>The following is Marc Cooper's original missive, to which the above is a
>response
>--CG
Perhaps this email was inadvertently truncated, and Cooper's letter omitted. Otherwise, I can't imagine why partisans of free speech wouldn't include it.
Here it is, for the sake of completeness. Since I don't know the details of the situation, I have no comments of my own to add.
Doug
----
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 20:02:20 -0500 From: Marc Cooper <mcooper at thenation.com>
Pleadse take a moment to read.. and please forward to as many other KPFK listeners as possible.... Marc
Tuesday Night February 20, 2002
Dear KPFK Listener:
I regret to inform you that as of this afternoon I have been "indefinitely suspended" from KPFK and my 4 P.M. daily program has been forever taken off the air. I was told in an official communication from interim General Manager, Steven Starr, that this action was being taken because he said my "refusal to participate in the Winter 2002 fund drive is having an adverse affect" on KPFK.
Earlier in the day, KPFK's Senior Public Affairs producer and sometimes on-air host, Jeff Kaufman, was also similarly dismissed from his duties.
As I will not be allowed back on to KPFK's afternoon air, I take the liberty of sending you this note to both explain what has happened and also to take the opportunity to thank you for so many years of your warm support.
Here's the background:
Over this past weekend I was asked by Mr. Starr what my intentions were regarding the KPFK Fund Drive that is set to begin tomorrow, Wednesday Feb 20th. I told him that though I had deep and abiding concerns about the direction and future of the network, I was willing to cooperate in the fund drive by providing the station with a solid, daily, live program each day of the drive. But I also said I was not willing to put my name on the plea for money and therefore I would leave whatever time was needed in each show so that he, or anyone else so designated, could make the actual pitch for funds.
In that regard, Starr's assertion that I was "refusing" to cooperate is simply not true.
During my conversation with Mr. Starr I outlined several reasons why I felt it would be untenable for me to do the actual asking for funds. As this is one of the last opportunities I will have to communicate with you, let me now explain those reasons in detail:
1) The Pacifica network and KPFK are in danger of formal bankruptcy. The factional power fight of the last three years led by the current management wound up costing the network millions of dollars in legal fees and have left it insolvent. There is a significant possibility that Pacifica will be dragged into bankruptcy court by some of the creditor law firms and it could be forced to liquidate some of its assets.
If the new Pacifica management had come in with a rational, mature, comprehensive business plan aimed at salvaging the network, then it might have the moral authority to ask for listener contributions.
On the contrary, the current management openly disdains any sort of professionalism and has shown much greater zeal for conducting internal political purges than it has for soberly managing the financial crisis. The new administration has found the time to force the resignation or fire 4 out of 5 the station managers, it has hired its cronies into executive positions, it has named a Treasurer who spent 16 months in prison for tax evasion (!), it has purged and shut down its 20 year old National newscast but it can present no plan for solvency other than to ask us the programmers to ask you to give more money.
Simply, I would find it immoral and unethical and possibly illegal to ask you to give money into such a void.
2) The new Pacifica management shirks any moral responsibility for the current financial crisis. The "old" Pacifica administration in power until 60 days ago, spent wildly on lawyers and legal advisers, running up the deficit that now threatens the network.
But it didn't get up one morning and decide to do so just for the hell of it,. The former Pacifica administration was responding to a series of expensive and tenacious lawsuits brought by those who eventually unseated them and who now run the network. Old Pacifica spent all the money, yes. But they did so fighting off the zealots who now control the new Pacifica. Both sides share equal responsibilities for the current mess.
Unfortunately, the current managers of Pacifica accept no such moral responsibility. Consequently, they feel no compunction to make extra efforts to raise the funds they helped deplete. Their only "solution" is to ask you to give again and again- and, of course, to trust them.
