[KFCF Friends] DEMOCRACY NOW! Changes

[subs-admin@kfcf.org]

Democracy Now! is returning to the entire Pacifica Network this Monday. KFCF
will broadcast the one-hour show at 6 AM and 9 AM for one week in order to
allow stations around the country to retune their satellite receivers from
the KFCF channel, (which has been distributing DN! during its' exile from
Pacifica) to the Pacifica satellite channel.

Beginning Jan. 14th, DN!  will only be heard at 9 AM on KFCF.  Democracy
Now! is only being produced as a one hour show effective Jan 7th.  The 6 AM
feed will be discontinued on the KFCF satellite channel and on KFCF as
affiliates should have retuned their satellite receivers to the Pacifica
channel.

KFCF is proud to have helped keep Democracy Now! on the air around the
country since last August and looks forward to a better, stronger Democracy
Now! in the future and a restoration of Pacifica's stations and network
under  the guidance of the interim Pacifica National Board.

 Here's more info:
-Rych

Goodman AND Gonzalez Return Monday
Source: Lyn Gerry, 1/4
Amy Goodman has agreed to immediately resume airing Democracy Now! on the
main Pacifica satellite uplink (as opposed to the Ku-band system used by
KFCF to carry the show). Juan Gonzalez, the former co-host who resigned to
start the Pacifica Campaign and aid greatly in the boycott and direct
actions, will join her.

This is the good news. The bad news is that the station managers, some of
whom are currently in open revolt against the new national board, may very
well choose not to throw the right switch and put it onto their own
airwaves. For example, KPFK's own gagmeister Mark Schubb has been
complaining on-air that outside forces are trying to influence his program
decisions, and also that he has a problem with any show from a non-union
shop airing on what is (nominally, anyway) a unionized station.

This AFTRA reference is probably another good example of Pacifica
management's seemingly unending distortion and fact omission when telling
their side of the truth. In fact, it is rather odd that Schubb, who
ironically enough comes from the Screen Actors Guild, is suddenly so
pro-union. He certainly wasn't when Pat Scott was union-busting the UE shop
at KPFK in the mid-90s.

For Immediate Release from DN!:

January 4, 2002

Democracy Now! Returns from Exile in Bold Move at Pacifica Radio Network

The Award-Winning Radio Show That Broadcast Blocks from Ground Zero even as
it was banned
from the airwaves of its parent organization, returns to Pacifica radio
stations
throughout the United States on Monday, Jan. 7.

NEW YORK (January 4)-- Democracy Now!, the award-winning national radio show
that was banned in
August from the progressive Pacifica Radio Network returns to the Pacifica
airwaves on Monday, bringing
to the general public the voices of some of the harshest critics of the "war
on terrorism."

On Monday, Goodman will be reunited on -air with former co-host Juan
Gonzalez for the first time in a year, when
Gonzalez resigned to found a national grassroots campaign to reclaim the
Pacifica stations. Guests will also include filmmaker
Michael Moore.

Democracy Now! was banished from Pacifica as part of the Pacifica Radio
crisis, which many community radio
activists say was an attempted corporate takeover of the only progressive
radio network in the United
States. The crisis moved toward resolution last month when three lawsuits
against the Pacifica board of
directors were settled, and the board of directors was reconstituted. The
new board majority is determined
to return the 50+ year old listener-sponsored network to its peace and
social justice mission. One of the first
moves of the new board was to vote at their first board meeting, a
conference call on December 29,
2001, to bring back Democracy Now!

Democracy Now! is the flagship national program of the Pacifica Radio
Network, and its host Amy Goodman has
won numerous journalism awards. But, as part of the ongoing conflict within
the Pacifica Radio Network,
Goodman was forced off the airwaves at most Pacifica stations and joined the
ranks of dozens of journalists
who were censored or banned by Pacifica.

Democracy Now!'s host and producers were physically and verbally harassed
out of the studios of WBAI in New
York City when that station was "re-programmed" by Pacifica management and
board leaders and subsequently
banned from four of the five Pacifica Radio stations:  WBAI in New York,
WPFW in Washington, DC,
KPFK in Los Angeles and KPFT in Houston.

But rather than stop producing the show, Democracy Now! has expanded. In
addition to broadcasting on Pacifica
Station KPFA in Berkeley and KFCF, Fresno , the program aired on community
radio stations around the country and has
begun broadcasting a daily national TV show which airs on Free Speech
TV--channel 9415 of dish network
(Satellite TV)-- and public access cable tv stations around the country.

Since the attacks of September 11, Democracy Now! has provided some of the
most incisive programming on
war and terrorism to be found anywhere on radio or television. On December
10, 2001, Democracy Now!
broke the news of a University of New Hampshire professor's study
documenting that close to 4,000
civilians have died in Afghanistan as a result of the U.S. bombing.

Other recent guests on the show have included Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani
journalist and author of 'Taliban:
Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia' , discussing the
oil-slicked road to war in Afghanistan,
Tahmeena Faryal, spokeswoman for Revolutionary Association of the Women of
Afghanistan (RAWA),
Arundhati Roy, activist and author of The God of Small Things, Howard Zinn,
Professor Emeritus of History at Boston University, author of A People's
History of the United States, and Noam Chomsky, author and linguist at MIT.

Pacifica Radio has been embroiled in controversy since 1999, when the
Network's managers shut down KPFA of
Berkeley. That shut down caused the largest protests in Berkeley since the
Vietnam War. In December 2000,
Pacifica "re-programmed" its New York City station, WBAI, by firing and
banning long-time programmers
and eviscerating the station's progressive political programming. Last
August, Pacifica suspended Amy
Goodman and removed Democracy Now! from the Pacifica airwaves.

But on December 12, 2001, it was announced that plaintiffs who sued the
Network reached a settlement with the
Pacifica board of directors that could end years of strife at Pacifica. The
settlement created a new interim board of directors that draws its members
from Pacifica's local advisory boards, its current board majority, and its
board minority. Now there is hope among Pacifica Radio activists that the
crisis is coming to an end and they will have a chance to rebuild the
progressive radio network. Among the issues yet to be resolved are the
return of the fired and banned producers at network-wide and resolution of
the news stringers strike against Pacifica Network News.

For more information about Democracy Now!, see http// www.democracynow.org.

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