TRANSCRIPT
PACIFICA BOARD OF DIRECTORS |
| JUNE MAKELA | Because of the transition of staff, of executive staff, the decision was made by David, or recommended to the chair and myself by David, and we agreed that it didn't make sense to do it at that point. We were in the middle of the Solomon. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | I understand that. I am just saying that I don't want to hear that again next year. So, I heard it two years in a row. Two years is enough I don't want to hear it again. |
| JUNE MAKELA | Right. Yes. No, and I think David is very clear, and he's done a lot of work. He's surveyed through networks. He's interviewed countless firms. I am not sure, I didn't get the details, I think they were not prepared to choose one by this meeting. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | Well then I guess the thing to say is to maybe get the board to authorize the executive committee to make a decision if the time comes beyond which we wouldn't be able to hire somebody for next year. |
| JUNE MAKELA | I mean if they are ready we can do it in a conference call of the Finance Committee if you want us to do it you know. |
| DR. BERRY | And you don't even need the authorization to do it. The executive committee acts for the board between meetings in matters that need to be taken up. But we should inform the board, and if anyone objects which of course the committee won't do it. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | This has nothing against Mike Krycler. I know he has done an excellent job. |
| DR. BERRY | Just a second, Pete is saying something. |
| PETE BRAMSON | I would hope that on the next finance call we just scheduled for in 10 days or at some point, that we could have a serious update on the accounting firm. That would lend clarity to that issue for 10 days. |
| DR. BERRY | Then if we get it and then we get a recommendation from them, then the executive committee would just... |
| JUNE MAKELA | Do it. We could do it in a matter of months. |
| DR. BERRY | So we may do it before the next meeting. |
| JUNE MAKELA | I think we can. We can decide right now that we will do it. |
| DR. BERRY | And then we'll have the person in place and then next year we won't hear the same thing. We'll hear something else. All right and further discussion of the Finance Committee? Yes. |
| KEN FORD | Just as a small matter. I think given the hard work that has been done by a lot of the units, that when they are running a surplus, that some form of verbal recognition should be in the water for them. To show appreciation to them by the board for the hard work that they did. |
| JUNE MAKELA | That's why I mentioned it, but I'm sorry. I am very under the weather this morning so I am not sounding very enthusiastic. I meant to sound very enthusiastic. |
| DR. BERRY | I will repeat the commendation of the general managers, the staff and volunteers at KPFK, WPFW and hope that they continue to doing a good job. |
| JUNE MAKELA | I think you should repeat the commendation. |
| DR. BERRY | I will repeat the commendation of the general managers, the staff and volunteers of KPFK, WPFW and KPFA who have generally been of service, and hopefully will continue to do so. Could we raise the question? All those in favor of approving the commendation and the report, indicate by saying aye. |
| GROUP | Aye. |
| DR. BERRY | Opposed? So ordered. Frank, could you give the report of the Program Standards and Practice committee? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Yes, thank you. The principal subject we took up yesterday was the issue of the Larry Bensky program, "Living Room," which was referred to us by the Finance Committee for deliberations. Our discussion recognized the value of Larry Bensky's programming to Pacifica and affirmed that the show "Living Room" serves a valuable role in the national programming offering. It was observed that the show meets the needs of some stations rather better than it meets the needs of others. And we recommended to the Finance Committee that this program be continued. We charged the National Office with negotiating with Larry a reformatting and/or rescheduling of the program to make it more useful to all the stations. And the Administrative Council is charged with recommending means of funding the program as the...as any new budget results from the rescheduling and reformatting of the program. That was subsequently reported out to the Finance Committee. We used that also to introduce the discussion, which was only introduced, into Pacifica's "Must Carry" rule. Not to be confused with the FCC "Must Carry" rule. There has been over the years controversy about the implementation of the "Must Carry" rule, what its requirements precisely are, what its origination was, and what compliance consists of, and what penalties should be required for noncompliance, if any. So, this has to be deferred for a longer conversation. We have scheduled a meeting of the Program Committee for the 21st of October at 11:00 a.m. and we will introduce...by which time I will provide members of the committee with a history that was prepared for me by the national staff of the "Must Carry" rule. |
| We will also discuss progress of the LABs in performing community ascertainment. I would just simply mention that the stations do seem to be making progress. One station is excused from this activity for a period of time not yet to be determined because of the lack of an LAB. However the remaining stations, the other stations do indicate a good date beginning on this, we have a first receipt, the first report, in writing from KPFT, which I want to circulate to all the LABs as kind of a model for reporting. These materials will be distributed to the Program Committee members before our telephone meeting on the 21st. | |
| DR. BERRY | Hasn't KPFK reconstituted its LAB so maybe we can get started with that. |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Well then I'll circulate all these materials to you. |
| DR. BERRY | Okay. Thank you very much. Can I get a motion to accept the Program Standards Committee report? |
| ANDREA CISCO | So moved. |
