Pro-labor parade in San Francisco, July of 1984, photo by Lloyd Francis.
Photo of Stephen Dunifer taken in 1993 found on his Free Radio Berkeley website http://www.freeradio.org/
Photo of primate by HD, 2008 India, illustrates what Berkeley's buffoon left-wing does to amuse rest of San Francisco Bay area from time to time.
416.
Published news story by Lurene Kathleen Helzer, June 21, 1993, East Bay Phoenix Journal, “Radio Free Berkeley fined $20,000”. Story about underground Berkeley micro-power broadcaster Stephen Dunifer, founder of Free Radio Berkeley, being in big trouble with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission because of his illegal broadcasts. Why would Dunifer have been the subject of so much local attention in 1993?
The broadcaster was doing protest shows from the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, Berkeley’s City Hall and far-left radio station KPFA’s offices in downtown Berkeley. (Dunifer said he felt KPFA was compromising its original, leftist ideals born in the Cold War/Vietnam War years. Of course, this is both impossible and amusing; many in the Bay Area still joke in 2009 that Berkeley’s KPFA remains somewhere to the left of Karl Marx.)
Whatever his platform, Dunifer was risking sizable financial penalties from the American FCC in 1993 because of his so-dubbed “pirate” radio broadcasts. The FCC said illegal broadcasts risked jamming aircraft navigation systems, for example, so the airwaves had to remain strictly regulated.
Pirate broadcasters like Dunifer argued that there was plenty of open broadcast area of the AM and FM bands of 1993, that the costs of radio broadcasting were needlessly prohibitive to the broader community. Pirate broadcasters believe this to be an opportunity cost, that it essentially contradicts the goal of free speech, ultimately serves to gag the opinions of those on pirate shows.
Who was being allegedly gagged? Black Liberation Radio in Chicago was one group that became relatively known in illegal broadcasting.
Such media earned this tag originally because illegal radio broadcasters often worked their controls off the European coasts of World War II. They worked in stealth in order to embarrass or influence their target populations, i.e., the Germans trapped inside Germany during the Nazi years. In later decades, pirate radio broadcasts could be heard by enslaved populations of the Cold War.
Today, it’s a far different debate because of the internet’s ubiquity. Mr. Dunifer, though, continues to strongly support regulatory reform for radio in 2009, and can be found online at “freeradio.org”.
In June of 1993, when I was sent out by the paper to meet Stephen Dunifer for this story, I could hardly believe the happenings right before me. The events weren’t staged. Some people were indeed excited about an illegal broadcasting movement in the Bay Area:
Even in Mogadishu U.S. military forces know what to hit first — the radio station.
So do U.S. Federal Communications Commission forces, much to the annoyance of Stephen Dunifer, Free Radio Berkeley’s most visible broadcaster.
Actually, Dunifer is Free Radio Berkeley’s only visible broadcaster, because the 88.1 FM station is illegal.
“Free Radio Berkeley encourages you to take up the microphone and let a thousand transmitters bloom,” said an FRB handout obtained June 12 at a gathering of Berkeley underground radio enthusiasts.
The FCC recently filed a Notice of Apparent Violation against Dunifer, which carries a fine of around $20,000.
These threats did not keep 20 people away from a “Micro Power Radio Workshop” in Berkeley, to learn the basics of setting up an underground radio broadcast.
Radio equipment a hot commodity
Amidst a background of leftist posters from the Cold War era, a man in Khaki shorts shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
“I just came to buy your $35 transmitter, but if I have to sit through the whole meeting, that’s okay, too,” the man blurted.
Dunifer replied he could not sell him an assembled kit, because it would only put him in further trouble with the FCC.
“Well, take a couple knobs off,” the man answered impatiently.
Dunifer said it would still be illegal.
No longer able to control himself, the man picked up the equipment, slapped $40 on the shelf as a “donation,” and made for the door, saying if he couldn’t legally buy the stuff, he’d ‘steal’ it.
Radio transmitters for illegal broadcasting are hot right now and getting hotter, it seems.
“Free Radio Berkeley is part of a growing movement of individuals and communities across the country who have set up these micro-power (1 – 15 watts) broadcasting operations. Most notable of these is Black Liberation Radio, which covers a housing project area in Illinois,” the handout said.
Other material was available from Dunifer, too, such as “Pirates Guide to FM Stereo.”
San Francisco attorney Louis Hiken, of the national Lawyers Guild’s Committee on Democratic Communications, represents FRB and several other under-ground operators. He said underground stations are popping up in several U.S. locations. He said he believes FCC regulations must change to allow these broadcasters to go about their business legally.
