Nicole Sawaya quits [sigh]
by Matthew Lasar Dec 13 2007 - 8:40am
LLFCC is dismayed and embarrassed to report that Nicole Sawaya has resigned, following a very brief tenure as Executive Director of the Pacifica radio network.
What happened? Without going into all the details, Sawaya found the level of internecine dysfunction at Pacifica overwhelming, and fled her job.
LLFCC will not conceal its chagrin at this development. The author of this blog [Lasar's] had high hopes for Sawaya, but they were obviously too high. Her quick departure reminds us that there are no saviors, no simple solutions to complex problems. And Pacifica radio is always a complex problem.
LLFCC also regrets not acknowledging something important when Sawaya accepted the position: despite the unfortunate denouement, the Pacifica National Board (PNB) deserves great credit for having unanimously approved her hiring. Sawaya made it clear during her interviews that she wanted to do radio, not spend her days putting out office politics fires. That the board responded favorably to this stance gives LLFCC hope, even now.
Pacifica remains in a perilous situation, however. It is pursuing an ambitious experiment in media democracy in a hostile external environment, with inadequate resources, and without the help of significant forces that rhetorically supported the Pacifica Revolution of 2001 but are now nowhere to be found.
And the organization is besieged by zealots whose vision of Pacifica boils down to a public access network that doles out air time to whoever screams the loudest at a four hour meeting.
But there are new voices entering into this debate at the various Pacifica stations; tough, smart people, not afraid of the mob. And somewhere out there is a creative, young someone, a leader who sees this merry mess as a opportunity. Without holding out for yet another savior, LLFCC hopes that person arrives soon.
end.
###
This is my response to Matthew Lasar's blog, posted at
http://www.lasarletter.net/drupal/node/525
12/15/07
Sawaya's Leaving Confirms Denial About Mismanagement.
By Gregory Wonderwheel
I appreciate Matthew Lasar's wealth of information and insight into
radio, however even Lasar has a degree of denial when it comes to
Pacifica that is difficult to fathom. I can only surmise that it is
because he feels so very close to Pacifica, since it is our own
foibles that are hardest to see.
Lasar praised the PNB for hiring Sawaya and then added: "Sawaya made
it clear during her interviews that she wanted to do radio, not spend
her days putting out office politics fires. That the board responded
favorably to this stance gives LLFCC hope, even now."
I don't see it that way. If Sawaya really "made it clear" that she
wanted "to do radio" instead of organizational management, then she
was the wrong person for the job from the get-go and should not have
been hired. If she wanted to do radio she should have applied for
program director or for the KPFA Sunday morning slot.
The failing of the PNB has consistently been denial of the outrageous
problems with management at all five stations. The PNB suffers the
illusion that the executive director and station managers, but most
importantly the ED, should be a radio people. This denial by the PNB
has led to the hiring of the wrong people to lead Pacifica beginning
with the hiring of Dan Coughlin, who despite his few good points led
Pacifica into the badlands of management protecting managers who were
accused of theft, sexual harassment, coverups of physical violence at
stations, etc.
The EDs and station managers at Pacifica have failed or done poorly
in communicating and working with the elected governing bodies.
Instead of working collaboratively and educating the PNB and the LABS
with the management problems at the stations and the national office,
the managers have covered up and glossed over the issues or worked
actively together to conceal the issues.
The crappy atmosphere at Pacifica flows from the top. And the ED is
the top of management. When the ED protects the station managers
instead of telling them to do their jobs fairly and evenhandedly,
then nothing can be accomplished to change the atmosphere at the
stations. The PNB needed to tell Sawaya, and any new ED, that "you
are not being hired 'to do radio', but to clean up the organization's
management practices."
But just as importantly, the PNB is the top of governance, and the
PNB is so much in denial of the problems at the stations that they
are running the foundation into bankruptcy. The PNB's denial is what
allowed them to hire Sawaya who, according to Lasar, was full of
denial about the need to put out the prairie fires of mismanagement
throughout Pacifica.
The directors on the PNB should be ashamed of themselves, first for
hiring Sawaya (if she indeed said that she wanted "to do radio"
instead of put out fires) but most importantly for their own
disorganization and buffoonery in office. You know there is a vein of
denial running deep and wide when they would rather argue over the
agenda than deal with the mismanagement at the stations where funds
and equipment are purloined, staff and volunteers are physically
threatened and battered, people are sexually harassed, and there is
no accountability with managers being allowed to go unevaluated (just
to mention a few of the concerns). As another example, the PNB has
allowed the CFO to continue when he should have been fired before his
first year was up for failing to provide adequate, useful, and
intelligible information about the corporation finances and has
misled the PNB about the financial difficulties at WBAI that now
threaten to sink the whole Pacifica ship.
In 1999 we saw a Board of Directors who were insulated and self
selecting running the foundation into the ground. We saw four
constituencies: Governing board, management, staff and listeners. At
that time, the listeners were out of the equation except for
providing funding. The Board became hostile to staff and the
listeners came to the rescue. We created an organizational structure
that allows the staff and listeners to democratically elect the
governing boards who in turn will select the management. However, now
at most stations, there are cliques of management and staff who have
allied together to keep out any listener influence that would
threaten the status quo of current employment of those staff and
managers. This unholy alliance is supported by listeners on all the
governing boards, including the PNB, who are jeopardizing the very
existence of Pacifica, rather than dealing with the real problems of
management and staff at the stations.
All along, those listeners who are not close to the stations'
political fires only hear what is on the air. From this, they either
decide everything is fine because they like the programming, or that
everything is hopeless because ths same poor programs continue. In
either case, the listeners are not informed enough about what is
going on to make them informed enough to vote on real issues. When
real issues are presented to the listeners, the management with the
support of the PNB finds one way or another to shut it down or
neutralize it in favor of the status quo, once again choosing denial
over dealing with fires.
So I say, a happy good-bye to Sawaya, who apparently was in denial
about what is needed, and I say to the Pacifica PNB, get your act
together and your heads out of your rear-ends of denial and hire an
ED who isn't interested in "doing radio" but who is interested in
managing a multi-million dollar national nonprofit corporation by
applying best practices and fair and honest policies and procedures.
P.S. re Lasar's "the mob" comment. Lasar's comment, regarding "the
mob" is another example demonstrating his denial. "The mob" to watch
out for is not the listeners who are clammoring for democracy, but
the station insiders who Lasar supports such as KPFA's "Concerned
LiIstener" [sic] faction and WBAI's JUC faction, who are doing whatever
thay can to undermine the democratic governance and maintain staff
and station status quo. Anyone who challenges this mob is in for a
real eye-opener.
GW
