Save KPFA benefit

Save KPFA Benefit Concert

When: Friday, August 06 2010 @ 08:00 PM - - 10:00PM

Where: Humanist Hall
390 27th St (near Broadway)
Oakland, CA 94612

AN URGENT MESSAGE
From:
Matthew Hallinan
Conn Hallinan

Dear Fellow Progressive,

We are sorry to bring you some sad news. Our long-time companion and voice of the Left, KPFA, is in serious danger of disappearing from Northern California's airwaves. In these hard times, the station faces many challenges, but the most serious threat to its survival comes from the crisis within the larger Pacifica Network. While part of the problem comes from growning defecits at WBAI and other sister stations, and part of it is due to competition with the Internet and a changing media environment, frankly, most of the damage is self-inflicted.

A recent S.F. Chronicle article by the well known labor reporter Randy Shaw outlining this story is enclosed.

Since the establishment of elected Local Station Boards (LSB) in 2002, the Pacifica stations have been embroiled in a series of destructive
struggles for the control of these boards. Most of KPFA's listeners are neither organized nor familiar with the problems of managing these stations. Most of KPFA's listeners do not vote in the Board elections. As a consequence, positions of power on the Board have fallen to small groups of activists who have neither connection with nor concern for the larger progressive community.

The LSBs are bitterly polarized, and the poisonous atmosphere has affected the working relations inside the stations. Where these stations once broadcast a broad spectrum of progressive voices, they have increasingly come to express the views of a narrower slice of our community. As the message has narrowed, membership has declined, and an ever-smaller circle of supporters determines the outcomes of LSB elections.

At a time when corporate and conservative consolidation over the media is at an all-time high, Pacifica is caught in a death spiral: Listener support is down 27%; net assets have decreased by 38%; the financial deficit now totals almost three million dollars.

KPFA is currently the most viable station in the system, the only one that has a listener base sufficient to support a transition to the realities of the new media world.

But KPFA may not make it. The current majority (by one vote) on the KPFA LSB is bent on following the same course that has produced disaster throughout the system. Over the issue of a misplaced check, they engineered the firing of one of the best station managers and fundraisers the station has had in decades.


(For the rest of this extremely important letter, please see Conn or Matthew Hallinan)