MasterCard radio? In Berkeley?
Free Radio Berkeley has been broadcasting 9 – midnight Sunday evenings since April. They have also broadcast from places like Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and Berkeley City Hall.
On June 17 FRB broadcast from in front of KPFA Radio’s Berkeley studio to protest what Dunifer called the station’s transition from “People’s Radio to MasterCard Radio.”
The FCC complained that illegal broadcasts can interfere with aircraft navigation systems. But Dunifer said there is plenty of space between radio bands, especially in the age of digital tuners, which are more precise. “There are at least 20 (available) spots on the Bay Area FM bank,” said Dunifer.
He complained that the cost of broadcasting has a chilling effect on free speech. “The only way for a community group to have a voice is to have at least $50,000 in the bank,” said Dunifer. –30—
321.
Published news story by Lurene Helzer for Berkeley Daily Planet, April 16, 1999, “KPFA supporters rally.” Story regards fans of Berkeley radio station KPFA, their street gathering to support well-known station employees Larry Bensky and Nicole Sawaya.
Bensky and Sawaya were then in conflict with the Pacifica Foundation, confronting possible termination of their contracts.
In the 1999 news photo running alongside my story, San Francisco area broadcaster Bill Mandel addresses the crowd of about 400 Bensky and Sawaya supporters. The crowd was gathered on Berkeley’s Martin Luther King Jr. Way with temperatures nearing 80 degrees Fahrenheit. They were calling for mediation.
A second photo by Berkeley Daily Planet Editor Rob Cunningham runs inside. That photo shows the crowd that day from a different angle. Most at the demonstrators held signs:
As the rally was going on, KPFA was simultaneously celebrating its 50th year on the air with the rebroadcast of many of its most memorable shows since 1949, including writer James Baldwin and labor leader Cesar Chavez.
It added a strange, historical feeling to the protest. One could have been at the rally and put a headset tuned to KFPA on to hear, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” in beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s scratchy 1957 broadcast of “Howl.”
Larry Bensky was there to speak. Rally organizers had constructed a kind of stage in the bed of a small truck with microphones. He stepped up into it.
“I’ve been known for a lot of things in my life, but now I seem to be known as the person who was fired for speaking freely on free speech radio,” said Bensky.
There was a large variety of homemade signs at the rally. “Lynn Chadwick and corporate mind-set have to go,” read one.
“While Clinton attacks Yugoslavia, his friends attack KPFA,” read another, drawn up by Aaron Aarons of Berkeley. He said he had made seven or eight signs. Some other attendees, lacking a sign with a slogan, had dipped from his cache of placards.
Laurie MacKenzie, a sample of the small but fiercely dedicated core group of financial do contributors that keep the station afloat, came from San Francisco with her 8-month-old son, Duncan Rocha to attend the demonstration.
She said she had been listening to KPFA for the last 20 years.
“It shouldn’t be run like any other broadcast corporation. The staff and listeners should have a say in the programming – especially the staff,” said MacKenzie.
But who were some of the attendees in the crowd? That was almost the whole story. You had Bill Mandel, after all, who is best remembered for his famous words during the Cold War 1950s.
Whatever your position on the various news events of the long Cold War era, Mandel was one of the more colorful speakers called to speak during the McCarthy spree:
“This is a book-burning! You lack only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did twenty years ago, and I am going to get that across to the American people!” Mandel said before Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1953, according to transcripts.
When in 1960 a member of the House Un-American Affairs Committee, then in San Francisco, asked Mandel if he was a member of the Communist Party, you can imagine Mandel’s response. Now, the House was in Mandel’s yard:
“Honorable beaters of children, sadists, uniformed and in plain clothes, distinguished Dixicrat wearing the clothing of a gentleman, eminent Republican who opposes an accommodation with the one country with which we must live at peace in order for us and all our children to survive…” began Mandel.
“...where a son of a friend of mine had his head split by these goons operating under your orders, my boy today might have paid the penalty of permanent injury or a police record for desiring to come here and hear how this committee operates. If you think that I am going to cooperate with this collection of Judases, of men who sit there in violation of the United States Constitution, if you think I will cooperate with you in any way, you are insane!” Mandel is recorded as saying in 1960 San Francisco.
You could not have paid me enough to live in the former Soviet Union, but I quickly concede McCarthyism in the United States was no fun, either.
Communism revealed deep rifts within American society and Europe, but also embarassing, fatal flaws with liberalism itself. With all respect to KPFA, I think the American left needs to be far more candid in portraying the Soviets and the American left as they honestly were in those decades. We may never quite see it, though.
