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East Bay | IndymediaKPFA Interim Program Director Tries A Lie To Save Election for Concerned Listeners
Today in the Berkeley Daily Planet Sasha Lilley makes a bold faced lie about the on air election coverage for the 2007 and 2006 Election Campaigns. In both years Station Management refused to allow any election information to be run during the fund drive, despite requests from many candidates. In both years the fund drive coincided with the beginning of the voting for LSB members. No candidate statements or forums were allowed on the air during the fund drive. The ballots went out each year during the fund drive and so did a slate mailer from Concerned Listeners while there was NO candidate information on the air for three weeks. Sasha Lilley was also one of the initiators or the CL slate. She asked her mother, Kathleen Lilley, active in the Wellstone Democratic Club, to put together a slate favorable to her group at the station. The previous "dismantlers" slate, KPFAForward, was soundly defeated by Peoplesradio in 2004. Peoplesradio won 6 of 9 seats up for election. CL and their "dismantler" allies must be running scared to stoop to this direct dishonesty! Notice Lilley puts it in the last Daily Planet before the voting deadline. Thus no possible rebuttal before all have voted. Tactically smart, morally bankrupt. Perhaps now every progressive will understand what we are up against and want to change. Pacifica MUST EQUAL HONESTY! Commentary: KPFA Needs Dialogue, Not Demonization
1. By Sasha Lilley (11-13-07) "...It has also been claimed that we conspired to hijack both this and last year’s board elections, by not airing candidate spots on the air. However, the elections are run by an independent election supervisor who determines the timing for on air candidate statements, not us...." >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> I asked the Local Election Supervisor this morning upon reading this statement whose decision was it that no election information was on the air during the fund drive? Her answer : Station Management. It was the same last year and The National Election Supervisor, Les Radke, will verify that. Below is an article I wrote about this some time ago. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> A TALE OF TWO ELECTIONS Ohio & Florida? NO KPFA 04 & 06 In the 2006 Local Station Board (LSB) election we had no candidate information on air for more than two weeks before the ballots were mailed and more than a week after the ballots arrived. 778 ballots were picked up at the post office before any candidate information was played. How many others were in the mail or filled out and ready to mail before the candidate information was aired, we will never know. What we do know is that Lemlem Rijio, Interim GM, and a member of the strategy group that was discussing “dismantling the LSB”, (see reverse side of this flyer for the (“KPFA Pentgon Paper”), refused to run any candidate information from October 3 to October 19. After that she refused to allow staff to prepare the carts for broadcast for several days. This may not seem to affect the outcome one way or the other until you realize that the Concerned Listeners (CL) Slate sent out a large mailing to arrive with the ballots. This combined with the election “gag” imposed by the IGM tilted the playing field decidedly in the Concerned Listeners favor. Please note that other members of the “dismantling the LSB” strategy group, Brian Edward-Tiekert, Bonnie Simmons, Rain Geesler and Sherry Gendelman endorsed the Concerned Listener Slate and Sasha Lilley and her mother helped put the CL slate together and get the Wellstone endorsement. Let’s take a trip back to the 2004 election. Remember the ballots arriving very late to the Bay Area? If you think this was an accident let me give you a fact that may change your mind. KPFAForward.org was the entrenched staff slate/web site during that election. They still have that web site but since they lost that election so badly to Peoplesradio, who elected its members to 6 of the 9 available seats, 2/3 of the votes, the entrenched staff obviously felt they needed a new image: Concerned Listeners. Peopleradio had its website up in August 2004 and its endorsers together and was out at all major KPFA and other political events. KPFAForward DIDN’T get its web site up until October 14, 2004 or later, the day before the ballots were to be mailed. If you want to check this go to whois.net and run KPFAForward.org. You will see the beginning date of October 14, 2004 with the owner being Mark Hernandez. Hernandez was a KPFAForward candidate in that election and a CL candidate in 2006. The Executive Director in 2004 was Dan Coughlin, a close ally of the KPFA entrenched staff. He hired the National Election Supervisor (NES) for the 2004 election. (There were other election dirty tricks in 2004, but this was the main one.) For some unknown reason the Bay Area ballots were delayed several weeks. They were not mailed when the others were. Why? Who benefited from the delay? The entrenched staff slate. They now had time to get their endorsements together and get their materials and emails out telling people to see their now operative web site, for several weeks before the ballots arrived. They couldn’t do that this time given that the current NES, Les Radke, would not allow such tactics. So this time they obtained an advantage the old fashioned way, get station management, who they are in collusion with, to shut down the election coverage on the air, making the Concerned Listener mailing much more effective in the vacuum. Sarv Randhawa, Mary Berg and Rosalinda Palacios who all regularly support the “dismantlers” on the LSB and PNB, voted to gut a motion that was passed by the PNB Election Committee 10-2, (originally written by PeoplesRadio’s Richard Phelps). The original motion would have required election and candidate information to be aired during September, October and November until the ballot deadline. There would have been no election GAG on KPFA air and thus a reduced advantage for the CL mailer. The struggle for democratic process and transparent operation at KPFA/Pacific is not over. Those that only want the listeners money and not their input are doing their best to “dismantle the LSB”. If you want democratic process and fair elections VOTE for peoplesradio’s. For more history see http://WWW.peoplesradio.net Richard Phelps |
Dear Sasha,
If it were just that email by itself, I would NOT be inclined to take that "dismantling" stuff too seriously. However, when words consistently match up with actions over a period of years, then I come to believe what I read, see and hear.
Recently, the author of that email explained it this way in the Planet (11/2/2007):
"I wrote an email to a group of people who care about KPFA that suggested topics we might discuss at a meeting—a meeting that, in fact, never happened. One of those topics was “recalling LSB members / dismantling the LSB”—asking KPFA’s members, via recall petition, to clean house on KPFA’s board. (I had just read a paper on nonprofit governance entitled “Boards Behaving Badly"—which suggested the only remedy for some boards made dysfunctional through infighting was "dismantling” them by stripping them down to the legal minimum number of members, then building them back up with fresh faces)."
Now that sounds to me like a pretty good description of what I see your group working to do.
Daniel
by Leslie Radford, KPFK LSB candidate Sunday, Nov. 11, 2007 at 2:28 PM
leslie [at] radiojustice.net
After a struggle for democratic elections that nearly destroyed a progressive radio network, local elections at KPFK are besmirched by unchecked money, influence, and confusion.
Six years ago, listeners to a progressive radio network called Pacifica won a lawsuit that allowed KPFK members to elect representatives to their local station board, and through them, to determine who sat on the Pacifica National Board. The demand for democracy was an eruption against a board of directors that considered selling one of the stations to finance a string of smaller Black stations in the South. The settlement instituted the first democratically-run radio network in the U.S., another groundbreaking advance in the network's long history. Such are the contradictions of democracy.
Today, that democratic outburst has fallen victim to a single slate of candidates supported by "The Committee to Strengthen KPFK," a powerful amalgam of Local Station Board members, station staff, and new faces, and endorsed by attorney Carol Spooner, one of the key figures in the original effort to democratize Pacifica. And they have injected the influence of a financed elections and Democratic Party politics into an institution that prides itself on being "powered by the people." The Committee and procedural violations threaten to confuse and discourage candidates, and endanger the quorum necessary for election certification.