PETER FRANCK 1115 Irwin Street, San Rafael, CA 94901 415-507-9960 * Fax 415-507-9969 * www.culturelaw.com * pf at culturelaw.com
To: Members of the KPFA Local Station Board
Dear Board Members,
I want to write to you, briefly, to express my appreciation of the work of Roy Campanella, which those of us here in Marin County have had direct experience of. Let me add, at the end, a few comments about the importance of management leadership at KPFA, based on my earlier experience in Pacifica. I know nothing first hand of the various incidents which appear right now to be issues with regard to Roy’s tenure, and am not commenting on them.
I chair Media Action Marin (www.mediactionmarin.org) (MAM), which is part of the Social Justice Center of Marin. We were glad to introduce Roy to the Marin/KPFA community on February 13th of this year. This was a community meeting held at the College of Marin. Roy gave generously of his time, both in working with us on the planning of this meeting and in coming over to Marin for a Sunday evening. Unlike many “important people,” Roy did not rush off after his presentation, but in fact stayed to talk with people well into the evening, until the College made us clear the room.
I cannot speak for the others there, but I think that it is fair to say that most of us were very favorably impressed by Roy’s analysis of the media situation today in the United States and KPFA/Pacifica’s place in it (both potential and actual).
With KPFA’s help the community scored a major victory here in Marin this week. As you know, Marin County is hilly, and over-the-air reception of KPFA and other FM stations is difficult-to-impossible in many parts of the county. For more than twenty years, people relied on being able to tune in the FM band from the cable system. Earlier this year, Comcast precipitously dropped the entire FM band from the cable, literally stranding thousands of listeners. MAM started to mobilize the community and more than 200 people showed up at a meeting of the Marin Telecommunications Agency to protest.
We had been in direct contact with Roy right away, because for very many people the abrupt loss of KPFA was very serious (even traumatic). Through Roy, we were able to consult with Pacifica’s legal counsel, John Crigler, on potential legal avenues to challenge the discontinuance of FM. Roy was also very helpful in getting us information on the subscriber base in Marin and its financial importance to KPFA. He attended a number of meetings here in Marin with the Marin Telecommunications Agency, Comcast, and community organizations and individuals, some on quite short notice. We very much appreciated his support and availability.
At a meeting earlier this week, Comcast announced that they were reversing their position and committed themselves to implementing a new FM service by the end of September. The new service clearly will carry KPFA and most of the other non-commercial stations people are used to hearing here in Marin, as well as quite a number of the commercial licensees (they are making room for a total of 30).
We got there, in good part, because Roy and Dan Coughlin made it possible for us to work directly with KPFA/Pacifica’s Broadcast engineer, Donald Mussell. With Mussell’s help, we were able to put together a simple technical explanation of the issues at stake and, most importantly, a clear and simple proposal for solving this problem. At a meeting of all players, held earlier this week, Mussell presented his proposal for restoration of the FM band under a “win-win” scenario (Comcast got some of their bandwidth back) in person. Challenged to comment, Comcast announced their new plan. This is broadly seen in Marin as a victory for FM listeners and for the community over a giant cable company. Roy and KPFA made a major contribution to this success, for which we thank all of you.
Let me say a word about management at Pacifica stations. For those of you who do not know me, I should mention that I joined the KPFA local advisory board (as it was then known) in 1973. I was asked to represent KPFA on the Pacifica Board in 1975, and served on that board until 1984, and served as President of the Foundation from 1980 to 1984. More recently I was involved with the lawsuits that got us Pacific back. I was not one of the attorneys of record because if any of the cases had gone to trial, I would have been a witness. (I had drafted the 1984 by-laws, which the usurper board illegally changed in 1997 and 1999.) I also represented the National Lawyers Guild on the KPFA “Steering Committee” during the later years of the struggle to get Pacifica back.
There has always been a kind of stasis, even stagnation, in Pacifica’s stations and programming, sometimes followed by abrupt upheavals. Regardless of the formal legal structure, it is almost always the case that the greatest influence on programming and the life of the stations is in the hands of the staff, usually the paid staff. It is clear that the staff (most of whom work for far less than they could earn in other media organizations) has and should have a very great influence. However, there needs to be a balance to that influence, allowing for other stakeholders and constituencies to have a voice and a say. I would say to you that without firm management and leadership, the real governance of KPFA will always be lopsided. The staff will properly always have a major role in creating and deciding the future of the station, however the most realistic channel for other stakeholders (audience, subscribers, movements for social change, etc.) to have an influence, is ma! nagement backed by and responsive to the station board, which in turn is closer to the community.
Again, I know nothing first hand of the facts of the incidents which are under discussion, and I know very little about the nature of Roy’s management to date. I can tell you that what he told us in Marin about the challenges of coming into a station such as KPFA and his ideas for gentle change seemed impressive. My own contacts with Roy have been pleasant and efficient.
I hope this letter, now too long, may be of some use to you in your deliberations. There can hardly be a more important duty in the United States of 2005 than the stewardship of KPFA.
Very truly yours,
Peter Franck
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