Mandel himself is still around Berkeley. He was 92 on June 4, 2009. So, covering Berkeley was innervating. Original story follows:
About 400 KPFA listeners and staffers stubbornly spilled out to fill a section of Martin Luther King Jr. Way Thursday afternoon to show their support for former station manager Nicole Sawaya and radio journalist Larry Bensky, both of whom demonstrators say were unjustifiably and wrongfully fired.
The rally began at noon with about 150 people who were confined to the sidewalk in front of Pacifica Foundation/KPFA offices. But as the temperature climbed to 78 degrees, the crowd began to swell with onlookers and supporters.
Barbara Lubin, who many in the Bay Area and elsewhere know for her missions to Iraq to deliver medicines, is the founder of the Middle East Children’s Alliance. She came to speak at the rally in support of KPFA staff.
“We depend on KPFA to know what’s going on,” she said in a critical remark directed at the mainstream media’s coverage of the current war in the Balkans. “We’re going to bring Nicole Sawaya back. We’re going to bring Larry Bensky back.”
The Pacifica Foundation has not responded to local protest efforts, saying personnel issues are not matters for public discussion. However, the foundation explained the Bensky dismissal, at least to a limited extent, in an April 9 press release.
“Mr. Bensky’s April 4th on-air attack of Pacifica Radio Foundation and members of its management was a direct violation of Pacifica policy, as well as his AFTRA union contract, both of which prohibit airing personal grievances on the air. Pacifica has no plans to replace Sunday Salon, nor to offer Mr. Bensky a new contract,” read the press release.
As the rally was going on, KPFA was simultaneously celebrating its 50th year on the air with the rebroadcast of many of its most memorable shows since 1949, including writer James Baldwin and labor leader Cesar Chavez.
It added a strange, historical feeling to the protest. One could have been at the rally and put a headset tuned to KFPA on to hear, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” in beat poet Alan Ginsberg’s scratchy 1957 broadcast of “Howl.”
Larry Bensky was there to speak. Rally organizers had constructed a kind of stage in the bed of a small truck with microphones. He stepped up into it.
“I’ve been known for a lot of things in my life, but now I seem to be known as the person who was fired for speaking freely on free speech radio,” said Bensky.
There was a large variety of homemade signs at the rally. “Lynn Chadwick and corporate mind-set have to go,” read one.
“While Clinton attacks Yugoslavia, his friends attack KPFA,” read another, drawn up by Aaron Aarons of Berkeley. He said he had made seven or eight signs. Some other attendees, lacking a sign with a slogan, had dipped from his cache of placards.
Laurie MacKenzie, a sample of the small but fiercely dedicated core group of financial do contributors that keep the station afloat, came from San Francisco with her 8-month-old son, Duncan Rocha to attend the demonstration.
She said she had been listening to KPFA for the last 20 years.
“It shouldn’t be run like any other broadcast corporation. The staff and listeners should have a say in the programming – especially the staff,” said MacKenzie.
The protest was being watched by Berkeley police officers. Lt. Stephanie Fleming said the department had stationed 10 officers at the rally, and one parking enforcement officer.
“We’re just here to make sure they have a safe environment to voice their views,” she said. “It’s gotten a lot of media attention. People knew it was going to happen.”
On March 31, the night of Sawaya’s termination, someone fired bullets into Pacifica’s offices. No suspect was found, and no one was it by the bullets. Both KPFA staff and Pacifica Foundation representatives condemned the incident.
Ben Clarke was there Thursday as part of a group called Media Alliance, a politically progressive media organization that has 3,500 journalists, students and other media professionals. Larry Bensky formed the group in 1975.
Media Alliance is demanding that Sawaya and Bensky be rehired. “KPFA has stood for free speech for 50 years and Pacifica management is headed in the wrong direction,” said Clarke. “Given that the war is heating up in Europe, radio founded by pacifists that provide alternative viewpoints to Pentagon press releases must remain strong.”
Free Radio Berkeley, the illegal pirate broadcaster, also was at the rally. The broadcaster for the group wished to remain anonymous, but spoke about why the station’s “microradio” equipment had been set up there to broadcast.
“We’re here to demonstrate how easy free speech can be created. That’s supposed to be what KPFA is about. We want them to return to it,” he said. One of Free Radio Berkeley’s first broadcasts six years ago was of a KPFA event.
Kevin Adkinson is an apprentice at KPFA who has worked there for the last nine months.
“It’s ridiculous. She raised so much more money for this station than her predecessor,” he said of Sawaya.
Standing next to Adkinson was Weyland Southon, who airs music shows like “Mid-Day Swing” for KPFA. He, like Bensky, used air time to protest the Sawaya termination. “It was just a verbal warning,” he said.
