The enclosed open letter was sent to selected press and the Pacifica National Board on September 13, 2015
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We, the undersigned local station board candidates in the 2015 election, call on Pacifica Radio to keep their commitment to the network’s donors and send out ballots for board elections now. It has been three weeks since Pacifica announced ballots would not be mailed. Continue reading Open Letter To The Pacifica National Board Regarding Board Elections
Berkeley -“There have been so many grievances filed it will make your head spin” were the words of one of KPFK-FM’s two SAG-AFTRA union stewards on Friday September 4th, a week after the LA entertainment union stated it was taking Pacifica Radio into arbitration alleging union-busting and contract violations. The handling of staff reductions has been an unmitigated disaster, with laid off employees receiving notices days late with incorrect job titles on them, Pacifica not applying for promised workshare benefits until one day before all employees were shifted to half-time, and employer-provided cell phones shut off this week with no notification. Continue reading Grievances To Make Your Head Spin
The state of KPFK’s finances gets curiouser and curiouser.
This morning, KPFK GM Leslie Radford emailed that the $134,000 bequest from the Rosen Estate to KPFK, which she announced to both KPFK’s finance committee and local station board, does not exist.
Update September 8th: The bequest check was for $21,000 dollars. Received July 31st. Deposited August 13th. There is no explanation for why KPFK general manager Leslie Radford ran around for two weeks after the check was deposited declaring it was for $134,000.
September 2, 2015 – by Karen Ocamb
Since 1959, KPFK, the Pacifica radio station in Los Angeles, has broadcast a wide range of liberal and hard-left-leaning programming under the rubric of multiculturalism. KPFK, for instance, airs the only LGBT-specific broadcast in the Greater L.A. area—IMRU, produced by award-winning out journalist Steve Pride.
But constant rebellion doesn’t necessarily entail respect among the programmers and community board members of the commercial-free, listener-sponsored station, so Pride created a Hate Speech Prevention policy. It took seven months to pass, but the interim policy was in effect on Aug. 15-16 when KPFK aired an unchallenged homophobic rant in which a psychiatrist compared homosexuality to bestiality, among other offensive comments. Continue reading Frontiers Mag: KPFK Airs Homophobic Rant As The Station Faces Financial Failure
After two wildly differing financial statements were issued by Pacifica in less than a week, a third version has now come out disappearing last week’s inconvenient surplus.
For good measure, the new statement changes the listener support numbers issued on August 17th for every single month from October 2014 to July 2015, sans one, and claims “double-bookings” in 9 of the last 10 months.
Continue reading Alterna KPFK July Income Statement Number 3
Berkeley – On Thursday, the SAG-AFTRA labor union filed a demand for arbitration with the American Arbitration Association. The union stated to its members their position that Pacifica is in ongoing violation of the collective bargaining agreement. The Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Radio and Television Artists represents approximately 160,000 actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, DJs, news writers, news editors, program hosts, puppeteers, recording artists, singers, stunt performers, voiceover artists and other media professionals. Three of Pacifica’s four unionized stations are represented by SAG-AFTRA, one in Berkeley by the Communication Workers of America (CWA) and the Houston station remains non-unionized. Continue reading SAG-AFTRA Union Takes Pacifica Into Arbitration Alleging Bust of Collective Bargaining Agreement
Enclosed is a copy of an alternate KPFK financial statement issued by GM Leslie Radford to the local board on August 17th. Radford states she received the return from “the National Office”, so this document demonstrates the time stamp on the “double-booking of April and May income” said to be the cause of the surprisingly profitable income statement that confused the National Finance Committee on August 25th, is between August 18 and August 24th, after KPFK’s latest temporary bookkeeper was terminated for embezzling.
Update 8/26/2015:
Thanks to some detective work, there is an update of sorts on the audit situation.
The payment pulled from KPFA’s bequest fund in July was made to Armanino in the amount of $45,000. Although Pacifica’s lead auditor at Armanino Grant Lam apparently is unaware, Armanino cleared the check.
However the audit has not started. The statement by Grant Lam that no work has been done on the 2014 audit despite it being 60 days past the deadline for both CPB and the Registry of Charitable Trusts at the CA AG Office is correct.
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Pacifica’s fiscal 2014 audit (for the period 10-1-2013 to 9-30-2014) was due to the State of California Registry of Charitable Trusts (which is currently investigating Pacifica for failure to comply with charitable laws) and to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which suspended Pacifica from eligible status for public media funding in June of 2014) was revealed on Tuesday night to have been neither paid for nor started, 11 months after the close of the fiscal year and 56 days after the legal deadline for submission to the State.
Continue reading Audit Information Was A Lie? Paid, But Not Started
Pacifica released a preliminary income statement for the 10 month period from October 1, 2014 to July 31, 2015.
The income statement, presuming the network’s famously bad accounting records can be relied on, shows the station’s Los Angeles unit KPFK-FM, which just placed every employee on half-time and laid off three due to a “dire financial crisis,” with an operating surplus of $182,000 for the year and the largest amount of listener support in the network, over $800,000 more than the nearest competing division, Berkeley’s KPFA.
Continue reading Pacifica Releases Financial Statement Showing KPFK With $182K Surplus At July 31
This sound clip from the August 17th KPFK staff meeting includes the announcement of the reduction of a KPFK staff to part-time and three layoffs, with staff reactions, including the union steward.