| DOROTHY NASATIR | I have a question. Did your report indicate that we were going to have a report back on the Bensky issue before or by the next phone call? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | I'm sorry, you're absolutely right. In fact, the period of time is ten days. So we should have that report then say next, a week from tomorrow, or Tuesday, so that would be in sufficient time, it will be sufficient, yes. |
| DR. BERRY | Will somebody second the motion? |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | I'll second. |
| DR. BERRY | Okay. Roberta seconded. Who made it? Andrea. Okay. |
| DOROTHY NASATIR | I wanted to ask, what is the progress on the community ascertainment effort? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Well, there are different levels of progress. Some are farther along than others, but all of them have done pretty substantial planning. KPFT has done a lot of work on assessing different sources of information, everything from call-in lines and so on. WBAI has initiated a program of listening to the programs and making non-judgmental descriptions of their content, and how many station breaks they do and how much forward promotion if any, they do, you know, but that kind of thing. There are plans at various places for everything ranging from focus groups to town hall meetings to questionnaires to the subscribership. Now that you're ready to get up and running on this, I'll provide you with all that material. Should I send it to both of you? I sent some to Ralph by e-mail a few weeks ago. |
| DOROTHY NASATIR | I would appreciate that because I'm on the ascertainment committee. |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Sure. You've got it. |
| DR. BERRY | Okay. Yes, Roberta. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | Once the report back about Bensky is made and the attempts to reformat to make this more useful to all stations, what is the implication of that? That all stations will then carry it? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Well that's a reasonable induction. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | I mean I've always thought it was a reasonable induction, but it hasn't happened. So I'm just curious if this is going to take it a step further. I mean was there a commitment made on the part of other stations to carry it? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Well, I don't think that they commit. The commitment was with me expressly at yesterday's meeting. I must say the reformatting may not go in that direction. It may be decided that that's not possible. One of the principal problems is the three-hour time difference and scheduling difficulty. For instance, one option may be to redesign it as a California and perhaps Texas program, perhaps of greater length or lesser length, or some days, or you know...that's up for grabs. The idea is to bring in a proposal, maintain this program. That with a new budget for it, and for the managers and Administrative Council who, after all may want to retain this program, to also propose a way of meeting its costs. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | I have to apologize for spacing out a little bit when you got to the "Must Carry" part. |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | About the "Must Carry"? I just simply said that you introduced that issue in conjunction with the Bensky discussion. And that the staff has prepared a chronology of the issue along with its different history of attempts to fund the national programming. And that I will duplicate and distribute that to the members of the committee in advance of our telephone conversation. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | Could you just distribute that to the entire board? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | In that instance, I guess I'll ask the national staff to distribute it to the entire board. |
| LYNN CHADWICK | We'd be thrilled to. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | I'd love to see that. |
| DR. BERRY | Now we need to lay to rest the "Must Carry" piece. I am tired of the "Must Carry" issue. My understanding when I came on this board was that there was a "Must Carry" rule. |
| LYNN CHADWICK | There is. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | There is. |
| DR. BERRY | And that there are stations that do not carry things because they don't want to. Which seemed to me to be like my nephew who refuses to eat his cereal because he does not want to. And he therefore eats bacon and eggs. Which he makes himself. [laughter] |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | I'll bet he does! [laughter] |
| DR. BERRY | So is there a "Must Carry" rule or is there not a "Must Carry" rule? |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | There is. |
| DR. BERRY | There is a "Must Carry" rule? First, Lynn you wanted to say something. |
| LYNN CHADWICK | I think there is a rule. However, there are a lot of questions about the parameters of the rule. For example, does it mean that you have to carry it during special events, fundraising, holidays? Those are the kinds of questions. |
| DR. BERRY | Cheryl has her hand up. |
| CHERYL F. BRADFORD | On this Bensky issue, I tried to get some sense of what some of the issues were and it did seem that in this particular case the carriage of the program live, that the conflict was about how it could be carried. So it kind of suggested to me that maybe there's a process for implementing "Must Carry" that takes into consideration the towns, the stations. I'm sorry. |
| DR. BERRY | Pete were you trying to say something? |
| PETE BRAMSON | Yeah. As I am unfamiliar with this particular rule, is there any one individual who could tell me specifically . . . |
| DR. BERRY | I'm going to tell you what I think it is. I was told that if three stations out of five agreed that a program should exist, a national program, that the stations would all carry it. Did I state it? |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | You did state it right. |
| DR. BERRY | That's what I was told. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | And would you like another rationale? |
| PETE BRAMSON | No. Not yet. So to that end, three of five... "Must Carry". Is there any defined timeslot? |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | Not yet. |