Southon has been doing shows for the station since 1991, when he began as an apprentice. Now, being witness to this latest row, he said he thought it was time for KPFA to consider a new status of its own, divorced from the Pacifica Foundation. It was an idea that floated within the crowd all day.
“It would probably give Pacifica cardiac arrest because this is the heart of the entire network,” he said.
--30--
438.
Published news story by Lurene Helzer for Berkeley Daily Planet, April 13, 1999, “‘This battle was different’; KPFA labor fight draws attention from 50th anniversary”. Berkeley's KPFA radio has been broadcasting a variety of programs for decades now. I've always had mixed feelings.
On the positive side, I find some of the music and science shows top-quality in 2009, as I did in the 1990s. On the more negative side, their political biases have always been extraordinarily liberal, with their reports wildly slanted in the Cold War years. I lost count of the shows they did defending or making excuses for the old Soviets as the Soviets chewed on multiple human rights and freedoms.
I doubt you'll ever hear much recognition by KPFA staff of those past shows, of course. I can't find these Cold War shows in their website archives.
Today, it's Islamic dictatorship they pretty-up -- the trampling of women's rights, etc.
What happened to the American Left? Where's the Gloria Steinem for Gaza on KPFA?
Joking critics in Berkeley often called the station KPLO rather than KPFA because the station's guests and broadcasters made so many excuses for the Palestine Liberation Organization under Arafat and his friends and/or co-conspirators.
Critics joke this way because the station has made hundreds, if not thousands, of justifications for political fanaticism by giving stage to apologists. They honestly could cover Arab/Islamic issues with more fairness, mind you, and do not.
Related examples of twisted broadcasting on KPFA were frequently -- very frequently -- found in citations of British Author George Orwell. In past years, and perhaps still, you would hear KPFA broadcasters labeling a U.S. government policy as inspired by Orwell's fictional "Big Brother" from Orwell's famous book "Nineteen Eighty-Four."
This was a serious misuse of the author's work since Orwell himself said he was using the fascisms and communisms of his own day for his nightmare, fictional scenario.
Orwell was not concerned with the U.S. government of the mid-1960s, 1970, 1987 or the 1990s. In fact, Orwell died in January of 1950. According to British Author Christopher Hitchens, interviewed on a NPR show, and several other sources easily available, Orwell was not much interested in affairs of the United States after the war. He died of Tuberculosis.
If you were listening to much of KPFA in the 1980s and 1990s, you had the feeling that Orwell had been commenting on multiple American Cold War controversies. Yet, Orwell was not observing Sen. Joseph McCarthy's vituperative shows in Washington D.C.; Orwell may well have called McCarthy a buffoon (See photo of primate in 2008 India above, consider "Burmese Days" by Orwell, 1934) if he'd been alive to hear him rant and accuse, but Orwell was no apologist for communism. There is ample evidence he disliked European communism, though he was a socialist.
Broadcasters like Democracy Now's Amy Goodman should make that extremely clear during their radio shows citing Orwell's work. I've heard her falsely flag his reputation about in the last twenty years like crazy. I quit tolerating her after the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.
The point is, some KPFA broadcasters are good quality, while others really should have been put to sea with the gulls as their loyal audience in 1989.
I still catch KPFA shows and always will, but I trust some shows more than others, and digest all media with reasonable doubts.
Having said all that, these old stories following below that I wrote in 1999 about KPFA have some truly interesting quotes, but are otherwise routine labor dispute stories:
In what was supposed to be a routine anniversary celebration, KPFA’s 50 years of broadcast service to the community is being recognized this week more for the station’s internal disputes than for its programming.
The disputes at the popular Berkeley radio station have gotten so bad that Berkeley City Councilmember Dona Spring will ask the council tonight to send a letter to the station calling for mediation.
The trouble reportedly started when the station’s staff and listeners were informed that popular station manager Nicole Sawaya had been dismissed on March 31.
After many people in the public and inside the station protested her departure, the station announced in a broadcast message that Sawaya had not been fired, but simply her contract had not been renewed.
KPFA staff member Larry Bensky also had been protesting Sawaya’s departure. He was fired Friday.
Bensky, host of the popular show “Sunday Salon,” started working with KPFA in 1969. This isn’t the first time he’s run into problems with the station. He also was fired in December of last year.
After hundreds of listeners contacted KPFA in protest, he was invited to return, though the Pacifica Foundation has denied that public reaction influenced its decision regarding Bensky.
The KPFA staff has been consistently opposed to the Sawaya and Bensky terminations. Staff members believe Sawaya held the station together and kept it from imploding on itself, as it has gained a reputation for doing every few years.
