Re: The Crisis at KPFA and Pacifica,

[adrienne lauby <adrienne@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: The Crisis at KPFA and Pacifica,

I'm a fairly new person to the KPFA staff, but I have been involved in the listeners' movement which played a critical part in prevailing against the previous Pacifica National Board. 

That board had gradually gathered most of the governance and financial power to itself, specifically disempowering the local boards along the way.  The democratization of the National board and local boards (KPFA's local board was elected even before we were able to kick out the national board) was an early goal of the listeners' movement.  The struggle to preserve Pacifica and democratize the network is one of the few honest-to-gosh victories I have ever been given in my many years of activism.

It was immensely satisfying.  Media activists, staff members and ordinary radio listeners organized into an organic rich powerful mix which saved one of the oldest and largest progressive institutions in the U.S.

Since then, the KPFA staff has mostly been disengaged in the revival of the local board and the year and half process which rewrote the by-laws.  They kept the station running.  They made several program improvements. 

Last year, the station board finally achieved a process which made the program council a representative body. The majority are staff.  The program council is where KPFA's program decisions are made.  This newly reconstituded body made a minor scheduling change--it shifted the M-F morning drive time program one hour to allow a more popular program to be heard by commuting listeners.

I can't tell you the number of times I had sat in meetings where individuals asked for this change. Literally, years of meetings.  I was a dutiful activist.  I answered that we had a bigger problem to solve, that the staff was in charge of programming and that listeners currently had no right or power to change the tiniest minute of programming.  BUT, I would say, "one of the things we expect to do, once we have won the larger fight is to give listeners a fair and rational way to participate in decision-making.

That time has come. 

 I have enormous respect for the staff.  I've learned a lot about what it takes to run a radio station and do good programming in two years of work to produce a disability program.   I never thought I would hear a staff person disrespect listeners and a governance process that was so laboriously and carefully constructed.  Shasha says the workers at the station should be the ones, and the only ones, to make decisions.  She frames it as a worker struggle for respect and dignity.  Okay, call me naive.  Non-profit struggles for power are not usually as sweet as we would want them.  Institutional change is rarely easy.

Of course, the workers need their fair share.  The question before us is "what is that fair share?"

The single program change never happened.  It's now scheduled for October.  Anyone want to make some bets about whether or not it will ever happen?

adrienne