KPFA "Election Is Turning Into A Complete Joke" KPFA Board Member Henry Norr Speaks Out

In this long, stream of consciousness rant on many topics, Henry Norr asserts that KPFA's embracing of new technologies is "sadly neglected." He explains that in the future people will have pocket media players where they can select what they want to hear and that the station really ought to get ready for that. Henry Norr seems to have sadly neglected to learn about or even peruse the website of the station for which he serves.

KPFA has long been an early adopter of new media technologies, thanks to a dedicated group of staff and high-tech volunteers. KPFA was one of the very first handful of community stations to stream live over the internet, and since very early on has offered a selection of different types of streams to accommodate a wide range of users. KPFA was one of the first and still only to archive it's broadcasts and stream them on-demand to anyone with an internet connection, beginning in around 2003/2004, this was long before podcasting and was a rarity in radio. KPFA began podcasting in the summer of 2005, very early, beginning just a few months after KCRW (http://hypebot.typepad.com/hypebot/2005/06/kcrwfm_kcrwcom_.html), beating even many well-funded commercial and npr stations to the launch of podcasting. You can't be much more on the forefront of new media technologies than that.

Very sad the disconnect between reality and the public assertions of some KPFA local station board members. Henry Norr was elected to the local station board last year under the Poople's Radio slate.

On the day this was filmed Pacifica leadership had finished reviewing the liability issue and had announced the return of statements to the web. Did someone not get the memo? http://www.pacificana.org/nes-peters-orders-return-candidate-statements-web

Henry Norr also complains at length that board members aren't being allowed to circumvent the on-air event announcement procedure. He apparently thinks the 25 members of the Local Station Board should be able to get their events on the air without following the same process everyone else has to follow. I applaud the station for not letting people who think like this bully their way to special treatment. There are many community activists who do not happen to serve on the board but whose event promotions are at least as important as Henry Norr's.

Henry Norr spoke about the obstacles that supporters of vital political events have in getting something on the calendar. These supporters of "concerned listeners" could care less whether KPFA gets these radio carts on the air. They might have to be more of an activist station if they changed their growing rules and obstacles to getting political messages on the air. Furthermore these pro-management mouthpieces should explain why KPFA can't stream KPFB and have more new programming that has been continuously blocked by the entrenched crew at KPFA. A number of programmers have suggesed over many years that KPFB be used to put on programming that is not able to get on KPFA and have been giving the run around.
Finally we should deal with the incompetence of previous manager Jim Bennett in losing our signal in Sacramento. Instead of fighting the efforts of a commerical radio station to block our signal for their station Bennett sat on his hands. We could have filed complaints and made it difficult if not impossible for them to take our signal but this was not on Bennett's mind. He was grappling with lawsuits at the station and unable to manage properly. This cost the station hundreds of thousands of dollars. The "concerned listeners" and their crew of course were quite happy with Bennett.

kpfb is streamed 24/7 right here:
http://kpfa.org/listen/

Bennett was not the GM when the commercial station in Sacramento began to obscure kpfa's signal, it was Roy Campanella II.

Concerned Listeners formed in 2006 to organize for the 2006 election, Jim Bennett stopped being GM in late 2005.

Used to be a reporter of any merit or worth would investigate and research the facts before reporting, whether or not the reporter liked the outcome of that work. Even if bias towards one side or the other was intended, it was done with all the facts at hand.

Henry doesn't much even bother to research; he just finds an opinion he likes and runs with it, the facts themselves be damned.

Stop blaming Roy Campanella II for Jim Bennett's failures. The effort to take over the signal of KPFA in the Sacramento began under the Jim Bennett regime. Check FCC records if you doubt this. Apparently since Bennett is supporting Concerned Listeners we can disregard his actions while he was in charge. In addition to not fighting the loss of the signal in Sacramento, Bennett cost the station hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal costs due to his admitted lack of knowledge about employment law. He admitted a deposition that he did not know what the laws were concerning employee rights and discrimination.

Bennett didn't cost the station hundreds of thousands of dollars, frickin' Bernstein did. It was his misogynistic, brutish behavior that started the whole ball rolling. The man is a serial harrasser and intimidator of his underlings. Any sane place would have sent has ass packing years ago. His program is awful. He's never heard of any other issue except the Middle East, and his so-called journalism is little more than a photographic negative of Fox News. It's an echo chamber of opinion, half-truth and oafish propaganda. But somehow he remains with his Jim Jones like hold on his lemming supporters.

Concerned Listeners formed in 2006 to organize for the 2006 election, Jim Bennett stopped being GM in late 2005.
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CL just took over for KPFAForward. The name was changed to protect the guilty. CL is the current dismantler staff/management listener front group. Sherry Gendelman ran on KPFAForward and now runs on CL. Changing the name doesn't change the anti-listener/anti-transparency representation of these folks.

Neither CL or KPFAForward ever took a position on the Democracy Now! move to prime time, the Program Council or the Unpaid Staff Organization. Same hiding of their anti-democracy positions. I wonder what they tell their new recruits who seem to know nothing of any of this history???

Point is no one cares about this so-called history except for the People's Radio hard-liners. There's plenty of transparency, they're called publicly available tax forms. What PR wants is to snoop into worker's private information. No more, No less. As for the Program Council, look the Program Director makes programming decisions at every radio station in the known universe. That's the only way the place can run effectively and not like a loony bin. Unpaid staff organization, that's between them and management and none of the board's concern. Hey here's a novel concept PR, raise a goddamn dollar for the station if you're capable. How about bringing in a new listener? Tried that? Didn't think so.