Listeners Besiege Berkeley Station After Staff Arrests

Hundreds of protesters, saying they were fighting to save free speech at the Berkeley radio station whose history is entwined with the city’s protest movement, rallied outside KPFA-FM on Wednesday, a day after 53 people were arrested during a sit-in at the station.

Four months into a battle over programming, personnel and on-air dissent, KPFA staff members Wednesday found themselves locked out of their building and normal programming replaced with archival tapes.

“We received no explanation,” said Aileen Alfandary, news co-director at the station for nearly 20 years. “I’m afraid this could be the end not only of KPFA but of the Pacifica network as a whole.”

Elan Fabbri, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit Pacifica Foundation, which owns KPFA--the nation’s oldest public radio station--and four other stations, including KPFK-FM (90.7) in Los Angeles, said the place is in the grips of an insurrection by its staff.

“It is a mutiny,” Fabbri said. “We have not locked out the staff, we have placed them on indefinite administrative leave until this calms down. This confrontation has been violent from day one. We’ve received death threats, we have been followed. We feel very unsafe and threatened.”

Founded by pacifists after World War II, the network has always prided itself on offering listeners a left-leaning alternative to commercial and mainstream public radio. It has weathered many labor disputes, but no one can remember a conflict as ugly as the one unfolding in Berkeley.

Pacifica’s critics say that at stake is nothing less than the soul of an institution that made its reputation covering antiwar protests in the ‘60s and the revolutionary views of such leaders as Che Guevara, and broadcasting offbeat fare rarely heard on mainstream radio stations.

The fight began in April, the month when KPFA marked its 50th anniversary, after the dismissal of station manager Nicole Sawaya. The station says it simply chose not to renew her contract; she says she was fired for standing up to Pacifica on programming and other issues.

The night Sawaya was dismissed, shots were fired through the windows of Pacifica’s national headquarters, next door to KPFA. The police are still investigating that incident. Next, two veteran hosts were fired for mentioning Sawaya’s dismissal on the air. Pacifica placed armed guards in the station’s lobby. Demonstrations were held, and protesters arrested.

“I believe it is a tragedy for public radio in this country,” Sawaya said. “To think that the station that was the mother of all public broadcasting in this country could be taken over the way it has, with no attempt at sincere dialogue with the community, the staff, the donors. It is a tragedy.”

Events took another twist Tuesday night. Shocked listeners heard radio host Dan Bernstein screaming as security guards dragged him from his broadcasting booth just after he finished airing his public affairs program, “Flashpoints.” Bernstein was placed on administrative leave for an on-air report about the conflict with the Pacifica Foundation in what management said was a violation of its orders.

Bernstein refused to leave the newsroom, contending that he had merely played the tape of a news conference given by 14 protesters arraigned on civil disobedience charges for demonstrating at an earlier protest against the station’s management.

“One of our staff members violated an on-air policy and ran amok in the station, took over the air and caused problems,” Fabbri said of the incident. “We ended up having to take off our regular programming and switch to an alternate broadcast station.”

As word of Bernstein’s suspension spread, about 200 people descended on KPFA, shouting slogans and accusing the Pacifica Foundation of violating the free speech rights of its own broadcasters and ignoring the wishes of the station’s listeners.

“I was arrested in the newsroom I have worked in for 20 years on charges of trespassing,” Alfandary said.

Bernstein and 52 others, including several staff members, were arrested, booked at the Berkeley police station and released, Capt. Bobby Miller said.

The foundation took over broadcasting, playing old tapes, which enraged station supporters.

“This is a corporate takeover of our community independent radio station,” said Andrea Buffa, with San Francisco’s Media Alliance, a nonprofit organization that monitors the media and has been coordinating protests at the station.

Station critics picketed Pacifica and KPFA and held a rally outside the buildings Wednesday. Fabbri said that crowds broke down the station’s door and that Pacifica employees fled to a location she said she did not feel safe disclosing. She said Pacifica has requested federal mediation to defuse the crisis.

“I think we have a very distinct culture clash,” she said. “We have the staff that believes they should make the decision about who hires and fires management, and they believe that the community should decide who hires and fires staff. You can’t run a radio station that way.”

Longtime staff members say Pacifica’s board wants to give the quirky radio station a more mainstream image to attract corporate donations. The station exists largely on individual donations and grants.

The roots of the dispute go back at least five years, to a discussion launched by Pacifica management about how to change programming to appeal to more listeners, said Berkeley civil rights attorney Dan Siegel. Siegel represents a coalition of 16 members of local boards from three of Pacifica’s five stations.

The programming discussion, Siegel said, deteriorated into labor disputes and other struggles at Pacifica stations.

In February 1996, leftist dissidents whose programs had been canceled took over the broadcast briefly at KPFK’s San Fernando Valley studio, airing their complaints for five minutes against Pacifica management before the station manager pulled the plug, replacing the live show with a taped promo of a women’s show. It was the most serious public display of dissent within Pacifica before the Berkeley demonstrations this summer.

Then, in February of this year, the national board that runs Pacifica voted to stop allowing local advisory boards from each station to elect members to the national board. Throughout the network’s history, locally elected national board members have formed the majority on the national panel.

The removal of local members from the national board fanned fears among Berkeley listeners that what has always been “this big, eclectic stew of different shows on KPFA . . . was going to become just like National Public Radio,” Siegel said.

Siegel, a student protester at Berkeley in the ‘60s, was one of the hundreds who descended on the station Tuesday night after Bernstein was yanked off the air.

“It is just ironic,” he said. “This is the sort of event that KPFA would have been covering in the ‘60s, only now it was happening at KPFA. It literally looked like one of the campus building takeovers at Berkeley in the ‘60s.”