THIS IS A REPOST of excerpts pertaining to KPFK – our local Pacifica radio station: KPFK
from:
http://www.unitedforcommunityradio.org/?p=2432 Pacifica’s National Board held one of its increasingly rare in-person board meetings in Los Angeles this past weekend, as LA station KPFK, the most financially successful Pacifica station as recently as 2013, continues its rapid free fall into insolvency.
In May, outgoing [Pacifica's] IED Margy Wilkinson saddled KPFK with a community college teacher as a new general manager, Leslie Radford, whose only credential appears to be a few years as a factional fighter on the local and national boards.
on Saturday, local issues at LA station KPFK took center stage. Many KPFK employees came to register their concerns about the managerial hire, expressed here by their selected representative Tony Bates....
The public comment period (you can see brief comments from that session from long-time LA overnight host Roy of Hollywood and former IED Grace Aaron) was followed by a meeting disruption when the board majority attempted to argue with the audience and were shouted down and told to return to their agenda. They did. A few brief clips of the disruption were recorded here and here.........
The meeting then moved on to several hours of discussion of a board mandate to increase the number of program broadcasts entirely in the Spanish language by 5 hours a week more than the current amount (which ranges from15 hours a week at KPFK to 0 hours a week at WPFW-DC). ...
The motion from the board’s Spanish Language Task Force is a must-carry mandate for all five stations, indicates the programs must be broadcast weekdays between 6:00am and 8:00pm, describes the programming as “permanent” and advises that if stations cannot assemble their own local program collectives they should then consider picking up programs from the existing 15 hours at KPFK....
,,,,,. Board member Rodrigo Argueta, who brought the motion, produces Voces de Libertad at KPFK and his wife produces Insurgencia Femina, two programs that recently came under fire from some segments of LA’s activist community.
The motion passed the board overwhemingly. All 4 KPFA board members voted for it as did all KPFK board members and the entire DC delegation.....
On Sunday, the board majority visibly split apart on several votes, including one that abolished on-air election information tutorials, which was voted down and then brought back up for reconsideration where it passed after modifying the length to five minutes and airing requirements to once in a month per program.
Board members Argueta, Casenave, Norman and Tucker broke with Brazon, Wilkinson and Edwards-Tiekert and restored the on-air announcements.
Similarly, a motion by KPFA board member Jose-Luis Fuentes to strip any supervisory authority by executive director John Proffitt over the organization’s chief financial officer was soundly defeated, with only Brazon and Medina from LA and Diaz and Brown from Washington DC supporting the idea of stripping the executive director from any financial operational supervision whatsoever............
On Sunday, the board majority visibly split apart on several votes......
Similarly, a motion by KPFA board member Jose-Luis Fuentes to strip any supervisory authority by [the newly hired ] executive director John Proffitt over the organization’s chief financial officer was soundly defeated, with only Brazon and Medina from LA and Diaz and Brown from Washington DC supporting the idea of stripping the executive director from any financial operational supervision whatsoever......
One of Leslie Radford’s first actions as KPFK’s general manager was to return to station premises a former board colleague of hers, Ian Johnston, who was removed from the local board after attempting to make citizens arrests with handcuffs of staff and board members, both in the LA station’s lobby and then at a board meeting held at the People’s College of the Law, which asked the KPFK local board to never meet there again after the Johnston incident.
The lobby incident was recorded on a security camera and while the footage was embargoed for a long period of time, (attempts to arrange a viewing for the KPFK local station board at the time were shut down by Radford and others in her faction at the time of the incident), it is now available.
The raw footage is 34:52 in length, and brief clips from before, during and after the incident are now on Youtube. You can view the 8 minutes of footage here.
They include Johnston’s altercation with the receptionist prior to the confrontation, a confrontation with IT director Jonathan Alexander, and the aftermath with several female KPFK employees encountering Johnston in the lobby.
Johnston, who was at the entire June 2015 meeting, was handcuff-free at this meeting, but threatened several members of the audience, board and KPFK staff, including following some for more than half a block outside the meeting area and threatening to “serve” them or “get them”.
The increasing level of tensions at KPFK is discussed here in a personal essay by former PNB treasurer Tracy Rosenberg, a KPFA listener rep from 2007-2013.
Pacifica in Exile readers may write to the board at
pnb@pacifica.org.
[ please refer to URL listed here = for past writings or future ones if you, reader, want to know even a bit more of what else transpires -- behind the vocalizings done on surface-air on KPFK radio, 90.7 FM. Much else is well hidden and the same opaqueness as in all corporations still hides the real workings that then work in selling the external messages and images only. ]