The author of this article manages a rare combination of being condescendingly dismissive and proudly ignorant, concluding that democracy is a failed waste of time without bothering to learn the rather simple details of the process.

"KPFA is governed by a Local Station Board consisting of 25 people responsible for overseeing staff and management." Management oversight is general: advisory evaluation and budget oversight; participation in management changes. There is no direct LSB oversight of staff or programming. Programmers remain responsible for their shows and management for coordinating programming and other station functions.

"Some seats are reserved for staff, while others are open to anyone who can get 15 members to sign a petition." Well, no. Some seats are reserved for staff and some for listener members. The nomination threshold is low but actually getting elected is a bigger bar.

"Elections are held two out of every three years, for some reason." Delegate terms are three years and only half the board is up for election at one time to ensure continuity. Think the US senate, it's not that hard.

"The elections are conducted according to a complex version of instant-runoff voting that few people understand or care to master." It's not complex at all. Choose the candidates you support. If you support some more than others put them at the top of your list. Fill out the form. How the author knows what Pacifica members care to understand is beyond me.

Approvingly quoting Edwards-Tiekert, "Fifteen hours of airtime were dedicated to candidate forums for the local board. We spent more time covering KPFA's election than Afghanistan's and Iraq's elections combined." But probably not on coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq generally. One of the findings in new media, i.e. the internet, is that involving users builds loyalty. Building loyalty is hardly a waste of time for an organization totally dependent on member contributions.

Edwards-Tiekert also believes that the governance structure, "amplifies the angriest voices, distracts from running the station, and depresses everyone with trivial fights." He might take a look at Pacifica history. These have always been problems under any governance structure. More generally they are the price paid for creative openness. If you want a quiet and well oiled machine try totalitarianism.

Pacifica is a fair mirror of the American left in general and as such there will be continuing struggle over issues and strategy. But the underlying conflict since the new bylaws came into effect is over democracy itself. Much of the rhetoric involves accusations of racism, ulterior agendas, exclusion of or deference to 9/11 criticism, etc. But high pitch of the fights comes from the fact that some at each station wish to push out all other voices and end the experiment in democratic oversight (note Edwards-Tiekert calling for a "serious redraft of the bylaws").

Abandoning Democracy at Pacifica would be a real loss to the left. If we are serious in our rhetoric about bringing greater democracy to our country and the world we had better to learn to practice it ourselves.

KPFA and Pacifica have entirely too much democracy and too little common sense management. The quality of the programming (public affairs) has plumetted since Larry Bensky left. There is too much hip hop across all the programming, too many "shout outs", to much "knowhumsayin?".

I used to give hundreds of dollars a year. Now I'm not even bothering to subscribe anymore. Given that the pledge drives have expanded from 3 to 4-5 and are even longer in duration than before, you'd expect the amount of money raised would increase. Wrong. They used to clear about 900K in a two and a half week drive. Now they get 700k for over three weeks. And this is with worldwide internet coverage!

Valuable airtime is spent on trivial topics like the absurd Nadra Foster incident. The staff is at each others throats. The only bright spot is the non- hip hop music shows. Everything else is basically unlistenable.

Dump Dennis Bernstein, Thug JR, Hard Knock, and the Aztlanistas and I may think about subscribing again.

I agree completely with Eric Romsted. It's easy for Chris Thompson to snidely sit back and pretend to have all the answers--without actually proposing any. Democracy IS messy, but it is the only antidote to corruption, which seems to have been going on quite a lot at Pacifica recently. And for Thompson's information, WBAI WAS take over, in the last couple of years...not so much by a gang of sincere black nationalist thugs. That would be exaggerating one's opponents' arguments in order to ridicule (as seems to be Thompson's wont). No, what happened was that after we in the Save our Station movement won the station back from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the program manager and his cronies abused their control of the station and fended off any criticisms by playing the racialist card, Such real-life subtleties seem however to be tragically beyond the snotty, privileged, middle class disdain evinced by Thompson.
Tom Smith,
Brooklyn, NY

Under current management KPFA is close to becoming an anachronism because it's Web presence is negligible and rapidly becoming more so.

This is not trivial to those of us who depend on the otherwise little heard voices that KPFA puts on the air.

I agree that the Black Nationalism was secondary to tawdry opportunism, but Bernard White shamelessly accumulated a contingent of race-centered supporters and he and his cronies do indeed viciously attack critics as "racist" (see, for example http://www.takeforwardwbai.org/pacificakickingdown.html and http://www.takeforwardwbai.org/explosiverevelations.html )

I question the author's journalistic methods, particularly his "fact-finding" and choice of informants. Nothing that Brian Edwards-Tiekert says should be taken at face value, given his history of misleading the press. See, for example http://www.listenerforums.net/cgi-bin/issues_config.pl?noframes;read=153359 [Username: poster. Password: enternow]

At this moment, independent candidates are desperately trying to scare up money to get a mailing to WBAI voters before Nov. 5, in hopes of preventing a JUC/TakeBack majority which might tip the PNB balance sufficiently to let them back at the trough: details on front page, http://takeFORWARDwbai.org