Is KPFA Community Radio Going Extinct? by Eric James Anderson

Originally printed in Oakland Local http://oaklandlocal.com/2014/06/kpfa-community-radio/

Reprinted in SF Gate

kpfa_save_morning_mix-659x366

Is KPFA Community Radio Going Extinct?

With its recent street protests, office occupations, and renegade broadcasts, Berkeley’s community radio station KPFA (94.1FM) typifies what people mean when they use the word “Berserkeley.” However, these confrontations are not merely some beatnik brouhaha, but in fact represent an existential threat to the future of community radio, and implicate one of Oakland’s current Mayoral candidates, Dan Siegel.

The most recent dispute is over the abrupt replacement of the locally-produced 8 a.m. show The Morning Mix with a radio program from LA called The Uprisingostensibly because the new show will generate more revenue during pledge drives. In response to being rescheduled and shortened, the hosts of The Morning Mix held protest rallies outside the KPFA building and took over the studio on May 26 to air their concerns.

According to Andrés Soto, one of the hosts of The Morning Mix‘s five rotating shows“I was really displeased that the morning mix has become a political football between rival factions…the morning mix, as an expression of authentic community voices, is what deserves to be heard.”

But, according to Richard Pirodsky, the Interim General Manager of the station, “The problem was that even though it had been on the air for three years, only one of the five Morning Mix shows was generating enough listenership and audience to even come close to justifying being in that golden hour.”

Supporters of The Morning Mix are organizing to attend the Community Advisory Board meeting in Oakland this Saturday, as well as hosting a “Save The Morning Mix” barbecue in Berkeley this Sunday, in hopes of pressuring the station to restore the show. While this disagreement and protest may not yet sound worthy of the “existential crisis” label, the story gets much deeper.

The radio station, founded by conscientious objector Lewis Hill in 1949, was the first of what would become the Pacifica Radio network: five stations across the country that are independently operated without any corporate sponsorship. While the accomplishments of this network are many, the predominantly listener-funded, locally-produced shows have struggled to contend with NPR’s corporately-underwritten programs, and with their own ideals of democratic, community-oriented radio.

In 2001, after 3 years of protests and lawsuits following an email leak, the Pacifica board signed a settlement that democratized the governance of the stations, allowing listeners to elect the members of their Local Station Board. Each LSB is comprised of 18 elected listeners and 6 elected staff members. These 24 “delegates” are tasked with forming the annual station budget, filling station management positions, and ensuring the mission of community radio. From these delegates, 4 “directors” are elected yearly to represent their station in the Pacifica National Board, which sets network policy from offices next door to KPFA.

While this settlement was intended to create a truly representative and listener-directed model of community radio, the reality has been more challenging. Chronicbudgetary problems (and their disputed “causes”), opposing visions for the future of the station, and abrasive implementation of management and board decisions (as in abruptly firing the former Executive Director Summer Reese, or canceling The Morning Mix), has led to regular confrontations among the various staff cliques, who at this point openly refer to themselves as “factions.”

At KPFA, the central rift is between the Support KPFA — United For Community Radio (UFCR) faction and the Save KPFA faction. UFCR is the more radical, community-oriented group, while Save KPFA is aligned with the views of management and directors, and, importantly, Dan Siegel, who has a long history with the network and, according to savekpfa.org, was a “representative on the Pacifica National Board until he stepped down in January to run for Mayor of Oakland.”

Many of those sympathetic to the UFCR faction accuse Dan Siegel and Save KPFA of bullying, ignoring legal conflicts of interest, and trying to take over the network in order to sell off the East Coast stations. On the other hand, Save KPFA has accused UFCR of union-bustingsabotage, and trying to take over the network in order to, well, just to take it over.

This is where the existential threat comes in. UFCR is afraid that the station is going to lose sight of its community-radio mission to represent diverse and underserved points of view, and that the historic Pacifica network will be dismantled in the process. On the other hand, Save KPFA is afraid that the governance of the station and the network are excessively democratic, to a point where compromise on the revenue vs. community issue is unattainable and that UFCR will lead Pacifica into bankruptcy.

As Richard Pirodsky, the IGM who made the decision to replaceThe Morning Mix, put it, “they have in some ways been so mission-driven in terms of trying to bring diverse programming that you can’t find elsewhere on the dial, almost to the exclusion of worrying about whether we can afford to continue to do it.”