I find this attitude to be intellectually offensive. During the factional battle of the last 3 years, I raised more than one million dollars for KPFK and Pacifica. Throughout that period, I was relentlessly attacked by the then-"dissident" who accused me and others of being scabs, sell-outs, CIA agents and patsies for a corrupt board. My good name, my reputation, my body of work, my intentions, my friends and even my family were mercilessly slandered and defamed. My "crime" was to have raised money for KPFK!
Now those same "dissidents" who did the attacking control the network. Our new Executive Director, effectively the CEO of Pacifica, Dan Coughlin, was a PAID ORGANIZER for the national campaign to boycott Pacifica. His "deputy" Verna Avery Brown was an associate in that same cause. Several other boycott supporters now sit on our National Board. Likewise, our so-called Local Advisory Board (an unelected rump of a dozen self-appointed "community representatives") is led by those who sued the network, openly sabotaged our fund drives for three years, attacked and slandered our programmers, and worked to divert big donor contributions away from the station,
But as a friend recently said, "History is cunning." The same boycotters and saboteurs who bullied their way into power and who openly attacked programmers like yours truly for having raised money for KPFK, now come back to us and tell us it our obligation to go out and raise money for "their" Pacifica! In short, it was a crime for me to raise money for a solvent and functioning KPFK that enjoyed strong listener support but all of a sudden it is my obligation and duty to do the same now that the crew that helped run us into the ground is in power.
Hence, my hesitation to go on the air and ask you for more money. If these new managers - who as recently as 5 weeks ago were boycotting and suing Pacifica- are now genuinely interested in salvaging Pacifica, perhaps it is "their" turn to come out and raise the funds.
3) The new Pacifica administration has shown unremitting disdain for you the KPFK audience. The "official line" from Pacifica nowadays is that KPFK's audience has doubled over the last 5 years because we, the programmers, have sold out and gone mainstream. Consequently, you the new audience, is also considered to be illegitimate. In a recent broadcast, Executive Director Dan Coughlin said flatly that the "KPFK staff" has "separated itself... from the communities that have supported the stations for decades." What politically correct clap-trap that is! In other words, the growth of KPFK isn't real or valid because you, the listeners, are not from whatever is considered by our new leaders to be the right community. Sorry if this makes little sense to you - but that's not my fault.
In your stead, Pacifica and KPFK's management is continuing to empower a rump group of 10 unelected and self-selecting people known as the Local Advisory Board (LAB). Let me repeat: this LAB is unelected and answerable to nobody. But now it has not only been empowered to hand-pick a representative to our National Governing Board, but it has in the past few weeks become the major influence in determining KPFK station policy. KPFK's interim General Manager Steve Starr was, indeed, hand-picked by this LAB and rubber-stamped into office by the Network Executive Director.
Since then, the LAB has comported itself with the swagger of a Central American military junta- albeit with a "progressive" tint. . Its members have started popping up all over KPFK's air and lamenting - always in the name of "the people" - that KPFK has been naughty and will now have to be returned to its "traditional" agit-prop role of spouting a party line of Flat-Earth Leftism.
Perhaps some of you caught some of the on-air handiwork of the LAB a few weeks ago. The National Lawyers' Guild Show host Jim Lafferty "turned over" his program for one hour to Ron Wilkins, a well-known black anti-Semite, so that for the better part of 45 minutes Wilkins could fulminate as to why he should be given regular air time. As other more rational African-American and Latino hosts on KPFK were mocked and disparaged as "paint-jobs," LAB member Lydia Brazon - a former litigant against Pacifica- openly cackled. Along with many others, I was horrified and deeply embarrassed that such a program was put on the by General Manager Starr with the LAB's urging.
In brief, we the programmers and you the audience have been supplanted by this closed group known as the LAB who now pretends to possess the monopoly on defining KPFK's future.
I could not ask you, the real audience, to give money so that this junta of usurpers would dismantle the project that you have supported over the last five years.
That brings me to the future of KPFK, one I see as very dark.
Since the mid-1990's KPFK struggled mightily to come out of a slump it had fallen into. Manager Mark Schubb - fired by Pacifica a few weeks back- led a renaissance that tripled the size of our staff, tripled our income and doubled our audience. Indeed, 2 out of 3 the current listeners of KPFK have come to the station in these last five years.
