Repost from Counterpunch re Pacifica - KPFK too involved

Article in Counterpunch [see link below ]

by Ann Garrison 3/26/2014

[[ Note: these are excerpts of the article, readers can find on site listed.

Summer Reese has long been a KPFK local station board member and also a Pacifica National Board member, recently hired officially as Executive Director after working many months as an interim at PNB.

then a strange and unclarified series of events occurred that claimed Summer Reese was "fired" by a telephone vote of PNBers with a 1 vote majority ???? Facts are elusive and attacks are highly prevalent on the internet, easily disguised as 'the whole story' but barely intelligible.

Further dramatic interludes recently indicating that Summer Reese was padlocked out of the PNB offices alongside of KPFA's in Berkeley. She has been described as having cut the padlock, entered the working premises with a number of her supporters and is working there, as contracted.

The question of lawsuits, legal conflicts, and pay offs for not honoring contracts looms once again, insuring that Pacifica and it's stations, KPFK a high prize included, may again pay-out in legal costs and foolish moves by a few [not the majority of board members and certainly hardly anyone of those who sponsor/ subscribe/ support/ pay-for the upkeep of these entities.

Check the internet for the latest in this wild and incomprehensible saga that dismays all who want to have the better parts of all that Pacifica and KPFK have offered over the many 44+ years on radio.

No, radio is not dead, and the internet tho claimed to supercede all other media, is as fragile as any other media, with commercial deals and takeovers and NSA with their commercial-like-partners interferences too.

The internet is not in competition with radio, as both mediums differ significantly, in cost, in convenience, in how the world is available or presented. Radio still thrives in many forms, some more commercialized, some more conservative-biased, and a few on the more fairly-balanced side. But the nay-doom-declarers are wrong in their fear of apocalypse of the radio or even TV media.

Maybe profits is not the only measure of viability.
Maybe even total audience share is not an honest measure either.

Size is not the criteria for survival or sustainability.
Vitality, relevance, inclusiveness, educational expansion, and variety may also be vital factors that listeners, viewers, linkers need and want, and will pay a moderate amount to maintain...
for a long long time. ]]

Here are the excerpts from her article=


“…a one vote majority of the Pacifica National Board (PNB) attempted to fire the network’s top executive, Pacifica Radio Foundation Executive Director Summer Reese, near midnight at the end of a conference call, with no discussion allowed.

Members of the Local Station Boards, staff, and listener communities also complain that there was no advance notice to anyone on the national board or in the wider community….a KPFA hiring committee that I sat on which made its decision in ignorance of California law, in ignorance of the Communication Workers of America (CWA) labor contract, and in ignorance of Pacifica policy regarding affirmative action.

In so doing, it left the station with a still unsettled, potentially large legal liability…..the previous General Manager didn’t instruct us to revisit the last stage of the process, which we could have done by convening for just a few hours, in a single afternoon.

Instead he got verbally abusive with me, refused to deal with the errors, and therefore created the liability that still lingers. He is no longer KPFA’s GM,[[is this KPFK’s iGM ??} for whatever reason, and I do not know that reason because I’m not privy to the investigator’s report…

...someone is likely to say that I have violated the hiring committee’s confidentiality agreement, which was an agreement that “what’s said in this room stays in this room,” without further definition, but I interpreted that to mean that none of us would repeat anything any member of the hiring committee had said about anyone in the pool of candidates, which included eight members of the KPFA staff and listener community, so as to protect all our working relationships with one another.

And I am quite sure that confidentiality agreements are not license to break the law with impunity….. the PNB doesn’t seem to have respected the termination clause in Reese’s contract, or the process requirement, which obliged them to warn her in writing that they were dissatisfied with some aspect of her performance. Nor, it seems, did the Chair of the Pacifica National Board even allow discussion of a matter as critical as terminating the Executive Director…..ownership of the building,… belongs to the Pacifica Foundation."