And this is where the “Berserkeley” side of this situation comes in. Save KPFA currently has enough of a majority with the Pacifica national board to preempt democracy by firing who it wants to fire and cancelling the shows it wants to cancel, leaving UFCR no other options besides protest, occupation and litigation.

There seems little chance of this situation being peaceably resolved, and realistically, this feud poses the greatest threat to the future community radio, but at least we can savor the irony of Save KPFA’s decision to replace The Morning Mix with The Uprising.

Think Globally, Report Locally

Green Party-collageFrom the San Francisco Green Party to KPFA General Manager Quincy McCoy, KPFA Staff, and the KPFA Local Station Board:

The San Francisco Green Party joins the San Francisco Labor Council, the Gray Panthers, ILWU Local 10, East Bay Veterans for Peace, Sonoma County Veterans for Peace, ILWU Local 10, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, the Richmond Progressive Alliance, and the Golden Gate Letter Carriers in calling for restoration of the KPFA Morning Mix to its 8 am weekday hour. “Think globally, act locally” is as relevant today as it was in 1915, when Scots biologist, sociologist, and town planner Patrick Geddes wrote Cities in Evolution.  “We need locally produced, locally relevant programming to help us make specific connections between our daily lives and politics and those of the international community and the planet.”

We find it difficult to understand why you replaced The Morning Mix with syndicated programming produced in Los Angeles, because locally produced programming about politics, art, culture, and the environment in a station’s fm signal area is the heart of community radio. We need to understand the realpolitik immediately around us, in the San Francisco Bay Area, not just in Iraq, the Ukraine, Nigeria, Los Angeles, or the distant chambers of Washington D.C. or the United Nations.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the movement towards community-based and/or regional renewable power infrastructure has reached a critical stage. We need to understand every step forward or backwards as this story unfolds on the ground, in our City Council and County Board of Supervisors offices, in public agencies and at public gatherings. San Franciscans need to know what is happening in the City of Richmond, in Marin, Sonoma, and Napa Counties, and in East Bay and South Bay counties where citizens are attempting create renewable energy infrastructure.

Despite a California State mandate to produce at least 20% renewable power by 2010, PG&E is still producing only 19%, four years later, and doing whatever it can to stop Bay Area communities from creating clean energy buyers’ co-ops, or banding together as one and eliminating its dirty energy monopoly. PG&E strategists may have been most successful at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, where they have used the San Francisco Mayor’s office – which they traditionally control – to block the implementation of our renewable power plan Clean EnergySF for two years, even after the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimous vote for it.

PG&E has also been able to activate its union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers 1245, to oppose CleanPowerSF; this calls for the attention of a local labor reporter like Morning Mix host Steve Seltzer.

Uprising host Sonali Kolhatkar lives within Southern California Edison’s monopoly and cannot possibly cover this as our local hosts can. We need diverse voices of hosts and reporters in touch with those on the ground, not the lone voice of Brian Edwards-Tiekert and/or his pinch hitter, Marie Choi, much as we appreciate the addition of Marie’s voice to the morning hours.

This is not a “narrowly focused, local issue,” as KPFA Interim General Manager Richard Pirodsky suggested the Morning Mix hosts had typically covered. in his parting lecture to the KPFA Local Station Board. We’re thinking globally and acting locally, for the survival of the planet and a sustainable peace rather than never-ending dirty energy wars. The same can be said of efforts to create municipal and regional mass transportation networks,local agriculture, just criminal justice, and other central elements of sustainable culture.

Local Police Issues

Every municipality in the Bay Area struggles with criminal justice issues including racial profiling, police brutality, police accountability, whether or not to arm police officers with tasers, whether to allow stop’n frisk, whether to allow Police Departments to report juveniles to immigration authorities, and police shootings of minority youth like Oscar Grant, Alan Blueford, Alex Nieto, and Andy Lopez. These police issues are all part of a national discussion, but local decisions determining how they play out here are made at multiple local levels every day. .

What does an LA or New York broadcast host know about the San Francisco Re-entry Council, which created a model for re-integrating ex-offenders that is now studied nationally? What do they know about former San Francisco Sheriff Mike Hennessey, current Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi, and Public Defender Jeff Adachi’s groundbreaking work in rehabilitation and re-entry?

