KPFA's Professional Journalists Are At It Again - More On-Air Shenanigans

This evening's KPFA News featured a "report" by Aileen Alfandary (interviewing Phillip Maldari) where the two sacrificed precious on-air news time to campaign for their unsustainable KPFA worker budget. Pillorying executive director Arlene Engelhardt for the perfectly reasonable statement that losing a million dollars in 24 months is "untenable", the two proceeded to merrily spew misinformation over 59,000 watts, sacrificing truth, integrity and basic ethics to the relentless campaign to preserve a 38-person headcount at the community radio station that posted a 500K deficit in the last 12 months.

Made-up Story #1 - The Pacifica Foundation won't pay KPFA rent for their office space at 1925 Berkeley Way

The Pacifica Foundation owns the building, legally. They aren't tenants. The office space isn't up to code and requires at least a $30,000 structural investment to be rentable to anybody due to some structural issues. It sat vacant for several years before Pacifica moved in in 2000. The liability insurance probably wouldn't cover it for a commercial rental.

Made-up Story #2 - If the Pacifica Foundation canceled iin-person meetings, KPFA would save $110,000.

The figure for all 4 board meetings is around $80,000 - divided among 5 stations. That is to do the business of a foundation with 15 million dollars in annual revenues. KPFA's savings from such a cancellation would be about $16,000 or about 1/3 of a job. If you add in teleconferencing costs, less than that.

Made-up Story #3 - KPFA wants to spread out the payment of the central service fees it couldn't pay last year because it went broke.

That's like taking out a new credit card to pay up the old one because the limit is used up. Doesn't solve the problem of having more expenses than revenue. Central fees pay for Democracy Now (which generates 300K in pledges annually), Free speech radio news (which provided no less than 27 minutes of the content to tonight's evening news program), the annual financial audit which is required for CPB monies, annual 990 form and a plethora of other services which KPFA is ill-equipped and unable to perform for itself. It also owns the license for broadcast.

All of these proposals together add up to about $100,000.

Say it very slowly - the operating deficit last year was more than $500,000.

"Untenable" was putting it nicely.

Enough with the on-air tantrums.