[lbo-talk] KPFA Staff Open Letter to the Local Station

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Aug 20 12:30:10 PDT 2004


Sasha Lilley wrote:


>I do think the bylaws are a disaster.

As I've said before, I was surprised at the lack of thought behind them. All WBAI producers were supposed to do segments about the by-laws rewrite. For mine, I interviewed national interim chair Leslie Cagan and local board member Ray LaForest. I asked them how they defined the constituency, beyond the ritual invocations of "the community" - who identifies them and by what criteria. They didn't really have an answer. And the listener-electorate is a subset of that. I knew next to nothing about most of the candidates in the WBAI local election - and if I knew next to nothing about them, how can thousands of listeners be expected to cast an informed vote?


>Can you honesty say that having an elected board is
>going to save KPFA and Pacifica from another takeover
>attempt?

Of course not. With such dubious election and governance structures, how can anything be guaranteed.


>Our membership numbers in the tens of
>thousands and our listenership in the hundreds of
>thousands and yet people were elected to the KPFA LSB
>with as few as 400 votes (see
>http://www.pacifica.org/elections/KPFA/details/index.html).

174 at WBAI <http://www.pacifica.org/elections/WBAI/details/WBAI-Listener-Round.html>! 3,292 total ballots.

Doug



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