How much can they know about Oakland’s infamous police corruption or the Oakland Domain Surveillance Center proposed barely a year after Occupy Oakland grabbed the national and international stage?

How much can they know about the Richmond Progressive Alliance and Contra Costa County’s struggles with the Chevron refinery, crude-by-rail shipments, and expanding oil infrastructure?

Citizens are working to stop potentially explosive crude-by-rail shipments from the Bakken Shale all over the U.S. and Canada, but shouldn’t we be specifically informed about the crude-by-rail shipments threatening our own communities here? If not for KPFA Morning Mix host Andrés Soto and the Richmond Progressive Alliance, many residents of the Bay Area might not even realize that crude-by-rail shipments now threaten their own communities, not just Contra Costa County’s.

This may not be of concern to KPFA’s wealthier subscribers who never have and never will have to live next to an oil refinery, a crude-by-rail transit line, an oil storage tank, or any of the radioactive and otherwise toxic sites that the U.S. Navy abandoned all around San Francisco Bay. They may never have to face any number of other injustices in their daily lives, but if KPFA is to foster real community within the fm signal area it claims to serve, in accordance with its mission, it must consider these injustices to some as injustices to all. It must not exclude them from the station’s early morning hours.

Coverage of Local Green Issues

The KPFA Morning Mix and Hard Knock Radio were the only KPFA hours that reported any of the following issues that San Francisco Greens have worked on in any depth:

*Twitter tax break
*Proposed 16th Street and Mission luxury condo development
*Waterfront highrise condo development
*Toxic artificial turf soccer fields
*Saving San Francisco City College
*Advocacy for Chelsea Manning as Grand Marshal for LGBT PRIDE 2013
*The cost of high tech company shuttles and their effects on transit and gentrification
*Ellis Act reform
*Legality of AirBNB, Lyft and similar services
*Clean Power
*Homeless policy

Every city and county in the Bay Area is dealing with similar issues and we want to hear their news as well. We love Davey D and Anita Johnson’s Hard Knock Radio as well, and would particularly like to thank Anita Johnson for bringing Andrés Soto in as a host, but Hard Knock also has a unique commitment to covering Hip Hop culture and the City of Oakland for a national audience. They can’t do it all.

This statement approved by the San Francisco Green Party at its monthly meeting on June 25, 2014.

 

KPFA News Reporter Ann Garrison: “iGM Richard Pirodsky’s parting lecture addressed to the entire LSB, UCR and Save KPFA”

There have been claims in various online forums, that departing iGM Richard Pirodsky’s farewell lecture to the KPFA Local Station Board was directed only at United for Community Radio (UCR), not at our station board’s other faction, Save KPFA.

It did seem that way to many members of UCR, because Richard was obviously arguing that we should all roll over and accept the LA program that displaced coverage of politics, art, culture, and the environment in our own fm signal area.  However that is not how Richard explained it to me in the e-mail that I’m attaching a screenshot of.  He said that all but three LSB members, whom he did not identify, had been seething with him after the lecture.

This e-mail should also expose the lie that Save KPFA’s LSB members and supporters have not attempted to tell KPFA’s manager how to run the station; he says here that the entire LSB has been telling him how to run the station ever since he arrived.  Former LSB member Sasha Futran even appeared at the initial KPFA staff meeting with Richard to tell him that he was doing more harm than good and should resign.

 Here’s what Richard said, for anyone who can’t open the screenshot:

As for the rest of your email, clearly you and I were at different meetings on Saturday.  I told the truth and ticked off everyone, not just UCR.  With about three possible exceptions by my count (and those three may be so pleased that I am almost gone they feel they can be magnanimous), the entire LSB was seething that after telling this iGM for over a year how he should manage the station, he would (while physically exhausted, mentally drained, and emotionally spent) have the temerity to tell them how they should govern.

Pirodsky-Claims-Equal-Nastiness

MANAGER’S REPORT TO THE LOCAL STATION BOARD 6-14-14

Andres Soto and Andrea Prichett talk with Richard Pirodsky at the door of KPFA during recent rally in support of the Morning Mix

Andres Soto and Andrea Prichett talk with Richard Pirodsky at the door of KPFA during recent rally in support of the Morning Mix

Saturday, June 14, 2014
(Richard Pirodsky, Interim General Manager)

Summer Fund Drive

KPFA will begin its Summer Fund Drive on Monday, July 28. It is scheduled to run until August 8. The dollar goal for the twelve day drive is $363,830, with a daily average of $30,320.00. The feasibility of using a full service phone operation is still being explored. At the very least, the drive will use a roll-over service in the same way the successful Spring drive did.

