Report on San Francisco Focus Group Meeting
by Josh Greenland
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Josh included comments from Maria's report on the same meeting

I also attended the San Francisco KPFA focus group meeting on Jan 27. I sat at Maria's table, actually.

TUC Radio wrote:

> Here is a brief report from the S.F. Focus group meeting - The bomb shell of the evening was that Ginny Berson stood up right at the beginning and declared that Larry Bensky had been given his talk show as of April.

Berson was there, according to Moran, to "give credibility" to the proceedings, and no, she would not answer any questions from the participants. After her brief opening remarks, she sat in back in the corner, behind and some distance away from the podium, for the whole meeting.

Moran ran the proceedings. The mike was at a podium. The room was on the ground floor of the women's building, was slightly cavernous with a stage that we didn't use, was drafty and somewhat cold (I wore a scarf), and was slightly echo-y but thankfully had better acoustics than the Ashkenaz.

In his opening remarks, Moran said that he worked for Stanford University, I think as a facilitator. He emphasized that he was not being paid for doing this for KPFA, and stated that he was willing to involve himself because the format laid down by management for these meetings was acceptable to him. He mentioned as an aside that not many people had shown up at the Walnut Creek focus meeting. (Good old "progressive", radio-signal-challenged central-eastern Contra Costa county :)

At 40 years old, I was probably in the youngest 3rd of the audience. It was mostly boomers AND OLDER. Many looked like old activists and counterculture people, and gave the impression of being relatively impecunious. Many could have been retired. The majority would probably be considered "what's Left" by Pat Scott and her followers. (I'll be honest that I was not happy that the crowd was so old and explicitly "alternative". It made me wonder if that is the only group really listening to KPFA (basically people who got old with KPFA since the 1950s and 60s), or the only group that really cares about the changes. But then, the meeting WAS on a Monday.)

Kiilu was there, as well as Dennis Bernstein. We were all given name tags to wear, but I didn't go around reading them.

There were something like 70-80 of us sitting at maybe 10 tables, to which we were randomly (??) pre-assigned by name. We were each given a form with 4 questions, I'm sure the same ones as in the report of a previous meeting (except maybe the Larry Bensky part of the 4th question?). We were to write our answers individually on our forms, and also come to a consensus at each table as to how we felt, have a spokesperson give a report at the mike and hand in the report, along with our individual responses. The meeting was supposed to run from 7-9pm, but started about 15 minutes late, due to people drifting in after 7.

> Now what we and Tomas Moran should all have done is walked out of the room since this does make the whole process into a farce.

People were already angry at the beginning, and broke into Moran's remarks a number of times. A number said the format of the meeting was intended to "keep us from talking to each other". (I noted out loud that this was very similar to the focus group method used by my corporate employer to do its employee survey.)

> Adding one level of farcity is that there was a question added to the questionnaire: What did we think about the Larry Bensky Show? One person aptly responded that he had not heard it yet. Quite a few people said they did not think it was such a good idea, a few others liked it though.

One person during the oral report period said that Larry Bensky needed to learn to show respect to callers. (I clapped loudly at this.)

> A great African American woman, former local board member,said as we walked away after the meeting: "We are all nice people, we participated in our humiliation."

Of course the other choice was to not show up at all. At least this allowed for some input, a chance to see how Pacifica/KPFA would run something like this, and a chance for those who showed up to meet one another.

> That's how I myself feel - [...]

We sat at our tables, wrote out our responses to the four questions, and then had spirited discussions with to get our consensus responses to the four questions. My table (6, 7 or 8) had an age spread representative of the whole group, with two people perhaps in their early thirties. One of these two had moved to the Bay Area recently and felt KPFA was very progressive (and was probably one of the few in the hall who liked the astrology show). The rest of us were more familiar with KPFA's programming. Our table came up with one of the most sharply critical reports, in an evening where EVERY table's report was highly critical.

During the consensus period, Jeff Blankfort walked around to a couple of tables and talked to people. When he got to our table, Tomas Moran sidled up and bent his head and listed a bit to what Jeff was trying to say to us. He then told Jeff that he could not be talking to people at other tables. Jeff sat down at "his own" table, and Moran looked like a bit of a bully.

When it came time to give presentations, Moran said we'd have 3 minutes, and that he would signal when 1 minute remained. He did this consistently and clearly, but unobtrusively. If anyone went over their time, it wasn't by much. Moran may have let a number of overages go by, and as I recall didn't tell anyone they were over.

Some tables elected to have multiple reports. These tables seemed more likely to have gay and lesbian people who criticized the present lack of program diversity. A number of the reports, group and individual, were quite angry.

> [...] although it did warm my heart that almost everybody had serious criticism of Pacifica, KPFA, programming and sturcture.
> Maria

I didn't take notes, and feel no need to remember what was said specifically during the reports. The reports were very similar between tables. And VIRTUALLY ALL OF THEM COULD HAVE COME STRAIGHT FROM TRAFFIC ON THE FREEPACIFICA/PROGRESSIVE-RADIO LISTS. There would have been NO SURPRISES for anyone who's been on these lists for a while. Perhaps one difference in emphasis was a little more discussion of arts programming.

It was good to see Maria, who I remember from her participation in the Free KPFA meetings, and to have met Jeff Blankfort. It was a damn good turnout for a Monday night and probably would have gotten a larger, on average younger group if it had been on ANY other weeknight (Monday meetings SUCK!) I went home immediately afterwards and went straight to bed....

- Josh-- End --