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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Bernstein could be heard on the air screaming "I'm afraid you're gonna hurt me, you're gonna shoot me!" during the broadcast, before station management was able to shut him down and start playing old archived programming. That night, 52 people were arrested outside the station for protesting Bernstein's removal. Since Tuesday night, the station has locked out all of its employees and is playing old taped programs on the air.
"This is like putting out a fire with gasoline. Some of us on the board were not in agreement with the policies," said one board member. "This would not be happening if they were not locking people out of the station. The board has consistently either done things which were not correct or in ways which were not well done."
Neither Berry nor Pacifica's national media spokesperson, Elan Fabbri, returned calls to Salon News for this story.
Berry is also being criticized for bringing race into a struggle that was already ugly enough. She has said publicly that her motive for reforming KPFA is to increase the diversity of KPFA's listeners and staff. While it is true that the three most recently fired staff are white men -- Bernstein, 30-year KPFA dean Larry Bensky and volunteer music programmer Robbie Osman -- those protesting their firing come in every color. The African-American program director and an African-American Morning Show host resigned earlier this year to protest recent management firings.
"What they wanted was to purge all the old lefties and get in some music shows and some mainstream, liberal shit," said J. Imani, a member of the local KPFA advisory board, who is African-American. "A week after Nicole was hired, they told her who to fire, and she wouldn't go for it. She took a stand against politically white-washing KPFA."
"Her manipulation of the race issue in this is an example of how unsuitable she is to run this organization," says Larry Bensky. "She's a megalomaniac who's uninterested in community-
Berry may be right to suggest that the audience of the Berkeley station is whiter than the region is. That's public radio's audience. But at KPFA, it's not for any lack of programming about minority issues. KPFA could instantly gain a more diverse audience by converting its format to 94.1 Jams, of course. But Berry's opponents say race is only one benchmark for diversity, and that losing KPFA's unique political voice -- eccentric and oppositional as it may be -- would lead to a different kind of homogeneity, one that's equally disturbing.
Those who've followed Pacifica Radio in the last 15 years can be forgiven for thinking they've read this story before. The Pacifica network and its five big-city member stations have been power-
KPFA, the Pacifica flagship station, was founded in 1946 by Lewis Hill. It quickly emerged as a bastion of free speech (perhaps, now, ironically), voicing openly leftist views at the height of the McCarthy era. In the early 1960s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the FBI investigated Pacifica programming for "subversion," citing the broadcasts of Bertolt Brecht, W.E.B. DuBois and others as evidence.
The Pacifica Foundation was established later to support the Berkeley station, and spread its model to other cities. But as the central administration grew, and tried to exert control over its member stations, there have been many fights. A long roster of station managers as well as central Pacifica administrators have come and gone trying to impose order on the unruly member stations, especially KPFA. They have mostly failed.