Some concern had been expressed that the roll-over service simply took donations from callers who could not get through to the station’s telephone room, that otherwise would have gone to the website. But the numbers tell a different story. In the three drives prior to the first use of a roll-over service, web donations accounted for approx. 11.3 percent of the drives total.

In the 2014 Winter drive, the web percentage dropped to 11.06 with the roll-over service bringing in 3.08, for a combined total of 14.14% and approx. $91,000. The Spring drive totals were 7.78% for web donations, 20.83% from the roll-over service, for a combined 28.61 percent and approx. $218,000. Clearly in the pre-roll-over service drives, KPFA was “leaving money on the table.” With the roll-over service, many more calls are answered, and much more money is raised. Going from a roll-over service to a full phone service for the Summer drive offers the potential for everything from full PCI compliance and instantaneous processing of credit cards to streamlined data entry and transmission, while freeing up phone volunteers to assist in other areas of pledge drive and station operations. Thus it is easy to understand why roll-over and full phone services are much like single-payer, national health care; while there are and always will be some whom offer complaints, no entity which moves forward to make the switch ever goes back to the way things were.

Development

The consulting firm Goal Busters is putting together a report which I will email to this board as soon as I receive it. It will cover the firm’s work to-date at and for KPFA, what it is pursuing now, and what it envisions for the short term future. The report will cover changes to the comprehensive campaign as well as enhanced focus on grant writing, donor list outreach, major gift cultivation, and other off-air revenue streams.

But there is one aspect of the report which everyone in this room must now start to address. It is what Alice Ferris and Jim Anderson of Goal Busters refer to as “the trust issue.” It seems that while many of KPFA’s donors have been with Pacifica and the station for “the long haul,” while they have witnessed many ups and downs, the past few years are somehow different.  They are becoming increasingly hesitant about giving.  They express openly their fear that they don’t know where the money they donate is going?  Will it really improve programming and services, or is it headed to New York?  Or Washington, DC?  Or to an attorney defending Pacifica and/or the station in yet another lawsuit.  And once again Pacifica finds itself suing itself.

The donors are very open about their concern regarding what they see as a blatant battle for political control of programming and the station by the two major caucuses; caucuses which they perceive as intent on serving themselves and not the listeners.

As Alice and Jim were relating all this to me, I couldn’t help but think of a scene from an old movie. In the film “Meet John Doe,” the hero barges into a plush dinner party to find out if the rumors he has heard are true. As the leader of a movement that espouses brotherhood and do unto others, the Pacifica of its day, he is shocked to find that the patrons of his movement are scheming to take it over and use the movement for their own personal and political gain. He glares at the assembled fat cats and tells them: “Your type is as old as history – if you can’t lay your dirty fingers on a decent idea and twist it and squeeze it and stuff it into your own pockets, you slap it down. Like dogs, if you can’t eat something, you bury it!  Why, this is the one worthwhile thing that’s come along. It may be the one thing capable of saving this cock-eyed world. Yet you sit back there on your fat hulks and tell me you’ll kill it if you can’t use it. Well, you go ahead and try. You couldn’t do it in a million years.”

Of course, John Doe, along with being an activist, was also an idealist. A decent idea, a service organization, a radio station, can all be killed. And right now, each one of us is bearing witness as to how that can be done. There are far too many people in this room looking at KPFA as if it were a mirror. If they don’t see enough of themselves in the reflection, they are more than willing to throw stones at it until it shatters.

As far as many of our donors and listeners are concerned, it is just about to break. They’re not in this room and they don’t belong to either caucus. They have seen and read all the negative press, the constant fighting, the all-too-public internet exchanges, the ever-narrowing focus on pleasing those at the station and in the caucuses at the expense of the broader public we are all pledged to serve. They can’t help but question whether KPFA can be saved, or even if it should be saved. Can they find a more stable organization, more deserving of their charitable giving? They can, they have, and in ever increasing numbers, they will continue to do so.

