L-A Radio: Report..KPFK 'On The Brink'

Pacifica Radio’s KPFK 90.7 FM is on the brink of extinction, and longtime staffers are seeing their hours – and their paychecks – cut in half.

“It’s a disaster,” says Sonali Kolhatkar, a longtime KPFK staffer who hosts the daily show “Uprising.” “Morale has been horribly low. We went from this amazingly buoyant place to this horribly depressing place.”

The Pasadena Weekly reports staffers attribute the in morale is due to poor management and a board of directors who are more interested in lining their pockets and pushing radical political and social agendas than they are in creating great radio or raising funds for the station.

Pacifica Radio is a network of five independently operated, listener-supported radio stations known for their liberal views, including Los Angeles-based KPFK, Berkeley’s KPFA, and New York’s WBAI. It was founded in 1946 by conscientious objectors from World War II, but over the last few years the democratic and open-minded principles on which the station was founded have been turned on their head, and sinking ratings, internal disputes, loss of grant money, constant fund drives, and financial missteps have brought a once beloved resource to the breaking point.

Sonali Kalhatkar

Kolhatkar and her colleague Ian Masters, host of the show “Background Briefing,” say that the root of Pacifica’s problems begins and ends with the board of directors and with General Manager Leslie Radford. When Kolhatkar heard that Radford was coming in to replace the previous general manager, she says, “I knew this was the beginning of the end because I had seen how she operated. She has no radio experience. I knew things were going to get real bad.”

Kolhatkar says that when Radford announced the pay cuts and layoffs last month, employees were also told that they could apply for California’s Work Sharing Unemployment Insurance program, which allows for the payment of benefits to employees whose hours and wages have been reduced. In order for that to happen, KPFK needed to submit the required paperwork, which didn’t happen in time.

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