Another Perspective on the Goings-On at KPFA

Berkeley Daily Planet
Edition Date: Friday, August 19, 2005


Commentary: Coup Crystallizes Inside KPFA — Again? By Marc Sapir

A powerful minority of the KPFA staff is intent upon ousting General Manager Roy Campanella II, on the job less than a year. The last manager, Gus Newport, resigned after nine months in the position due to difficulties in working with the factionalized staff.


Meanwhile, before Campanella became manager, and despite helping pay off the Pacifica Network’s national deficit left in the wake of the Mary Francis Berry take-over debacle, the station’s salaried staff was near doubled to 42 full-time employees. Expenditures are beyond income despite expanded fundraising efforts. Inevitably any general manager will have to make salaried staff cuts, increasing tensions.

The effort to force out Campanella is led by a core group of paid unionized staff and includes key department heads. In June the dissident group presented a petition of no confidence with 78 signers (from about 300 staff) to the Local Station Board. Later, eight women in the group publicly claimed sexual harassment by Campanella. Since Aug. 12, the dissidents have aired their side of the controversy repeatedly. A San Francisco Chronicle article covered their filing with the state, quoting two managers who say they were harassed. An Aug. 15 Daily Planet article reported that the Local Station Board (LSB) had voted 15 to 5 not to fire Campanella, and quoted morning show co-host Phillip Maldari that the LSB was jeopardizing the station by not taking action.

KPFA staff’s filing harassment charges with the state seems unprecedented given that the accusation against Campanella is mainly that he invited staff members on a one on one basis to share free pairs of tickets he regularly receives to newly released film screenings. These free pairs of tickets, according to Campanella, come to him regularly because of his past work as an independent film producer and director. The tickets can’t be given away so he’s always asking people around him if they want to share the tickets to new films.

Campanella says he’s offered the tickets to many people at KPFA, including men and not so young women. But apparently some of the young female staff interpreted the offer quite differently. Others offered tickets have not complained.

According to the complainants, when they confronted Campanella directly about his “inappropriate” behavior, he became irate and used their complaints as a basis for on the job retaliation. Campanella categorically denies those latter allegations. They appear to involve individual interpretations of tone of voice and body language rather than documented retaliatory behavior. Some in the dissident group, such as recently elected shop steward Sasha Lilley, have gone outside the station spreading the word on the street that their boss, Campanella, is a sexual harasser. On Aug. 16, in a rhetorical escalation Phillip Maldari accused me of supporting a “sexual predator” when I asked him if taking a sexual harassment issue to the state and federal governments might not also jeopardize KPFA.

Many activist listeners who have been trying to assure more community input into reforming some of the antiquated internal processes at the station have a contrary view of what is going on as they watch the staff uprising unfold. These listeners view the effort as an attempt by some staff to block broader community input and open discussion of the station’s direction.

According to Joe Wanzala, a member of the Local Station Board, "Roy is listening to people outside as well as within the staff. We feel the community needs to be engaged in expanding and reforming the station because of the way all kinds of diversity and progressive ideas are under attack in the corporate media and in the Government dominated environment. Campanella, whether or not he’s the perfect fit here, is at least trying to be open minded."

An example of how much the dissenters have stymied Campanella in trying to evaluate the station’s problems is that despite being the general manager he has been unable to meet with many individuals on staff because they or their department heads resist it.

“How can a news director be allowed to prevent the general manager from talking with news staff?" asks boardmember and chair of its News Subcommittee, Chandra Hauptman. "But this problem has deeper roots than Campanella,” she insists. “For example, the News department leaders won’t even permit a daily News Department staff meeting to discuss and prioritize the main stories of the day. This has been going on for years. Staff are just handed individual assignments by the department managers. Talk about lack of collectivity and open processes. Even the corporate media is more collaborative than that."

The outcome of this crisis is far from certain. Campanella retains the support of the majority of the Local Station Board. Yet, the station remains ungovernable, largely under the control of the large dissident group and their strategy of non-cooperation with their boss. The mutiny threatens station function. And the dissidents believe they can and must run the station by locking out substantial elements of the left movement on the board and in the Bay Area, while building their own support base. With one sidedness in air coverage most listeners are baffled.

KPFA listener activist groups on the other hand may end up solidifying behind a long smoldering view that many of the permanent staff have little respect for the activist community and care mainly for their own security. It is easy to imagine that a failure to find a workable middle ground might lead to a decline rather than expansion in KPFA’s quality, listener base and influence as the premier alternative radio station in the region, regardless of who comes out the victor.

Certainly this station cannot operate without a high quality and diverse staff. Nor can it expand into broader ethnic and working class communities without integrating the sometimes raw critiques of its most dedicated listeners. Balancing the concerns of the regular staff with those of the politically active community and the need to resist the growing attacks on democracy in the U.S. is a huge challenge. Assuring changes in KPFA’s internal culture and creating a culture of openness, dialogue and conflict resolution would seem a prerequisite to other needed changes. But the going is very slow, as the concerted and personal attacks on Campanella seem to indicate.