Those numbers are growing increasingly frightening. Back in 2009, when KPFA was still subscribing to to the Radio Research Consortium for Arbitron rating numbers, KPFA had 150,000 listeners or cume persons; that is the total number of different persons who tune in to a radio station during the course of a day-part for at least five minutes. Of those 150,000 listeners, we had 19,063 donor-members. By February of 2012, just three years later and no longer receiving Arbitron numbers, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle cited the number of listeners for KPFA at 90,000, while the station’s members had slipped to 17,653. Now in 2014, in the fourth largest radio market in the country, with well over 6 million potential listeners within reach of our over-the-air signal, KPFA is now down to a total membership of 15,809.  One can only guess as to how low the listenership numbers have sunk, at least until KPFA can purchase Nielsen Audio numbers.

I have no simple, easy solutions to the “trust issue,” and I don’t think there are any. This board will have to develop a plan of action for what will probably be a slow, long, and difficult process. But I will offer one bit of advice. It is a way to frame the thoughts which motivate your actions. I would ask you to think like a manager but we all know that isn’t going to happen. So instead, think like a programmer. As an individual, you have the same right to free speech as everyone else. But interestingly, as a programmer, you don’t. The FCC says you can’t say certain words or even suggest certain actions. Pacifica and KPFA say you can’t “air dirty laundry.” And if as a programmer, you are unwilling to live up to what is demanded of you and your position, if you insist that you have every right to say whatever you want whenever you want to, you will be suspended, fined, and taken off the air.

As an individual, you have every right to protest, criticize, and legally bring down any entity you deem worthy of such action. But as a KPFA LSB member, there is one such entity protected from your righteous indignation: KPFA. As a board member, you have fiduciary responsibilities to the station. The most basic definition of which means that KPFA has been entrusted to you. You must hold it, support it, protect it, and at the end of your tenure, turn it over to others, hopefully in better shape than when you started. If you as a board member you are unwilling to live up to what is demanded of you and your position, if you feel you have the right to tear down KPFA for any reason, if you feel you must “burn the village in order to save it,” then you are in violation of all you have sworn to uphold and have no choice but to resign. You can destroy the station or you can serve as a board member. But you can’t do both.

Programming “101”

The coverage maps I distributed are, even by Radio Locator’s admission, “generous.” They offer the high ground of “what should be” whereas those listeners living all across the maps will tell you “what actually is.” Still, they do present a good picture of the size of our over-the-air listening community; the ones we are obliged to serve with our signal. Page 1 shows KPFA’s signal coverage. Page 3 shows KFCF in the Fresno region.

On weekdays at 8 am, those two regions offer us the largest, most diverse audience available to us. KPFA can, if it so chooses, and in the past it has, use this time to narrowly focus on a very small segment of that very large available audience. And by doing so, it will never recoup at any other time of the day, at any other place in the weekly schedule, the numbers it loses with regard to listenership and revenue.

In study after study, in decade after decade, stations in large, competitive markets, succeed or fail, live or die, depending on whether they try to reach as many listeners as possible during peak times with the most consistent programming of the broadest appeal, or whether they offer a patchwork quilt of inconsistent, narrowly focused shows with decidedly limited appeal.

But what if a station decides that what IT deems important should be aired at peak drive time, no matter how few listeners it attracts and how little revenue it generates? Now I know all of you just LOVE it when I use baseball analogies, so here’s an apt one. The most important player on a baseball diamond is the pitcher. I don’t say this as an old pitcher. Everyone on the team agrees. No one is more vital to the team’s success on a consistent basis than the person on the mound. If the pitcher is throwing well, the team has the best chance of winning. If the pitcher is throwing poorly, the team is most likely to lose.

So clearly, when making out the batting order, the manager puts the pitcher in the most important slot. Well, no; that doesn’t happen. The pitcher invariably bats last so that those who can’t pitch, those who are less important, can deliver what is needed from the batting lineup in order to win. Baseball and radio are team “sports.” In order to be successful, it takes various types of people with differing skill sets, put in positions where the team or the station can most benefit from what each individual has to offer.

If anyone or everyone in this room feels that locally produced, narrowly focused, unpaid, radical programming is the most important offering KPFA and Pacifica can make to the listening community, I will not and have no need to argue the point. But if you don’t have some other kinds of programming which can deliver the listeners to justify our signal strength and the revenues to pay the station’s bills, there will be no station to offer ANY kind of programming. You don’t need studies to confirm this. You need only look to New York. For over ten years WBAI has embodied it. And if not for KPFA and KPFK bailing it out, it would have gone under long ago.

