KPFA FANS SEEK STATION CHIEF'S OUSTER
From Staff Reports

BERKELEY -- In a continuation of hostilities at Berkeley's listener-sponsored KPFA radio, staffers and supporters gathered outside the station's offices Tuesday to present the parent company's executive director a "notice of termination."

   The move followed demonstrations, sleep-ins and a two-hour period of dead air at the station in recent days after the nonprofit Pacifica Foundation, which owns KPFA, fired a third popular programmer in as many months.

   The letter to executive director Lynn Chadwick, signed by activists -- including the United Farm Workers' Dolores Huerta -- and KPFA staffers, was to be brought inside the station's offices at 1929 Martin Luther King Jr. Way following a rousing protest outside.  Tuesday's event was attended by more than 50 people, including City Council members and fired staffers, and was broadcast on Flashpoint, the station's 5 p.m. news show.

   "We are writing to notify you that you have forfeited your right to lead KPFA and Pacifica due to your promotion of censorship, your failure to uphold the principles that have guided KPFA and Pacifica for the past 50 years, your abuse of and disrespect for KPFA's staff and listeners, and for your inappropriate and irresponsible mishandling of the grave crisis that confronts KPFA," the notice read in part.

   Sixteen members of Pacifica local advisory boards from three radio stations -- KPFA, KPFK in Los Angeles and WBAI in New York -- have retained Oakland attorney Dan Siegel.  Siegel wrote another letter to Pacifica threatening to file a lawsuit by Friday if the company does not agree to discuss with local board members the recent changes in by-laws preventing them from voting to select members of the national board, a move Siegel called "the least democratic option imaginable" in the letter.

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