A new professionalism was introduced so that KPFK's unstintingly progressive and alternative message could better compete against the commercial pap and crap that now dominates the airwaves. Public Affairs programming was greatly expanded and the morning and afternoon programming strips served as alternative oases for tens of thousands of Southern Californians.
I am proud to have been part of that project, which is now being rapidly dismantled. Radio Nation was born and today flourishes on 130 public radio stations. Our 1999 five-hour teach-in on the war in Kosovo drew a live audience of 1200 people, was carried on dozens of public radio stations and won several programming awards. During the 1999 "Battle in Seattle" against the WTO, I was privileged to be able to anchor 5 days of continuous satellite coverage that, again, we provided for free to scores of public radio stations and for which I won the award of "Radio Journalist of the Year" from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club.. And in the fall of 2000, I anchored KPFK's live *national* broadcast of Ralph Nader's super-rally in Long Beach.
These are just some of the highlights. As day by day at 4 PM, with the help of producers Barbara Osborn, Heidi Pickman, Jeff Kaufman, Dan Pavlish and Autumn Doerr, I humbly tried to convene an on-air university seminar. There was never a presumption that you had to be spoon-fed any particular point of view. I was free with my opinions, for sure. But I made a conscious effort to bring you discourse of the highest level, with the most intelligent guests available. I wanted to provoke you, challenge you and stimulate you. But never preach to you. I'll leave that task to the priests - clerical and political. My view was recently expressed by my Nation magazine colleague Christopher Hitchens when he wrote that being an independent thinker is about *how* you think - not *what* you think.
My critics among the "New Pacifica" view much of the above as "elitist" and politically unreliable. They argue that KPFK needs fewer book authors on the air and more street protestors, that we need less debate and more guidance.
I find that formulation to border on a chilling know-nothingism. And I regret to say that is in this latter direction that things are running at KPFK. Apart from all of the reservations I listed above in regard to raising money, I have to say I would find it near impossible to continue doing the daily show of the sort I have offered over the last 4 years in an "intellectual" atmosphere so openly contemptuous of... well... your intellect!
Let me also add that my position is widely shared by much of the paid KPFK staff. Both Andrew and Katie in the News Department have similar views and reservations about the fund drive. As does Betto Arcos. Obviously, Jeff Kaufman is of a like mind and for that has been dismissed. Other staff who do not have the obligation of going onto the air have voiced similar positions of concern about the direction of the station. Fortunately, they can keep their views to themselves and not be fired.
I also want to recognize the unswerving solidarity of several volunteer programmers including my dear friends Suzi Weissman, Jon Wiener, Saul Landau and Barbara Osborn. None of the good things that have happened at KPFK over the last handful of years would have happened without the vision, courage and perseverance of Mark Schubb.
I hope to stay in touch with many of you via email. I leave the 4 PM show without a single regret. If I had it to do it all over again, I wouldn't change a thing. And yes, I would even have Robert McNamara and Pat Buchanan back on the show, despite the howls and squeals from the Flat-Earthers. The weekly show, Radio Nation, exists independently of my daily show and is not a condition of my employment at KPFK. I have every expectation that it will continue as is. For those of you who have expressed concern about my future, let me re-assure you that under present conditions, leaving KPFK is only a liberation. I am fortunate to have a successful career as both a print journalist and university journalism lecturer and KPFK - while it took a lot of time- accounted for very little of my livelihood... so thanks for your concerns, but not to worry.
Keep in touch. I will. My email is mcooper at igc.org
MARC COOPER P.S. Many of my friends have asked me what they should do about the KPFK fund drive i.e. should they give money or not? My answer is that it is up to you and your conscience. I know only that at this moment, I could not have asked you to give. Under any circumstances, I would urge you to email KPFK General Manager Steven Starr at sstarr at kpfk.org to freely express your views and concerns as a listener.