You could have prevented the take over. We did not want to blame you. We were sure that ultimately even the collaborators would welcome change. Even those who helped Pat Scott and those who followed her could not have been happy in that role. We understand that he amount of intimidation was immense. Not everybody has the guts to stand up. We thought you would be relieved to live and work without fear and compromise.
However, now, just five months into the new era of Pacifica, many of the names of those who collaborated with the old regime appear on the staff letter of July 22, 2004. I know that the mainstream media feels empowered to re-write history, but when it happens at KPFA it must become a cause of wider community concern.
I am writing this because there are now two stories, two parallel narratives. The inside and the outside story of KPFA and Pacifica and they are totally different. Collaborators have become heroes, victims made perpetrators; actions and in-actions reverse their order. Michael Moore is right. We are living in fictional times. But we cannot allow fiction to invade KPFA.
Here is a list of some of your missed opportunities to save KPFA and Pacifica:
In June, 1993, KPFA was picketed by African-American programmers from KPFK in L.A. They were protesting Pacifica Executive Director Pat Scott’s purges at our sister station. They had hoped for help from you ? none was forthcoming.
1994: Pat Scott changed the face of community radio by voting as a member of the CPB task force to peg CPB funding to Arbitron ratings, a decision that almost defunded KPFK and several other community stations. There was not a word from staff.
February 1995: Pacifica program directors were told to mainstream programming. The staff of KPFA voiced no opposition. Instead management at KPFA began to prepare the purges of August 1995.
March/April, 1995: Pat Scott hired the American Consulting Group, listed by the AFL-CIO as a notorious union-buster, to break the KPFA union (United Electrical Workers). Did nobody notice that they were there?
May 1995: Bill Mandel was fired for deviating from his subject matter and breaking the "Gag Rule". More than 60 people picketed the station ? no paid staff among them. Some of you went on the air and said it was a good thing to fire people who had been there so long and were "old". Now, that some of you have been there for almost as many years, "term limit"s is no longer talked about.
June 1995: The National Board began to hold secret meeting in violation of CPB funding guidelines. For the next two years, Take Back KPFA activists picketed at National Board meeting sites, often struggling to raise enough money to send representatives to other cities. There was never, in all these years any participation from paid staff until it was almost too late in 1999, until your own sinecures were threatened.
August 1995: All 7 to 8 pm weekday public affairs slots were replaced with music and 165 programmers, many of them community activists, were removed from the air. Some were informed, as they went on the air, that this was their final program. (The large number of 165 was due to the fact that these evening slots were programmed by collectives: Native Americans, Gay community, the Women's Department, Pacific Islanders etc.) This mass removal changed the demographics at the station in a dramatic way, since a substantial number of the evening programmers were people of color.
In the context of the 1995 purge four KPFA departments were eliminated without resistance from paid staff.
The Women's Department had as department heads, over time, an African-American, a Native American woman and a Latina. The Third World Department had an African-American woman as the long-time department head and the Public Affairs Department had an African-American department head and later two Latino directors. KPFA paid staff also agreed to the firing of the last FOLIO editor, and the termination of the FOLIO department, ending publication of, not only a literary supplement, and reference guide and resource, but an essential form of monthly outreach to KPFA's listeners, continuous since the station's founding in 1949.
All three programming departments (Third World, Women, and Public Affairs) had a degree of diversity. They also allowed for community participation in the programming of KPFA that no longer exists in the tightly controlled "air-strips" and remnants of PA programs that have become the private property of a host. Several paid staffers voiced approval of the demise of these departments on the air.
November, 1995: Brian McConville, investigator from the Inspector General’s office of the CPB (Corp. for Public Broadcasting) launched an investigation into the violation of open meeting rules of the Pacifica National Board. Following Pat Scott's intervention with his boss, he was fired 17 days later and the investigation is suspended. At the time, both management and staff never bothered announcing that the meetings were even taking place.
May, 1996: The presence of the American Consulting Group at KPFA, and Pacifica, was exposed by Take Back KPFA. The producer of the labor program on KPFA did not have the courage to mention its presence in KPFA’s union negotiations while interviewing a union activist on the role of the ACG in preventing union organizing at the Lafayette Park Hotel The rest of the staff also maintained radio silence concerning ACG's role at the station.
December, 1996: CPB’s Deputy Inspector Mike Donovan was fired after attempting to continue the investigation into the violation of open meeting rules of the Pacifica National Board. No word from staff. Unconcerned with anything outside of the station’s front door, paid staff probably didn’t know about it.
1996-1997: The union at WBAI, the United Electrical Workers (UE), refused to submit to Scott’s order to kick the unpaid staff from the union. While the WBAI/UE fought all the way up to the NLRB for inclusion of the unpaid staff in the bargaining unit - and even initially were victorious at the New York level (Feb. 1997) - KPFA paid staff knuckled under to Scott and left the UE and joined the CWA (Communication Workers of America), breaking solidarity with their sister union members in New York, and as well as with KPFA's unpaid staff who they unceremoniously booted out.
There was, however, a pay-off. In return for two-tier pay raises, job protection and a pension plan, staff agreed to NOT go on strike, NOT do sit down actions, and NOT employ work stoppages, slow downs or boycotts, sympathy strikes or corporate campaigns against management.