The crisis with Pacifica's flagship national news show, Democracy Now!, has gotten worse. Pacifica management has now suspended Amy Goodman without pay. Incredibly, the Democracy Now! team found this out in the morning newspapers.
As you will remember, Amy and the Democracy Now! staff last Tuesday, August 14, moved production from Pacifica station WBAI in New York to an alternate studio in downtown Manhattan because they feared for their safety. At WBAI, they had been physically and verbally attacked by interim station manager Utrice Leid and her loyalists. When Pacifica senior management ignored repeated written requests that something be done about the atmosphere of intimidation and threats at the station, they felt they had no choice but to fashion some interim solution and find a safe and secure workplace.
But instead of taking steps to investigate the assault on Amy, and to ensure a violence- and harassment-free workplace, it is Amy and the Democracy Now! team that are now being disciplined by Pacifica Executive Director Bessie Wash. For more than a week, Pacifica management has refused to broadcast live editions of Democracy Now! that Amy and her staff have been producing from Downtown Community Television (DCTV). This is despite the fact that other shows at WBAI are produced from alternate sites and fed to the station by ISDN line.
Despite Pacifica's claims that Amy had failed to report to work, KPFA in Berkeley continues to air the live broadcasts of DN!, as do several affiliates around the country who were able to get the feed via phone, web and ISDN. But on the other four Pacifica stations in New York, Washington, Houston and Los Angeles, listeners were denied the show they have grown accustomed to hearing each morning.
For several days last week, Amy and DN! staffers Kris Abrams, Brad Simpson and Anthony Sloan engaged in marathon negotiations with their AFTRA union representative and Pacifica lawyers to defuse the crisis. Before they would return to WBAI, the DN! staff insisted minimally on firm written guarantees and actions by Pacifica to assure their safety. They also asked for an investigation of the Leid assault, an end to their banishment to a second-class production studio at WBAI, and unrestricted access with their own keys to the DN! offices. Clearly, if a station manager is allowed to physically assault an employee, as Leid did before eyewitnesses, and to deny basic quality working conditions, without any censure from management, it provides a greenlight for intimidation and attacks to continue.
Quite predictably, on Saturday one of the most virulent and violence-prone producers on WBAI, Clayton Riley, launched into an on-air tirade of threats that were clearly directed at Amy and the current crisis. "When you talk about the enemy, you find the enemy, you isolate the enemy and you destroy the enemy," said Riley. "These people have put themselves in the position of being the enemies. This conflict is not going to end, in my judgment and let me be clear about that, until the dissidents, until the so- called exile community is destroyed. Unequivocally."
This echoes Station Manager Utrice Leid's own statements, some of which on NPR's Morning Edition of June 21st: "I need you stalwart soldiers out there ... This is a call to arms. I told you, it's a war." Leid said that some of those who she says were sabotaging the station are "right here with us." Listen to the NPR report.
Source: http://www.savepacifica.net/
