Originally posted January 17, 2015

Berkeley-Local management at KPFA has been under fire for their increasing reluctance to provide live coverage of community rallies and demonstrations, backpedaling on a denial of the “Block The Boat” broadcast from the Port of Oakland and acknowledging a tepid response to the Black Lives Matters protests that swept the station’s Berkeley neighborhood in the first week of December. That reluctance has amplified, with staffer Frank Sterling in receipt of angry emails after submitting a proposal for a 90-minute special program for the March For Real Climate Change Leadership planned in Oakland for February 7th. Continue reading KPFA Threatens Staffer For Trying To Broadcast Oakland Climate Change Rally →

Originally posted January 11, 2015

Berkeley-Pacifica’s rogue board majority voted on January 8th to retain conflicted law firm Siegel and Yee to represent the network in the correspondence audit by California’s Attorney General. Dan Siegel’s Oakland law firm specializes in employment law and has no practice in accountancy. The motion to retain the firm again was made by board member Jose-Luis Fuentes who has been employed as an associate attorney at Siegel and Yee since 2003. Fuentes replaced his boss, Dan Siegel, on Pacifica’s board of directors in January 2014. When board members contested Fuente’s motion and favorable vote as a conflict of interest, Fuentes replied that he had resigned from Siegel and Yee in September of 2014. Continue reading Truth Or Dare →

Originally posted December 27, 2014

Berkeley-In response to a March 2014 complaint from 8 former board members who served on the Pacifica National Board between 2008 and 2013, the Registry of Charitable Trusts, the division of the California AG that supervises California nonprofit organizations, has launched a comprehensive audit of Pacifica Radio’s accounting and compliance functions. The scope of the initial document request is broad and encompasses most financial records from the past five years of operations. (see list below). Continue reading California Attorney General Launches Audit of Pacifica Radio →

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. Continue reading Corruption in Executive Director Hiring Process →