KPFA staffers said she had the talent to smooth disagreements and to act as a fair arbitrator between Pacifica and station personnel.
“We’re in shock that a manager as successful as Nicole Sawaya, who unified the staff, got the station on track and raised over $40,000 over the last (fund-raising) goal, was fired for supposedly not being a good fit. We’re trying to figure out who she didn’t fit with,” said Dennis Bernstein, co-host of Flashpoints, a nightly show that focuses on national and international events.
Strong arguments and ideological clashes are common at the station, even expected. But listeners and staffers alike reacted quickly to the departure of Sawaya and the subsequent firing of Bensky.
“KPFA is an extremely interesting place,” said Bernstein. “This battle was different.”
The underlying issue that reportedly feeds the battle between Pacifica and the staff of KPFA, Bernstein said, is the conviction among staff that any tampering with the organization’s principles will “undermine the real free-speech mission of the station.”
Bensky has worked for KPFA intermittently since 1969, and steadily since 1987. He was the station’s national affairs correspondent from 1987 through 1998, and the station manager from 1974 to 1977.
Bensky does not accept the explanations for personnel changes given by the Pacifica Foundation.
“You can call it roast beef or you can call it Swiss cheese. The bottom line is she’s (Sawaya) not there anymore,” said Bensky. “Any rational person would say I was fired in December and she was fired in March.”
Lynn Chadwick, the now-maligned executive director of Pacifica, spoke on the air April 2.
“First, internal Pacifica issues and management decisions are precisely that – internal. We have made decisions that reflect the best management practices for the organization, regardless of their popularity,” she said in that statement, which appears on the “Take Back KPFA” web site.
“Second, internal Pacifica issues and management decisions are not news. It is not appropriate for any media outlet, including KPFA, to use airtime to voice internal grievances, nor should a parent organization, such as Pacifica, use airtime to counter such grievances. This is not the purpose of community radio.”
Chadwick said Sawaya’s contract with KPFA expired on March 31, and Pacifica simply made a decision not to renew it.
She denied in the same broadcast that Pacifica fired Bensky last December. She also said his return to host “Sunday Salon” was not the result of public outcry.
“The legalities surrounding personnel issues and their confidentiality make it impossible for me to share the particulars of either situation with you,” Chadwick announced.
Bensky spoke out on his show April 4 against the Sawaya termination. The station, standing on its policy of forbidding Pacifica personnel from discussing work-related grievances on-air, subsequently fired him.
Regarding the Sawaya affair, Bensky said the station’s listeners deserved to have more control over major changes in policy. “This was at the very least an abusive process. At the very most, an aggressive power grab,” he said.
On the Monday preceding his termination, Bensky found that his e-mail account had been cut. By Tuesday and Wednesday, Bensky began learning that KPFA affiliates had been told that his show would be discontinued. When Bensky received orders to attend a meeting with Pacifica representatives on April 8, he declined to attend.
Bensky said he got a facsimile telling him he was fired, and a package that contained his final paycheck the same day, dated Wednesday, April 7.
“There was no point in going to talk on the 8th,” said Bensky.
“I intend to grieve it through my union and ask for arbitration. If that is not satisfactory, I am going to consider legal action,” said Bensky, adding that he has already received some 1,500 e-mails of support. He also has received listener support on the street, he said.
“It’s been overwhelming and gratifying,” he said.
Bensky said he regretted that events have overshadowed KPFA’s 50th anniversary, for which staff had been preparing.
He also said listeners would miss a program he had scheduled for his next Sunday show featuring a professor in Belgrade – an area particularly difficult to reach as the NATO strikes continue.
“Pacifica is doing absolutely nothing special about this war and we would have been leading that effort; I would have been a part of it. Instead, we have this unseemly situation,” said Bensky.
This is not the first time that KPFA’s internal disagreements have spilled into the public sphere. A similar incident occurred in 1995, when broadcaster Al Huebner went on the air Feb. 10 to discuss KPFA’s internal disputes.
Bensky, when asked why KPFA seemed to have a fractious history with staff and management disagreements, took a broad view.
“It’s not easy to administer a place like that,” he said. “Anti-authoritism is hard to administrate. It’s a place that gathers innovators. You tend to have strong personalities and strong opinions.”
Curt Gray is with a community group that has followed closely the events at KPFA, called “Take Back KPFA.” It has criticized the decisions to terminate Sawaya and Bensky.
“They’re in the information-suppression business,” Gray contends of Pacifica management. “They’ve been gagging people. It’s a perversion of what free speech radio is about.” – end –
439.