If you choose to follow WBAI down that path, and believe me when I say that it will take other changes to the schedule and way more promotion to avoid it, please remember that there is no station in Pacifica to bail out KPFA. And that is why this interim General Manager did what he did with regard to the recent change in the schedule.

“But you did not follow proper process!” I don’t know about that. I checked in with the iED in advance to tell him what I was planning to do. He gave his enthusiastic approval. As for the history of process at KPFA, let’s stroll down memory lane to to the last time a show was added to drive time. After two Fosters and three choruses of “Waltzing Matilda” (or maybe the other way around), former iGM Andrew Philips told me that 7 am was “bloody cratering.” And so even though he had told a group of programmers he was not going to make any moves, he placed the locally-generated program Up Front on the schedule at 7am. At the time, one KPFA caucus favored this action and supported it, while the other cried for “process.”

The last time a drive time program was not just rescheduled but canceled, again, it came with no warning, no consultation. Termination letters were handed out and suddenly The Morning Show was gone. At the time, one KPFA caucus favored this action and supported it, while the other cried for “process.”

Now I’m sure everyone in this room is a committed, principled idealist. But when it comes to calls for process, I’m afraid your partisan political slip is showing. Process seems to be something one caucus calls for when it wants to slow down change or bury it under a mudslide of procedures. Nothing in Pacifica is determined by consensus because no one is ever able to create it.

Still, if you wish to actually develop a non-partisan process for programming and scheduling, I heartily encourage you to do so. Set up a committee, a programming council, take the “process” out of management’s domain and give it to the LSB. But when you do, make sure you hand over all responsibility for the success of programming and all that it must do for the station, to the entity with all the authority over programming. Because if you don’t, whoops, we’re back in WBAI-land again.

“Didn’t you tell programmers you weren’t going to make any changes shortly before you did?” Yes, that’s true. When they asked me, all I knew was that Uprising was scheduled as the all-too-necessary preemption at 8am during the last week of fund drive because the Morning Mix as a whole does not deliver the necessary revenue for that slot and has not for three years.

But if Uprising had failed for any reason (and there were many) to generate the necessary monies, if it drew fewer listeners and dollars than the Morning Mix, then not only would it NOT have become a part of the schedule, it too would have been preempted later in the week. As a manager, I am not and cannot be politically invested in any program. I cannot promulgate or subsidize failure. In this case, I did not have to. The numbers, both in terms of streaming listeners and revenue, more than justified the decision.

“Weren’t you intimidated by a certain caucus to make the change just before you left?” Yes, this is also true. During the fund drive, Margy Wilkinson came to the GM’s office, kicked down the door, reached across the desk, grabbed me by the collar, lifted me up off my feet, slammed me into the wall and said, “Listen, punk! You put Uprising on at 8 am or else!!”

Come on, folks. Going back to last year, in the first iteration of the schedule changes and all that followed, I had Uprising listed at 8am, and for all the reasons I have stated earlier. If I could make just one move, and it appeared that was all I could do at best, then I would take the most important hour for listenership and revenue and do what I could to help the station.

“Didn’t you do this to get back at Summer Reese for blocking your changes?” I have absolutely no animus toward Summer Reese and she has little if any toward me. In fact, if she were to make a list of all the people in this room and rank them in terms whom she likes and respects, I’m pretty sure I’d rank a lot higher in that batting order than most of the folks in this room, including some of the folks who say they are on “her side.”

She is not the first supervisor to overrule me and she won’t be the last. And if you happen to re-read the email she sent to me and that I forwarded to the staff, please note that she commended me for starting a data-driven “process” to achieve necessary change. If she were still ED, I am certain there would be changes to the schedule, and some of them would be ones I suggested. For me, that’s fine because I NEVER expect to get all I want, and am usually grateful for whatever good I can achieve.

“Have you gone over to ‘the dark side?'” Well duh, I’m the money-grubbing GM. At any community media outlet, I am always “the dark side,” dealing with money and other things that governance would rather avoid.

“Are you trying to curry favor with the majority caucus?” You mean so I can be manager-for-life at KPFA? No there is nothing either caucus can do to help me for what little time remains for me up here in Berkeley or down in Los Angeles.

