Whipped Cream Difficulties

I was planning to steal a lyric from “Radio Free Europe” for this post title. Then I went to look up the actual lyrics, and found this; “complete babbling” seems like it fits just as well here.

By way of Big Jim, I found a rather interesting LA Weekly article on the latest goings-on at Pacifica Radio, about which I’ve written before. Some highlights:

On March 13, after weeks of rumors, Pacifica Radio’s board of directors voted to fire its executive director, Summer Reese, during what was essentially a conference call…
And so it was that Reese marched to the Pacifica national office in Berkeley on March 17, bolt cutters in hand, removed a padlock placed on the front doors over the weekend, and essentially occupied the building. When newly appointed interim executive director Margy Wilkinson showed up, Reese and 12 of her compatriots — including Reese’s mother, a longtime anti-war and civil rights activist — refused to let Wilkinson, her husband and two of her allies pass.

…

Pacifica’s New York station, WBAI, is even worse off, with too few listeners to register on the Arbitron rankings, and is all but bankrupt. Last year, most of the staff was laid off, including the entire news department.
Making matters worse, the federal government, via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is withholding Pacifica’s grant money, thanks to the network’s “failure to provide documentation” for a 2012 audit.

…

“We’re no longer a radio network, we’re a sad political glee club,” [Ian] Masters [a KPFK host – DB] says. “We desperately need adult supervision.”

…

Reese admits to having no Social Security number, saying she is legally exempt because of a “religious objection.” When asked her religion, she says only that she’s a Christian; when asked whether she pays income taxes, she says only, “I don’t think that’s relevant to the article.”

…

While KCRW holds two nine-day-long fund drives each year, KPFK holds a monthlong fund drive every three months — meaning one out of every three days is a pledge drive, days full of DVDs and nutritional supplements and get-rich-quick schemes such as the “Wealth Propulsion Challenge,” an online course that promotes “how to get rich holistically” — and quickly — via “subconscious reprogramming.”

…

Within a few months, Democracy Now! was privatized. In what may have been a reward for Goodman’s support of the revolution, she was handed complete ownership of the show. For free. In fact, they paid her to take it, handing Goodman a contract worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — and gave her an automatic 4 percent raise every year, regardless of the size of her listenership or the money she raised…
Today, Pacifica’s debts amount to roughly $3 million; $2 million of that is owed to Democracy Now!, which is also the name of an independent nonprofit run by Goodman.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 21st, 2014 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Clippings, Music, Radio. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.