Published news story by Lurene Helzer for Berkeley Daily Planet, April 17, 1999, “Pacifica official speaks out; Spokeswoman says foundation has been fair with KPFA”. This story, while boring like previous story, gives some insight into Berkeley's KPFA radio:
The Pacifica Foundation said Friday it has been trying to initiate discussion with staff members at its local radio station, KPFA, following a bitter and high-profile rift that has arisen over the termination of two popular station staffers.
Elan Fabbri, Pacifica’s national communications director, said that Pacifica has been attempting since April 7, in cooperation with the Communication Workers of America union, to enter into discussions with staff members at the radio station. As of Friday, Pacifica was awaiting a response from KPFA staff members on whether they would enter “facilitated discussions.”
If staff members agree to talk, an organization called the “Institute for Labor and Mental Health” will act as facilitator between the opposing camps, Fabbri said.
In the meantime, Pacifica has “suspended all disciplinary procedures as a sign of good faith.”
“We did this to show that this is not about power, this is not about firing people, or about rigidly adhering to a disciplinary process. Our good faith effort was to show the people at KPFA that we are reasonable people, that we do want to hear their issues, and that we do want to be able to communicate ours to them,” she said.
The trouble between KPFA and its parent organization, The Pacifica Foundation, began when the foundation decided not to renew the contract KPFA Station Manager Nicole Sawaya on March 31. Many KPFA staff members, who characterized her departure as a wrongful termination, began to voice complaints during KPFA shows.
Pacifica remains silent regarding circumstances surrounding the termination of Sawaya. Attorneys for Pacifica have advised foundation officials to remain silent. For that reason, Fabbri said, “we have not been proactive with the media.”
She also said that American labor laws prohibit employers from disclosing information about employees in several ways.
However, Fabbri did say that every station manager who works for Pacifica must effectively manage the station, manage programming and further the mission of the parent organization.
“It is the responsibility of a good manager to understand Pacifica’s mission and to accurately communicate that with their staffs and volunteers and, not just the understanding of the mission, but directing them in such a way that it furthers the goals of the organization – of the Pacifica national organization – and I think that’s a key distinction.”
Radio host Larry Bensky devoted nearly 20 minutes of airtime to protest Sawaya’s departure. He was subsequently fired on April 9 for violating Pacifica’s policy that forbids its radio personnel from airing internal grievances during broadcasts.
“Most media outlets have these policies,” Fabbri said. “That kind of stuff is just not appropriate. He has repeatedly violated the policy over the years. Repeatedly.”
Many members of the KPFA staff, under an agreement between the CWA and Pacifica, are entitled to a four-step disciplinary process. This means Pacifica must first verbally warn and employee or volunteer, then issue a written warning, followed by a suspension if there is still an issue. Termination is the final step, Fabbri said.
Six people on the staff of KPFA violated the same rules as Bensky in that week, she said, and have received verbal warnings.
But Bensky is not entitled to the same four-step process because he is employed through a separate unit of the Pacifica organization. “He was covered by a different set of rules,” Fabbri said.
Bensky has promised to grieve Pacifica’s actions with his union. He said if he could not get results that way, he would consider taking legal action.
Asked what her understanding was of what happened between KPFA and Pacifica, Fabbri said, “The station, instead of coming to Pacifica to enter into some sort of internal grievance process, immediately took to the air within a couple of hours.”
That night, March 31, someone fired shots around 11 p.m. into the Pacifica office. Evidence of the incident remains. One window is boarded up, another has a bullet hole which is situated at about eye-level. Pacifica’s Executive Director Lynn Chadwick’s desk had been located behind that window.
Berkeley police told Pacifica personnel that the shots were not random, Fabbri said, adding that she “cannot believe” anyone from KPFA could have been responsible. “I can’t internally resolve that. I really can’t, that a peaceful organization would be the target of violence,” she said.
On Thursday, a crowd of about 400 KPFA listeners, staff members, and supporters gathered in front of the offices on Martin Luther King Jr. Way to rally against the terminations of Sawaya and Bensky.
“It doesn’t surprise me in the least. We encourage people’s right to free speech and the legal expression of it. We’re in Berkeley, and in Berkeley, people protest,” she said.
One of the disputes that has arisen between Pacifica and KPFA staff regards changes Pacifica made at the urging of one of its major financial contributors, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which provides Pacifica with 14 to 15 percent of its annual budget.
CPB officials wrote a letter to Pacifica on September 14, 1998, advising the foundation that because some members of the Pacifica board were also serving on local station advisory boards, in violation of Communications Act guidelines, that CPB might be forced to withdraw funding.
