Saturday Night Dear KPFK Supporter:
I'm sending you this note because of my concerns about the future of KPFK. And I send it to you strictly on personal title, not claiming to represent anyone or any organization. But I can tell you that my concerns are shared by a great many of my fellow KPFK staff members.
After three years of intense factional fighting around Pacifica's governing National Board, a legal settlement was reached that ended the dispute. A new "dissident" faction now controls the national network.
And though that new governing faction claims to be for local control and increased democracy, in my opinion, its recent actions bode ominously for the KPFK that so many of you love and support.
Last Friday morning, the new Chair of the Board, Leslie Cagan, and the new acting executive director of the network, Dan Coughlin, summarily removed KPFK's General Manager, Mark Schubb, from his job. After refusing to resign upon their repeated demands, Schubb was ordered out of the work place and placed on "administrative leave." He was, effectively, fired.
Schubb had led the station through six years of re-building, of re-juvenation, of improved programming, and several record-breaking fund drives. KPFK's audience has more than doubled since 1995. And Schubb recently negotiated a new union contract in an expedited manner.
Only one day before his removal, Pacifica executives Cagan and Coughlin had met with the staff and promised a "new day" of collaboration. They met privately with me the day before in an extended session and expressed their hope that I would continue with my current programming and fund-raising (even though their most vociferous local supporters clamor not only for my removal from KPFK but also for my dismissal from The Nation magazine).
Much of the KPFK staff was staggered to learn on last Friday morning that the station's management had been decapitated by the "new" Pacifica without any consultation whatsoever with the staff. That afternoon, as assembly of the KPFK staff with Cagan and Coughlin went on for three hours as a majority of staff expressed their shock at such anti-democratic methods and such blatant disregard for the views of those who actually work at KPFK.
More disturbing are some of the future perspectives. KPFK has been operating with budget surpluses for some years and had amassed a quarter million dollars in reserve (a lot of money for us!). But the lawyer's bills run up by the factional fighting, not only wiped out our own reserves, but also left another $200,000 of our bills unpaid.
As some of you might have noticed, our phones went out for one day last week when Pacifica failed to pay our bill on time. We face ongoing threats of power cut-offs from the electric company. Many of our key contractors have been "stiffed" by Pacifica and remain unpaid. Several hundred of you, our listeners, have still not gotten the "thank you" gifts we promised you in last November's fund drive, because Pacifica has not paid those bills either. And, regrettably, we remain at ¼ power as Pacifica has yet to provide us with the funds that had once been set aside to get our new transmitters up on to Mount Wilson.
The "new" faction that governs Pacifica claims that this is all the fault of the "old" faction recently pushed out of office. They are only half right. The "old" board indeed spent most of our reserves on expensive lawyers. But they spent them to defend lawsuits pressed by those who now control the network. The new governing faction is also composed of several leaders of an economic boycott against Pacifica. Indeed, the new Executive Director of Pacifica, Dan Coughlin was a lead organizer of that defunding campaign!
While over the last couple of years so many of you were generously giving to KPFK as I and others asked you over the air to do so, the current CEO of Pacifica was at the same time trying to economically starve the organization. It is a strange world we live in.
The new Board claims it is committed to solving our threatening economic crisis. But from my perspective - and that of many of my co-workers - the new managers of Pacifica seem to spending much more time on throwing their formal rivals out of the organization and packing it with their friends and cronies, than they are about getting serious about managing the nuts and bolts of a five station network that they helped bankrupt.
At last Friday's turbulent staff meeting, we were introduced to the new interim General Manager hand-picked by Cagan and Coughlin -- Steve Starr. Mr. Starr seems an affable and well-intentioned fellow. But by his own words he has NO radio experience except for a stint as a high school intern several decades ago.
Unfortunately, he seems to have been chosen mostly for his political credentials. He has been a key figure in the local web site known as the Independent Media Center (IMC). And the IMC has been unremittingly hostile to KPFK. During the recent Democratic National Convention, the IMC passed a resolution banning KPFK personnel from its work site and branded KPFK as "scab radio." Mr. Starr claims he has taken no sides in the Pacifica disputes. But he also admits that he was, in fact, party to the "consensual decision" to pass that anti-KPFK resolution.
Given KPFK's grim economic state and its internal instability, this is hardly the moment to name an ideologue lacking in radio experience to head up the station, even for a short period. Public radio systems are complex and arcane. There are CPB and NTIA grants to manage. There are sub carrier contracts to be negotiated. Direct mail campaigns and membership renewals must be generated on time. And
programming strategies must be devised for our next fund drive. Mr Starr has no experience in handling any of these matters.