I am not eligible to be a part of any caucus. As a manager, making politically-motivated decisions will not serve the listeners, the station, or even my employment prospects. I’ve managed media outlets for over 30 years. Pacifica was not my first employer and it is certainly not going to be my last. I have never made politically-motivated decisions and I never will. Oddly enough, that is one of the reasons Pacifica hired me.

“If not politically-motivated, how do you explain that one caucus is in favor of the change and one isn’t?” I will cite the law of averages. Unlike proposed schedule changes, which BOTH caucuses opposed, every blue moon I do something which will appeal to a given side. My motivations are dictated by my responsibilities. The caucuses do not have my responsibilities and have their own criteria. Sometimes the stars align; most of the time they don’t.

“Well, we will have more protests, have more people sign petitions, and more emails sent out to have the change rescinded!” Since this was a data-driven decision, the data created by those actions need to be held up against the date which was employed. If people show up for a protest, sign petitions, or write emails, there is no way of knowing how many listen to or support a given show. As an example, the online petition now contains over 200 names. When it reached 175, I asked our data guru Chris Stehlik to cross reference the list of names with our list of members to determine how many had made any kind of donation to KPFA in the last two years. The number was 78, considerably less than half.

But if people are willing to hold up a sign against Uprising being on the schedule, they may be willing to put up a poster promoting The Morning Mix or another show that needs and deserves more listeners. If people send emails to the station, maybe they could be encouraged to send emails to their friends and colleagues urging them to listen to the show of their choice. If some folks will sign an online petition, perhaps more of them also sign checks to support KPFA.

Taking those positive steps to generate more listeners and more revenue will generate the very type of data that can and should impact programming and scheduling if the station is to survive. Protest can be a very effective hammer, but not every situation is a nail. What kind of protest is going to save the network? What kind of petition is going to turn things around at WBAI, WPFW, and KPFT? If these problems are not addressed, no matter what is done to KPFA’s schedule, the network will die. To save the network, this LSB and the PNB will need to make difficult decisions which none of you will like. Management has to do that every day. Governance must learn to do the same in order to ensure that this service organization continues to serve.

Richard Pirodsky, iGM
KPFA Pacifica Foundation Radio
June 14, 2014

Love Letters from Sasha Futran

By Ann Garrison

Sasha Futran was the first speaker.

Former KPFA Local Station Board member Sasha Futran was the only Save KPFA supporter who attended the Saturday, June 14, 2014 Local Station Board meeting to speak during the public comment period. Futran began by saying that she had written letters to the San Francisco Labor Council and the Gray Panthers, the first two organizations within KPFA’s fm signal area to pass resolutions calling for the return of the locally produced, locally relevant Morning Mix to its 8 am time slot.  Those organizations now include ILWU Local 10, East Bay Veterans for Peace, Sonoma County Veterans for Peace, the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club, and the Golden Gate Letter Carriers.

Futran said she would go over the main points of the letters that she had written, rather than read them in their entirety,  then proceeded to denigrate the Morning Mix and all those of us who had come to speak for its return to the 8 am hour.  She is the first speaker in the audio archive of public comment above.

Sasha Futrun

Sasha Futran

She also said:

“I suggest, and I didn’t put this in the letter, but I would suggest that those people who would like to be hosts go through the apprenticeship program and learn how to do radio, and not start out in drive time, the most precious time of the day.”

Who was she talking about?  Tuesday Morning Mix host Dave “Davey D” Cook, who has more broadcast experience and more of a national profile than anyone on KPFA airwaves? Anthony Fest, who has been a KPFA Evening News Anchor for 20 years? Sabrina Jacobs, who graduated from San Francisco State’s broadcast journalism program and has produced news and public affairs at KPFA for at least five years? Steve Zeltzer, who hosted the Labor Show many years before the Morning Mix, and now maintains his own website and Youtube Channel, the Labor Video Project?  Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, the hosts of Project Censored, which has more national and international recognition than KPFA itself?

Or was she talking about Andrés Soto, who became one of KPFA’s most popular hosts almost as soon as Hard Knock Radio’s Anita Johnson brought him in? Andrés opened KPFA’s early morning air waves to voices of Contra Costa County residents struggling with Chevron’s refineries, potentially explosive crude-by-rail shipments from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale, and expanding oil storage infrastructure.