The rule is designed to keep community advisory boards distinct from governing boards. Up to that point, Pacifica had some board members who also were serving on community advisory boards.
Pacifica changed the structure of the organization to stand in line with CPB guidelines. Some listeners were offended at what they viewed as a reduction of local control over KPFA, Fabbri said.
“If we don’t comply with laws, we’ll be at risk of being shut down,” said Fabbri. “We need to change how we do things.”
For example, she said, it makes sense to centralize purchasing because Pacifica could get better prices if it purchased in quantity. “That is responsible fiscal management,” she argued.
Asked if Pacifica intended to find a new station manager right away to replace Sawaya, Fabbri said the organization might hold off until the situation with KPFA staff cools down, perhaps sometime this summer.
“I don’t think it would be fair to ask a new person to step in when the conflict has yet to be identified, much less measures taken to address it,” she said. – end –
203.
Published news story by Lurene Helzer for Berkeley Daily Planet, April 20, 1999, headlined “Upheaval continues at KPFA.” I lived in Berkeley, and even dated host Dennis Bernstein on a few occasions, who was considerate, good-natured in personality.
It took me until the late 1990s to see KPFA clearly, and this story shows my then-naivety; I needed more outside opinion for this story.
KPFA is publicly supported, and far to the left. They do virtual propaganda broadcasts for Palestinian nationalists and Islamic apologists. They regularly broadcast programs during the Cold War defending positions of the Soviet Union. Few, if any, of these Cold War shows are today rebroadcast by KPFA, for embarrassingly obvious reasons. They regularly feature speakers who hurl vague allegations of racism, i.e., higher-income “white” neighborhoods are usually lumped in with the broader history of American racism.
Today, there are no guests invited for interviews from the old Eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia or Romania to share memories of authoritarian socialism/communism. Not that I’ve ever heard, at least. (Perhaps I am wrong?)
The station attacks American political positions. KPFA reached the height of left-wing vehemence and self-righteousness when American President Ronald Reagan was in the oval office.
In 2007, they every day hurl slanderous remarks by various radio hosts and program guests against not only U.S. policies and history, but “whites” in general. Never mind what KPFA means by “white”, “people of color”, or “economic justice.” Today’s shows are the closest one can get to Soviet obfuscation, propaganda and meaninglessness. I still listen to them for instruction in modern slander, but not for accurate analysis of world events.
When you consider that these broadcast stories are defending Islamic parties/countries that show hostility to other ethnicities, detest Jews, oppress women, and routinely use violence to terrorize populations, you see that stations like KPFA may as well be doing press releases for organizations like the old Ku Klux Klan. You would not guess it by some of the quotes in this story, though.
The KKK was/is not an Islamic organization, but stood just the same for a legally mandated racism (toward American black populations in their case), the legal suppression of women’s rights, the suppression of American Jews, and terrorism in general.
Here's the bottom line: You could post the photo of lynched black Americans of the 1920s and the photo of the beheaded Daniel Pearl on the same bulletin board. People would put it together fast, but the staff and listeners of KPFA would surely rush to tear them down.
Original story below:
While the operators of radio station KPFA are expressing optimism regarding today’s labor talks with staff members, station personnel are turning up the heat with reports of two popular shows being taken off the air.
Radio station staffers told the Daily Planet on Monday that two popular shows have been knocked out of their broadcast slots at KPFK, the Los Angeles affiliate of KPFA.
One of those shows, CounterSpin, a nationally syndicated show produced by the media watch group FAIR, had scheduled an interview with former Pacifica network host Larry Bensky, who had been fired from there because of his protests over the departure of Nicole Sawaya, station manager at Berkeley’s KPFA.
“CounterSpin invited Bensky to discuss his firing, the Sawaya dismissal and overlying issues of Pacifica accountability. The Sawaya and Bensky dismissals have stirred public concern, resulting in an April 15 demonstration at KPFA which reportedly drew between 700 and 1,000 protestors,” a press release by FAIR read.
“As a show concerned with censorship, CounterSpin relies on the atmosphere of openness and critical thinking provided by non-commercial radio,” said CounterSpin producer and host Janine Jackson.
“It would be distressing commentary on the state of free speech at the Pacifica network if CounterSpin was pulled from their airwaves for doing just the kind of work we’ve always done, raising just the kinds of questions we regularly raise about the media.”
The Pacifica Foundation’s offices had closed for the day when Daily Planet staff tried to call to solicit reaction to the press release from FAIR.
KPFA personnel also said that “Your Health and Fitness” with Leyna Berman had not been simulated as usual from the Los Angeles Affiliate April 12, but no further details on the situation are now available.
