.
The KPFA local meeting on May 9th, also disclosed that despite the receipt of $958,000 in bequests last month, the station’s bank balance a week into its spring fund drive was only $659,000, with over a third of the windfall spent in a month. The station finished its fund drive on May 22 with a disappointing $510,000 gross, $70,000 less than the reduced goal and $220,000 less than the budgeted goal. The net amount of the fund drive, about $435,000, will only cover the station’s operating expenses of $250,000+ a month for 7 weeks.
At Thursday’s national board meeting, another bylaws amendment proposed by the rogue board majority was voted down. The proposal to slice the size of the national board from 22 to 16 members was overwhelmingly rejected. A second bylaws amendment to reduce the number of annual in-person board meetings from quarterly to as few as one a year passed and will go out to local boards for approval this summer. The proposed amendment is pretty much de facto in effect as the national board met in-person only once in 2014.
The next in-person meeting, the first in 15 months, is set for June 12-15 in Los Angeles, with the board meeting at the Aris and Carolyn Anangos Center, the building board chair Lydia Brazon manages for her employer, Aris Anagnos, who is a six-figure Pacifica creditor. Pacifica has not yet noticed the in-person meeting dates and location on pacifica.org.
Also at Thursday night’s board meeting, chair Brazon inserted herself as a kind of co-executive director. The national board passed a motion giving Brazon as an individual veto power over all hires at all five local stations, apparently not trusting new executive director John Proffitt to enforce the network’s hiring freeze. No national board chair who wasn’t serving as the executive director has ever asserted individual veto power over all local hires.
Brazon also attempted to have the national board itself “elect” a new national board member for LA station KPFK to replace expelled whistleblower Kim Kaufman. Brazon’s wacky proposal, which did not pass, proposed the national board take nominations and vote to fill the position themselves. Brazon filed suit in 1999 to allow local boards to pick their national board reps, a lawsuit that eventually led to the reconstitution of Pacifica’s board. Her 2000 deposition with attorney Dan Siegel can be found here. Fifteen years later, amnesia has struck and Brazon as board chair proposes to do exactly what she sued about in 1999.
Pacifica’s national board continues to sort-of plan a a delegate election, the network’s first since 2012 after a 2013 postponement and a 2014 failure. The proposed election timeline, which is unknown to most of the network’s members, is for nominations to open for local station board seats in 22 days on June 15th. The cut-off date for voter and candidate eligibiity is July 14th. Some board members have been busy preparing for the elections, as in LA, where 160 waiver requests have been received from people who would like to vote in the KPFK election without making a $25 membership donation or volunteering for three hours. It’s a bit of a mystery how the 160 people requesting waivers found out about the election schedule as there have been no on-air announcements yet.
Pacifica has wrestled with the high costs of elections for many years. The simplest fix to the biggest cost, which is printing and postage, is the implementation of secure online voting. Pacifica appears to be trying to proceed with online voting without securing the services of a vendor experienced with online voting systems, which usually require some level of encryption and personal identification markers to prevent hacks or unauthorized voting.
Want ads have been published for local election staff, who administer the elections in each geographical area. The job’s compensation, which has never been especially generous, has been slashed, now comprising $6000-$8000 for four months of work. Pacifica is presenting the jobs as independent contractor positions, despite a finding by the New York State Department of Labor that the positions were temporary employees. The NY hearing was initiated by a former WBAI election supervisor who was awarded employee status and unemployment insurance based on the lack of autonomy in day-to-day work duties.
Pacifica is still reeling from the abrupt resignation of CFO Raul Salvador who gave less than two weeks notice on May 6th, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family. Salvador’s tenure was marked by workplace complaints, a year-long delay in independent audits that cost Pacifica millions in public media funding, and an investigation launched by the California Registry of Charitable Trusts in December of 2014. At his last finance committee meeting on May 12th, Salvador gave confused-sounding answers to inquiries. This brief Q+A from the meeting focuses on three things. The first whether funds filched from restricted accounts at KPFK in 2014 would be repaid. The second on why his accounts payable reports left off 3/4 of the accounts payable. And the third – the astonishing chain of events over the summer when the CFO announced an unsolicited $150,000 donation in July and then the board borrowed $156,000 from board member Lydia Brazon’s employer to pay past-due employment taxes at WBAI six weeks later – not using the windfall to pay the overdue employment taxes, but using it for other stuff and then borrowing money to pay the taxes. Salvador gets tangled up in his narrative and says the loan came before the donation, and is corrected by committee chair Brian Edwards-Tiekert, who gets the sequence right, but bafflingly declares the $150,000 donation came in January 2014 instead of July 2014. Pacifica has not yet repaid a cent of the $156,000 loan from Anagnos.
A censorship controversy at Berkeley station KPFA continues to rage, with Californians opposed to the elimination of the personal exemption for childhood vaccines descending on KPFA’s Facebook site by the hundreds, where almost 200 one-star reviews and 400+ comments were posted. Guns and Butter host Bonnie Faulkner was prevented from going ahead with the planned show by program director Laura Prives. It is highly unusual for a program director to interfere with the editorial independence of an established long-term public affairs host.
Prives issued a statement that dodged the vaccine issue and focused on personally attacking the planned guest, Gary Null, who runs the Progressive Radio Network (PRN). The statement contains numerous factual mis-statements, including statements that KPFA’s local station board voted to keep Null off of KPFA’s air (they didn’t), and that Null is the subject of an FCC investigation (he isn’t).
Null wrote a response stating “Regrettably, censorship such as yours help shut off public and open debate on the dangers of unsafe vaccines. Your statements attacking me as an AIDS denialist by listening to disturbed propagandists flies in the face of simple fact-checking”, and invited Prives on to his show to debate. New York listener rep Steve Brown publicly expressed libel concerns about the public mis-statements made by Prives, and even 2006-2007 ED Greg Guma got into the act, castigating the censorship and saying “Here we go again! Managers of this network have too often been hostile to rationality and open discourse; frequently incompetents driven by ideology and personal grudges. I write from close personal observation”.
Faulkner, the Guns and Butter host for 11 years, sent out a newsletter to the program’s fans saying: “Unfortunately, KPFA listeners were denied the opportunity to hear the facts and information about vaccines including safety, efficacy, legal issues and the corruption and collusion of the pharmaceutical industry, politicians, government officials and the media. Guns and Butter can not and will not be censored by KPFA or anyone else. We have created a blog post, Guns and Butter Uncensored with a link to the interview on Sound Cloud along with some additional information and links regarding KPFA’s attempt at censoring Guns and Butter”.
Only 24 days ago, Pacifica’s board executed a McCarthy-style purge when it threw LA listener rep Kim Kaufman off the board for financial whistleblowing. Kaufman, who sent a package of supplementary documents to California’s Attorney General after noting several omissions in Pacifica’s response to the AG’s initial document request, stated she engaged in an act of whistleblowing.
Many Pacifica listeners and current and former board members were appalled by the rogue majority kangaroo court and expressed their outrage here. The petition is still accepting signatures.
Pacifica in Exile readers may write to the board at [email protected].
To subscribe to this newsletter, visit www.unitedforcommunityradio.org.
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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.