What...You don't believer the accts. ("26086Re: Buzzanco faction member requests names while threatening legal action, " thread or this one, "25215 Juden Raus??? was: Re: Zionist/ Fascist Subversion Of Pacifica.") on the NewPacifica http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewPacifica/ list? Heh.
I find it hard to believe that Buzzanco, whose book on LBJ and the Vietnam War is a good read
(here 'tis a cite of another Buzzanco review of New Left historiography on US foreign policy from H- DIPLO, http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/0009/0043.html TOWARD A RADICAL READING OF AMERICAN FOREIGN RELATIONS" http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/bernathlecture.htm A lotta to and fro on NATO, with Brad starting it off. http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~diplo/NATO.htm And some replies on a piece of his on H-DIPLO.
http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~diplo/StateofField.htm )
would say anything anti-semitic, like what was alleged on the NewPacifica list.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewPacifica/message/24721
From: "edix2001" <edi at h...>
Date: Sat Aug 10, 2002 6:26 am
Subject: Critique of Herman, Chomsky, Zinn letter to Duane Bradley
>pls fwd widely to Pacifica lists<
Professors Herman, Chomsky and Zinn,
I have read the July 12, 2002 letter that you all have signed and sent to the KPFT station manager, Duane Bradley (with cc:s to Pacifica executive director, Dan Coughlin and national board chair, Leslie Cagan) concerning issues related to associate professor, Bob Buzzanco in Houston.
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You open your letter by mentioning that Buzzanco has previously interviewed you on his program. You lament that he is personally no longer on the air at KPFT, which you attribute to "attacks" and also relate his allegation that Pacifica failed to defend against these alleged attacks.
You then lay out that information was provided to you by Buzzanco and many of his close cohorts concerning the controversy related to Buzzanco's actions at KPFT on April 17, 2002, during and just after the airing of the "Jewish Voices" program, a one-shot program of invited representatives from Houston's Jewish community that was part of KPFT's experimental programming this year.
Based on this information, which you present as a sort of foundation for Buzzanco's complaints of his alleged mistreatment, you conclude that it stems from an alleged vendetta by a small group of people, a group that you allege has previously attacked others who allegedly don't meet their political standards. You further claim that Bradley had no business apologizing to the guest of the Jewish Voices program who made a complaint against Buzzanco and chastise Bradley for not defending Buzzanco and for his failure to castigate those you alleged to have smeared him.
Additionally, you second guess Bradley's managerial objection of Buzzanco's use of the airwaves to criticize the invited guests to the station just after their program ended.
Then you go on to claim that Bradley's actions are unacceptable to you, that he failed to defend Buzzanco against alleged false charges, alleged attacks and Bradley's alleged appeasement of an alleged smear campaign. You state that you do this in the interest of elementary justice and because you feel that the "establishment" will attack KPFT programmers, so they will need to be defended by Pacifica spokespersons.
Your letter ends with another reference to the danger that the "establishment" poses to Pacifica programmers, citing John Ashcroft. You then call for Bradley to reopen an investigation into the controversy surrounding Buzzanco and the Jewish Voices program. You again assert your belief that the charges leveled against him are false, and interject this time that Bradley needs to prevent the potential for KPFT to be subverted and hijacked. Finally you urge Bradley to attempt to get Buzzanco back on the air.
****
It seems to me, professors, that you are only contributing to the production of conflict at KPFT, conflict based on entirely unsubstantiated allegations. The Jewish Voices program incident took place back in mid-April, nearly four months ago. Buzzanco voluntarily resigned from KPFT, without anyone else's urging at all, a month later. Why are you so interested in stirring up the pot at this late date, when locally, people generally wish this issue would just go away? And why the entirely one-sided nature of your own investigation into the matter?
If your initial investigation, the information provided to you by Buzzanco's faction at KPFT, raised some questions in your mind about serious problems at KPFT, why did you not directly contact any of the other individuals involved to get their individual sides of the story before leaping into such an accusatory mode? Why did you not ask Duane Bradley for his take on things, or George Barnstone, one of KPFT's reps to the Pacifica national board, or Stan Merriman and Greg Geiselman, the producers of the Jewish Voices program, or Donna de la Paz, or Deb Shafto, the chair of the KPFT Local Advisory Board or myself?
We are all generally available and each of these people's emails was published in the material that you've gone over, so there is little excuse for you to not have done so. If you had taken the time to more fully research the issue, by interviewing or seeking information from others involved in this dispute, I sincerely doubt you would have come to the conclusions that you did in your letter. In fact, you might well have come to conclude quite the opposite of what you have put forward, given a fair and objective inquiry into the matter.
The impact of your letter has only served to create an atmosphere of suspicion aimed at our general manager, Duane Bradley. Unwarranted suspicion, since Bradley is widely loved and looked upon as a person of fairness and a glue that keeps our community together. It has only added to the friction and instability during this fragile interim period. In that sense, I find it a grave misstep on your parts, damage that I hope you are willing to repair.