| PETE BRAMSON | So they can run it at any time, and it would then allow them to be within the "Must Carry", and as I understand it, three of five defines it as five of five. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | Right. |
| PETE BRAMSON | And how is the determination made, at what council or what structure says that this has been offered and that there's been a vote, and it's three of five. Is that at the Administrative Council? |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | Yes. |
| PETE BRAMSON | And how are shows brought up to the, addressed at that level? |
| DR. BERRY | Staff. |
| PETE BRAMSON | So Suzy Stixit's show gets addressed by staff and it gets kicked up to Administrative Council. |
| LYNN CHADWICK | Right. |
| PETE BRAMSON | Are all shows brought up? |
| DR. BERRY | Just through the national. You're talking about . . . |
| JUNE MAKELA | National programs for national funding. |
| PETE BRAMSON | So Suzie's show wouldn't go up because it's localized. |
| DR. BERRY | Right. Right. It has nothing to do with it. |
| PETE BRAMSON | It is only nationalized, correct? |
| DR. BERRY | Right. |
| PETE BRAMSON | How many national programs are we dealing with? What's the world here? |
| GROUP | Three. |
| PETE BRAMSON | So this dialogue is around three programs. |
| DR. BERRY | Mark wanted to say something. |
| MARK SCHUBB | I think there is a disconnect between the information the managers have been operating under, and the information the board has been operating under. Not to say everyone's right. But we have not just been not following policy. We've been following policy. The three out of five "Must Carry" rule was adopted around national special coverage of the originals. |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | That's not correct. That is not correct. |
| MARK SCHUBB | May I? Excuse me. I was, there were no national programs other than the news, which was a "Must Carry" when I became manager. And then I was told there was a policy that when we were polled on breaking coverage or hearings of extraordin-- |
| ROBERTA BROOKS | Maybe it started that way. It might be it started that way. |
| MARK SCHUBB | If three out of five agreed that we should do some national special coverage, then we would all carry it live. I was in every meeting we ever had to design and create the national program fund and national programs that we have, Bensky, Living Room, Jerry Brown. There was always an explicit, absolutely explicit statement that these were not "Must Carry" programs because they were not being optimized for all five markets. The National Program Director said they were not must carries. |
| FEMALE SPEAKER | Who said this? |
| MARK SCHUBB | The National Program Director said they were not must carries. And Pat Scott was in that room as well in all those meetings, and if you ask any manager who was there, they'll tell you the same thing was true. What happened was there was supposed to be a policy that if four out of five voted to fund something, it would get funded. And then it was not a "Must Carry", but the assumption was these four stations would want it. WBAI, regardless of whether we should be carrying that show or not, was in compliance with what we were told were the agreements about how these shows were going to be created and done. I agree with the sentiment that if we're going to invest in a national production, it should be carried on all five stations, but it does require creating programs that will actually not hurt the schedules of each of the five stations. So just for information purposes, we have had a completely different set of meetings, a completely different conversation with the Administrative Council, and every manager will confirm that it was said that the national programs were not must carries, and that if there weren't four votes to fund each time, the programs wouldn't continue. And actually, what's happened is because Bensky's program has not enough votes to continue funding and yet the show was continued anyway for some ridiculous reason. |
| DR. BERRY | Mark, let's find your committee. So what's the answer to this? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Well, that's what we're meaning to talk about. |
| DR. BERRY | No. What is the answer to Mark's restriction of what the "Must Carry" policy is? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | I had, that's part of the difficulty of the determination. There are disagreements as to how it developed and what precisely the words mean. |
| DR. BERRY | But did the board actually vote to have the "Must Carry" rule where if we have five stations who need to carry something, that it would be carried? Did that happen? |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Yes. That I believe is the case. |
| DR. BERRY | That did happen. |
| FRANK MILLSPAUGH | Now, let me say, though, he's correct in the context of the conversations principally around specials at that point, and this is a live...the show in question is a live call-in show. It's a live, three-hour show. That means that three o'clock may be a great time in the Berkeley area. It's actually at one, but let's hypothetically say, but that would be six o'clock in Washington and in New York, and would compete with the news. Now obviously, you wouldn't want to do that. But there is the problem that one o'clock is a great time to broadcast it probably. If we had it at one o'clock in New York we might broadcast it then. If we had it at two o'clock. By the time it gets on to four o'clock, we're running into other live, on-the-air shows. I think that's fair enough. Then there's the problem of preemption. The Executive Director has asserted that preemption can only be done with the Executive Director's prior permission. That may be a perfectly legitimate thing to do. I don't believe that that has ever had the force of board approval, and probably does not need to receive it. But I was asked by the Executive Director to hold this discussion in our committee to clarify and reaffirm or make recommendations for changes. |
| DR. BERRY | Basically the board has a policy on record, if I understand this correctly,
which says that if three out of five stations want to carry something it
must be carried. Doesn't say what time it must be carried. But in point
of fact, the board policy has not been followed.