As for Futran’s letters to organizations who have passed resolutions in support of The Morning Mix at 8 am, I can only hope that they’re as thoroughly dissuasive as the bitter, acrimonious letter she wrote to chastise the San Francisco Green Party for endorsing her only as an alternate in the 2009 KPFA Local Station Board (LSB) election.There were at least two women present, Erika McDonald and myself, when LSB candidates came to our meeting to speak and ask for endorsements that year, but Futran claimed that only one woman had been present and that we had made sexist and “incredibly uneducated” choices. She also denounced most of the candidates we did endorse, even though she herself had chosen to run on the same slate with them, at least in 2009.

In the following year, 2010, Futran switched slates for the second time, joining Save KPFA, and she now appears to be one of its most active members. She spends a great deal of time at the station and even appears at staff meetings though she is not staff. When KPFA’s recent Interim General Manager Richard Pirodsky was introduced at a staff meeting, she was there to tell him that he was doing more harm than good and should resign.

Here’s Sasha Futran’s letter to the San Francisco Greens about our process and her own LSB slate mates:

From: Sasha Futran
Date: Sun, Sep 27, 2009 at 2:15 PM
Subject: Re: [SFGP-A] [SFGP CC] From Sasha Furtran
To: Eric Brooks
Cc: active@sfgreens.org

I wanted to congratulate you on your excellent choice of candidates to endorse for the KPFA board. Just one woman, thank you and, fortunately, you had just one woman there to vote on the selection as well. Good work!

So let’s see:

One of the gentlemen you endorsed was banned from the station for two years because of scenes he caused at meetings and threatened physical violence. You see, he gets very testy with anyone who doesn’t agree with his precise view of the world.

Another is on the board and is prone to profanity and yelling while standing up; he also does that in restaurants and other public places.

Another lied incredible about his work background and KPFA history, and has been known to accuse people of being a government agent on national email lists; they aren’t.

Hmmm, two are on the board are completely silent, always. Never say a word or do any work. Three years and I wouldn’t recognize the sound of their voice.

One is not sure he can be on the board for more than 8 months because he is probably moving

One is so dumb you won’t believe it and, although, he has been running for the board for years now, he still can’t get anything about KPFA straight. He is one of several men you endorsed who weren’t there so you didn’t get a chance to hear him in action.

I think I’ll stop. Makes we wonder about democracy . . . and the Green Party . . .

Did I notice “feminism” as one of the things you support on a poster on your wall? Of course, you didn’t indicate that includes women so one can’t fault you on that score. Let’s have all male feminism. Never thought of that, what a creative idea!

For a group that didn’t go for any Concerned Listener candidates, you did about as badly as you possibly could. Three of the people you selected are ones that the rest of us dread having on the board, even though they are on “our side” of the main issues because absolutely nothing will be able to be accomplished even if we are in the majority.  They will be fighting with everyone including each other, and the rest of our “faction” because they hate one another and anyone who doesn’t properly admire every little sound they make.

Just had to share because your endorsements are so incredibly uneducated, strange. the weirdest combination imaginable; simply an unbelievably disparate grouping.

Now, aren’t you glad you didn’t follow the legal, election supervisor’s format for keeping the KPFA election process fair and consistent and instead insisted on doing it your own way? Good for you! A strong man!!!  But hey, she’s a woman so what could she possibly know? I’m just a stupid, immaterial woman, too, so I know you will just flick this little email off like a piece of lint. Silly me, that’s what your wives and girlfriends are for . . .

Let us all hope, for KPFA’s sake, that you do not get your wish! Do take me off your alternates list, whatever that is, as I don’t want any part of this.

Thanks,

Sasha Futran

Ann Garrison is a KPFA and WBAI news and public affairs producer and a contributor to the Black Star News, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Global Research, and the San Francisco Bay View Newspaper.

Article posted: June 24, 2014

Veterans for Peace Sonoma County Supports the Morning Mix in Prime Time

download (1)
From Bill Simon, PhD
President, Veterans For Peace Chapter 71, Sonoma County
Statement: on KPFA

Sonoma County Veterans for Peace supports the continuation of the Morning Mix at KPFA in prime time hours.  The Morning Mix has been on KPFA at 8:00 A.M. for three and half years. They are men and women; black, white, and brown; and are gay and straight; radical scholars and labor activists; young, old, retirees, and  are all volunteers in service to the mission of KPFA.  We strongly support this type of community programming instead of a daily external show from LA.