Meanwhile, Pacifica’s National Communications Director Elan Fabbri expressed optimism earlier in the day Monday that “facilitated talks” between Pacifica’s Executive Director Lynn Chadwick and KPFA’s designated union shop steward Dan Albers could make progress.
“My hope is that that meeting is a launch pad. That will be the first step,” said Fabbri.
Albers said the two sides would need to begin with basic communication issues. But he said the issues on the table were already clear to station staff and volunteers.
“The firing of a totally competent person does not seem to be in line with anyone’s mission. Getting rid of competent people is not a good move. Not communicating with listeners who provide the funding is not a good move. And censorship of what people can say on what is ostensibly a free network is not a good move,” he said.
Dennis Bernstein, the long-time host of KPFA’s “Flashpoints,” said an immediate concern for station staff was the departure of several big donors, who have expressed opposition to the dispute that has been raging between Pacifica and KPFA since March 31.
He said one donor had left $150,000 in a will as a donation to KPFA but then rewrote the document to cancel the bequest.
“They pulled a popular manager out when we’re in the middle of covering a war at a station founded by war resistors who went to jail for opposing a popular war,” said Bernstein of the station’s beginnings in the post World War II era. “How sensitive could (Pacifica executive staff) be to the mission?”
Bernstein said Sawaya was “acutely aware of Pacifica’s mission of creating diversity and promoting freedom of the press.”
“It’s beginning to look like KPFA managers are rewarded for censoring programs and fired for supporting freedom of the press,” said Bernstein, who has been with the network for 20 years.
Bernstein said the March 31 shooting through the windows of the Pacifica headquarters by an unidentified suspect had created further tensions and unfounded suspicions, between Pacifica executive staff and KPFA staff.
“Pacifica’s enemies are many, and they are not the network’s producers and reporters. They’re white supremacists, extreme anti-abortionists and those who hate minorities and resent their crucial role in the network,” he said.
Bernstein referred to Pacifica’s policy that forbids staff members from discussing company business on the air. Enforcement of that policy is what led Pacifica to dismiss Bensky, company officials say.
Pacifica has declined to discuss its reasons for not renewing Sawaya’s contract, citing company policies and labor laws governing such actions. While Pacifica has remained silent on the issue, critics on all fronts have been vocal and have garnered widespread media coverage. – 30 –
440.
Published news story by Lurene Helzer for Berkeley Daily Planet, April 28, 1999, “KPFA talks continue”. A follow-up brief:
Little progress is being reported in talks between Berkeley radio station KPFA and its parent organization, Pacifica Foundation, as a rift involving the two parties enters its second month.
“I give them an ‘A’ on diction, an ‘A’ on thinking on their feet, a ‘B+’ on steering the discussion and refocusing, and I give them a ‘D-‘ on perceiving the problem,” said Dan Albers, who has been acting as shop steward for KPFA in talks with Pacifica.
“We’re anxious about moving on this,” Pacifica executive director Lynn Chadwick said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “I hear concerns in the community; they want to save their radio station. We’re doing, we’re trying.”
Chadwick said that with two talking sessions now behind them, Pacifica and KPFA staff have not been able to go “fast enough,” but that “there was an agreement that we will continue to work together.”
“I will continue to be optimistic,” said Chadwick, who has been heavily criticized by station staff for her role in the March 31 termination of station manager Nichole Sawaya.
Chadwick reported leaving the second round of talks Tuesday having “more of an appreciation of each others position.”
“This may be my little Pollyanna attitude, but this station is very important to the people that work here. They don’t work there just because it’s a job. And it’s the same for me,” she said.
Albers reported a much different perception of the talks. When informed of Chadwick’s optimistic comments, Albers said “the two sides spent 45 minutes on the first question KPFA put to Pacifica but never got an answer. They moved on to other issues like an upcoming pledge drive.”
The rift began March 31 when Pacifica Foundation announced it would not renew the contract with Sawaya, KPFA’s station manager.
Chadwick said she has been concerned about Pacifica Foundation’s overall condition as the rift continues.
“The main problem for me is that I have four other Pacifica radio stations, an archive, and a national programming service that have not been getting the attention they need. That’s a hard thing because there are a lot of other things you want to be working on and this matter is taking up considerable time,” she said.
“There’s only so many hours in the day and we’re short-staffed anyway,” she added.
Albers agreed that the struggle has caused distraction at the local radio station.
“People are still trying to do radio. We’re trying to do our jobs,” he said. “It’s very, very disruptive. I came to work here because it was progressive, free-speech radio. I’m kind of wondering where my energy should be placed.” – end --
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