Peace & Freedom's KPFA candidate endorsements; KPFA's poor coverage of UC strike

Peace & Freedom Party has made its endorsements of candidates for KPFA's Local Station Board, and of course, none are of the reactionary current LSB majority, Concerned Listeners. They have endorsed Jaime Cader, Jim Curtis, Henry Norr, Richard Phelps
Andrea Prichett , Gerald Sanders, Stan Woods, Steve Zeltzer
More information may be found at:
http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/about-us/resolutions-and-statements/565-pfp-endorses-candidates-in-kpfa-election

The following is a personal obsevation and not a position of Peace & Freedom Party.
KPFA is in such a moribund state that its coverage of the 9/24/09 UC statewide labor/student strike was miniscule and NONE OF IT WAS LIVE. This writer can easily remember that LIVE COVERAGE of the 1964 Free Speech Movement's sit-in at Sproul Hall by KPFA, including the screaming students as they were thrown down the stairs by the National Guard and County Sheriffs, called to action by Democratic Governor Pat Brown, father of current Democratic Attorney General Jerry Brown, and the LIVE COVERAGE of the protests against the US war against Vietnam and against the draft, which took place almost daily in Berkeley as students could be drafted before 1973, and the war escalated between 1964 and 1971. It was this LIVE COVERAGE that built the solid financial support for KPFA.

This statewide UC strike was planned many weeks ago. On KPFA, we heard 4 lines of news briefs at noon, 3 good speeches from the noon rally at UC Berkeley shortly after 4 p.m., when Hard Knock Radio, a young workingclass people's program was pre-empted for a program on Charles Darwin, and they sandwiched in these 3 speeches; a brief snippet of one of these speeches at the beginning of Flashpoints at 5 p.m., and about 5 minutes for UC Berkeley's protest and another 10 minutes or so for UCLA and other UC campus protests during the 6 p.m. evening news. THERE WAS NO LIVE COVERAGE TO THE BEST OF MY KNOWLEDGE.

WHAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DONE: Since UC Berkeley is only 2 blocks or so from the KPFA station and UC San Francisco at Parnassus and Mission Bay (the medical school) and Hastings Law School of San Francisco are just across the Bay from Berkeley, there should have been:
1. Live Noontime coverage of the entire UC Berkeley rally
2. Live coverage of the march of thousands of people on the UC Berkeley campus and in the streets of Berkeley.
3. Live coverage of the entire UCLA rally re-broadcast on KPFA during the hour that is Hard Knock radio.
4. Live reports from all 10 UC campuses starting at 7 a.m. when the pickets were first put up at all the campuses, with live interviews of as many people as possible who walked the picketlines. With cell phones, this is much easier than the 1960s and 1970s, and we had live street coverage then too.
THIS WAS A MILESTONE EVENT THAT KPFA AND KPFK SHOULD HAVE COVERED LIVE ALL DAY LONG. That is how community radio builds support, reporting the news from the community in which it exists. ALL POLITICS ARE LOCAL, and education is a primary example. Without a strong free, public educational system from pre-school through university, no society can call itself a democracy or an industrialized society.

The paltry coverage of the statewide UC strike on KPFA today, 9/24/09, was so shameful that if the Concerned Listeners are again allowed to prevail on the Local Station Board, KPFA is dead. If that happens, we will have to start a new radio station, not an easy task.