And that not only has it not been followed, there are all kinds of ambiguities about who said what to whom and when did it happen, and how did we do it, and who's supposed to do what, and that's what I'm hearing. If that is the case, the only thing that's clear is that the policy hasn't been followed. So the question is, do we keep the policy or do we change it? Now you can have policies and if you don't insist that they are followed, then as far as I'm concerned, they're not worth the paper they're written on. Unless you just don't know that they're not being followed. And then once you find out, you tell people they have to. But it sounds to me like the shortest way to deal with this issue is to ask for the Program Committee to make a recommendation to the board at a date certain. In fact, make a recommendation to the executive committee before the next board meeting as to what we should do. Should we reiterate our policy? Should we change the policy to some other policy? Or what should we do? And all these issues that are being discussed here can be put into whatever the discussion is to be sorted out by the committee. We can't sort them out here; it would take us forever, and we'd never get them sorted out. And of course, people can take into account obvious things, like we have to figure out the timing and the ways to make sure--but this is not a new problem. There are networks all over this country that have shows that are all over the country. And somebody must have sat down and figured out somewhere how you figure out what time to have a show in different parts of the country. I am sure this problem has been addressed before. And so somebody ought to be able to sit down and think through this problem and solve it at Pacifica. Which makes me believe that there are people in Pacifica who simply didn't want the problem solved, which is what happens with other issues. |
| DR. BERRY | And they wanted to do whatever they wanted to do, whoever the whomever's are, for perfectly good reasons. And that the thing got all gummed up and is not enforced because those who were supposed to enforce it didn't enforce it. So here we are. It may not even be a good policy. But if we could ask you to make a recommendation. |
| DR. BERRY | Yes? |
| KEN FORD | Not to make the process too onerous, I would also ask that you come back with a set of procedures. You know, the comment was that even though you have the "Must Carry" rule, there are times when it must be preempted for special events, special programming. We need to have a dedicated line of policy or procedures by which that could be instituted because I know we've had problems at WPFW we've got, "Okay, it's... do that.". Then at the last minute, I was superseded by a higher authority, which screwed up the whole weekend for setting up our fundraising drive. So we need to have that spelled out exactly such that we can know exactly what to do on the local level. |
| DR. BERRY | But it has to be policy, and not details. We're writing constitutions. We're not writing statutes. So keep that in mind. They have to have some flexibility, but the broad parameters can be . . . okay. With that, is there any further discussion of this report? I call the question. All in favor of agreeing to this report with the expectations we have, the burdens we have placed on Frank for various reports, indicate by saying Aye. |
| GROUP | Aye. |
| DR. BERRY | Opposed? So ordered. The Board Governance and Structure Committee apparently does not have...does it have a report? Does your task force have a report? The Board Governance and Structure Committee met on the phone and the task force met too. Pete? |
| PETE BRAMSON | Not knowing what the status of the Loretta Ross is, I would ask that
maybe Dorothy and I can co-present our findings? If that's okay with you?
This is a very quick, fairly cursory overview of what has been determined
out of the New Jersey meetings as the Process Review Sub-Committee. The
mission of the subcommittee was to review design and proposed processes
and procedures that we hope will insure that communication input is available
to all members of the layers of the Pacifica family. It was not the mission
to go into specific detail, but to set up a process whereby things are,
there's a flow of good communication, and everybody understands what the
procedures are. Another issue that came out of one of our conference calls
was that some processes and procedures are scattered throughout many sorts
of documents. We would also like to undertake the task to gather the documents
together into one accessible document. What we have kind of put together
or made a suggestion of was for two flow charts that would be useful for
everyone at Pacifica.
The first flow chart would illustrate organizational relationships, in particular, a flow chart that shows who reports to whom within the Pacifica structure. We have kind of put together a draft of that, not ready to go to production. Thank you for your info on that, by the way. Then the second flow chart would be to illustrate how programming decisions are made. As had been exampled by our previous dialogue. The recommendation was to check with the programming committee of the governing board to see if they already have a flow chart. We have not gotten to that process yet. The item, came out of the New Jersey meeting. There was a recommendation from our subcommittee to take a look at if there are processes that are developed, that each Pacifica layer receive training and written guidelines for the processes for clarity and fairness, consistency and sustainability. So what we are in the process of doing is putting together some flow charts, going through kind of organizational relationships, though we're not yet to the point where we are ready for production but we'd like to state for the record that we will be by the next meeting. Does that sound fair? Is there anything you'd like to add? |