The following letter of concern (with minor grammatical corrections) was emailed to LA Weekly's Editor in Chief Laurie Ochoa prior to publication of Ella Taylor's article.
I'll respond to the actual article separately.
Thanks.
Steven Starr
Interim General Manager
KPFK-FM
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Subject: KPFK
Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 11:26:15 -0800
From: steven starr <sstarr@kpfk.org>
To: lochoa@laweekly.com, amittelstaedt@laweekly.com
Dear LA Weekly Editors,
I am writing to express my urgent concern that the LA Weekly is planning to run a hit piece on KPFK, rather than a thoughtful article that will educate your readers about some of the important issues regarding KPFK, Pacifica, and independent media.
Ella Taylor, the reporter you've assigned to this story, has interviewed an imbalanced list of sources, largely reflecting past managements' hostility to the current efforts, and has allowed only the most impoverished opportunity for current management to offer perspective. I ask you, is this what alternative, independent media has come to?
When I first received Ms. Taylor's narrow list of questions concerning Ron Wilkins' appearance on the Lawyer's Guild show, I answered her questions immediately, and invited her to broaden the discussion. Further, in an effort to support her inquiry, I invited Ms. Taylor numerous times over the last four weeks to visit KPFK, to get to know me, the staff, the changes that are underway here at the station. She repeatedly demurred, claiming 'deadline pressures'.
In that time period, the station has had a record breaking fund drive, a historic, network-wide "Save the KPFK Transmitter" fundraiser, and a spectrum of other initiatives that hold the promise of a positive future. KPFK's phone lines are now open, allowing unscreened calls for the first time in years. We are developing intense outreach efforts to bring community back into the station, forming programming collectives, building out remote broadcast facilities, etc.
One might imagine these are relevant facts to a story that's been researched for more than four weeks. But after four weeks of avoiding my entreaties to experience these things for herself, Ms. Taylor appeared at KPFK to research her story for the first time this past friday to interview two employees: one seeking employment elsewhere, and Marc
Cooper's ex-producer.
When she finally made her way to my office, she declared she had very little time, that her story was 'basically finished', and that she simply wanted to ask me a couple of follow up questions. My associate Andrea Buffa, former exec. director of Media Alliance, was in my office, and we both tried to engage Ms. Taylor in an informed discussion about developments at the station with no success.
Ms. Taylor asked why I'd not responded to the Ron Wilkins 'paint job' comment on the Lawyer's Guild show. I told her that I had, on the very next KPFK Report To The Listener, stating publicly that there was no room for personal attacks or hate speech on KPFK. Ms. Taylor said that in her view, I should have named Mr. Wilkins in that public statement. I indicated that had I'd been interested in naming names, I'd have mentioned escalatory on-air comments made by another programmer the following day, painting Lawyer's Guild Show participants as 'anti-semitic thugs'.
Ms. Taylor then asked how I could put someone as 'disreputable' as Mike Ruppert on the KPFK airwaves during the Fund Drive, offering his tape (Truth And Lies About 9/11) as a premium. She indicated that she'd not actually listened to the show. Fascinating. If she had, she'd have discovered that Mr. Ruppert was invited into a vigorous debate I'd organized with Norman Solomon of FAIR, who spent the entire show disputing Mr. Ruppert's journalistic methodology. His tape was then offered to our audience for them to form their own conclusions. Unlike Ms. Taylor, we have enough respect for our audience to give them both sides of the story.
Further, Ms. Taylor took no notes in the less than 30 minutes we spent together, with the singular exception of jotting down my phrase "Forget the LAB", in response to her repetitive query as to whether the Local Advisory Board was 'running' KPFK. With that, she again expressed her need to leave. So I hurriedly asked various members of the staff to drop everything, so they could spend a few moments alone with Ms. Taylor, in a last ditch effort to try and give her a broader view.
A very few members of my staff were granted brief interactions with Ms. Taylor, but then she left, avoiding an interview with Armando Gudiño, a new staff member, among others eager to speak with her. So I encouraged staffers to reach out to her over the weekend, but she's not interviewed them, despite their efforts to contact her.
She's not interviewed Esther Manilla, or Terry Guy (who's tried to contact her), both staff members here of long-standing. And she's avoided an interview with Michael Zinzun (who's been trying to contact her for weeks), a member of our Local Advisory Board.
And yes, perhaps they would challenge the picture Ms. Taylor plans to present of KPFK, as apparently Ms. Taylor prefers to limit her sources to former manager Marc Schubb, former paid host Marc Cooper, and a variety of staff members who support these two men's perspectives.
It is a shame that the LA Weekly is going to perpetuate the divisiveness of the Pacifica Radio battles rather than posing to its readers some of the questions that Pacifica will need to deal with in the future--how to include community input and participation without sacrificing professionalism; how to diversify our staffs and programming to reach out to communities that haven't been included in the Pacifica family; how to produce progressive programming that is politically and intellectually challenging rather than
predictible and boring.
In contrast to the policy of silence on internal issues of the prior administration of KPFK and Pacifica, we continue to engage more than 150,000 Southland listeners in ongoing, open line dialogue about the changes underway at the station, and the history of its recent struggles.
Our recent fund drive, which eclipsed all prior subscribership and fundraising totals by hundreds of thousands of dollars and thousands of returning subscribers, demonstrates the strong support of our listenership for these changes and their desire to be informed about the state of the station they support.
I've made mistakes as iGM of KPFK, and take responsibility for them, as indicated in my public comments at the National Board Meeting in Los Angeles last week (see below). No doubt KPFK has significant challenges in front of us, as well as significant promise. But the whole story is clearly not being told by the LA Weekly, and that is my reason for writing.
Despite all this, we continue to pursue a positive relationship with the LA Weekly, as it's quite clear to me that we are two progressive media outlets in a sea of reactionary voices. This past week, KPFK featured LA Weekly contributor Sarah Catania. This week, we've invited contributor Marc Haefele on the air. And despite his public disagreements with Pacifica, and his choice to leave the paid staff, LA Weekly columnist Marc Cooper's voice continues to be welcome on KPFK's airwaves via Radio Nation.
Again, of course we welcome constructive criticism, when it comes from a place of balance and integrity. But this is clearly a matter of contempt prior to investigation, and given the long history of collaboration between our two institutions, I urge you to investigate my concerns.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Steven Starr
KPFK Interim GM