But to Cagan and Coughlin, it was apparently more important to push our former manager out as soon as possible than it was to find the sort of seasoned professional the station would need, immediately, to take his place.
This devil-may-care attitude of our new leaders was further evidenced when on this same past Friday morning, they also removed the General Manager of our sister station WPFW in Washington D.C. That manager had assembled a formidable record as a professional who had led WPFW out of two decades of red ink to economic stability and a growing listenership. But again, deemed to be not sufficiently politically correct for our new executives, he was also dumped. And, like in the case of KPFK, he was also tossed without any consultation with local staff.
KPFK is a station born to and immersed in controversy. Within Pacifica there have always been many contending views as to which was the best way to adhere to our stated "mission." I think it is fair to say that there are many and varied ways to stay true to that mandate and that it might be impossible to quantify it in one single formula. But what is for sure, is that there is a very clear "wrong" way to exercise Pacifica's mission. And that is to claim that there is ONLY one way. And that attitude, unfortunately, seems to be prevailing among the new leadership at Pacifica. If you weren't "with them" during the last three years of their factional fight to achieve power, then it seems abundantly clear that you are branded as being
"against them."
In short, the new leadership is now carrying out exactly what it accused it own rivals of - a political purge.
Within just two weeks, that has led to the removal -without process of three of the five Pacifica station managers and the forced resignation of a fourth.
The staff at KPFK has been told it will not be purged. But our manager certainly was. And at the time of our greatest economic threat, Pacifica has replaced him with someone whose political allegiance seems to outweigh his potential for solving the thorny problems before us.
So, you must be asking yourself, what now? I wish I could answer that question. But I simply don't know. And the new Pacifica leadership seems to offer no indication other than a prolonged political vendetta.
My fear is that KPFK is now in danger of being pushed back to the past. Many of you long time listeners remember a time, not so long ago, when any professional standard was disdained, when the station was more or less an "open microphone" for anyone who wandered into the studio, when our programming was less mature, less relevant, less coherent and when programmers would come on to the air and beg for money to buy tape and razor blades.
Over the last five years, with many ups and downs, we have attempted to upgrade KPFK without straying from its radical mission. There are certainly some in the audience, and some of you who are reading this, who firmly believe that what we call improvements are, in fact, sell-outs and compromises. You are free to draw that conclusion if it works for you. But tens of thousands of other listeners have flocked to the station and have repeatedly expressed their enthusiasm for a KPFK they find greatly improved and just as provocative as ever.
It is that forward motion that we are now losing. In the days to come, the KPFK staff is going to have to grapple with the question of how we can or cannot put together a fund drive under these adverse conditions. It is very difficult to do such a campaign when we are forced to run at low power, when we have no money for supplies or ancillary staff, when staff morale is nose-diving and when we cannot even send out the "thank you" gifts from our last drive of three months ago.
These difficult decisions will have to be hashed out in the weeks to come - our next drive, if it happens, would need to be commence sometime in mid February. Certainly, at the time of this writing, I personally cannot see the way clear how to make that drive a successful or honest one.
For those of you who have asked- no, I have not been asked to leave KPFK or to reduce my programming by our new managers. But I repeat, their local supporters have been quite vocal to the contrary.
During the first week of February, I will be on assignment in Porto Alegre, Brazil covering the World Social Forum. So my absence from the air over the next week will not mean that I have been purged. I am scheduled to return to L.A. around February 8th and I hope that by then the KPFK staff will have reached some sort of consensus of what to do next. And in my personal case, I will also have to make an evaluation as to whether or not it is even feasible for me to continue working under our new national leadership. At the moment, it is a far from inviting prospect.
In the meantime, I ask you to keep the welfare of KPFK close to your heart. Keep your eyes and your mind open and don't be swayed by empty rhetoric about "democracy" and "reform." Right now we need competent serious managers who can put aside political posturing at least until they solve the formidable economic challenges before us.
In the meantime, take a moment and drop an email to National Chair Leslie Cagan and to our local National Board Member David Fertig expressing your concern about our future. If you have been a supporter of the new KPFK of the last five years it is very important that you tell them so. Their addresses are to be found below.
I thank you for all the warm support I have taken home from so many of you over the past few years. It has so greatly enriched my life and I have incurred a debt with you that I will never be able to repay. I hope we can find a way to allow our relationship to continue.
MARC COOPER
P.S. Please forward this message to as many of your fellow KPFK supporters as possible.
Board Members can be contacted at the addresses below:
Leslie Cagan lesliecagan at igc.org Dave Fertig dfertig at workerlaw.net