by Alex Steinberg
Sun, Apr 27, 2025 9:02AM
A Los Angeles lawyer Jan Goodman who sued Pacifica in court lost the suit and then through the “New Day” group manipulated to change the court ruling that affirmed the votes of Pacifica staff. The KPFA and Pacifica management are now announcing the new bylaws before the court has agreed with their manipulated “settlement”
New Day Hijacking of Pacifica & The Lies Of KPFA & Pacifica Management
Alex Steinberg, Report to the WBAI LSB, April 9, 2025
In order to understand what is happening today in Pacifica we need a little bit of historical context. I will start with the adoption of Pacifica’s new bylaws in 2002 that for the first time allowed listeners and staff to vote for who represents them on the Board of Directors and created Local Station Boards that provided some input for listeners and staff to influence programming, a performance review and hiring of local management and work on a budget in partnership with local management.
At the time of the new bylaws in 2004 WBAI had over 20,000 member subscribers and KPFA had approximately 28,000.
As of the last election in 2024 WBAI had 6,766 members and KPFA 14,936 members. ( The figures for the other stations were WPFW: 7,218 members, KPFK: 11,451 members, KPFT: 3,647 members.)
This huge drop in listeners’ subscribers in the past two decades was matched by a huge drop in listeners and to our revenues at each of the Pacifica stations.
There are many reasons for this drop both structural and managerial that I will not go into but what it did to Pacifica internal political life was begin a long process of a zero-sum blame game. The stations on the West Coast, particularly KPFA, whose subscriber base and revenue was also dropping precipitously, but not as precipitously as WBAI, began scapegoating WBAI for Pacifica’s problems.
Many battles within Pacifica ensued in this zero-sum game where there are no winners. One historic event was the illegal shutdown of WBAI on October 7, 2019 by a minority group of the Board of Directors together with the then Executive Director. We were able to reverse that in court and brought WBAI back on the air a month later in November. However the combination of legal bills and WBAI being unable to raise funds for more than a month cost Pacifica somewhere between $500,000 – $1,000,000.
And the scapegoating of WBAI continued and those who were behind the illegal shutdown of WBAI decided on another plan of attack. They would change the bylaws so that the democratic governance system that came into being in 2002 would be replaced with a far more centralized and top-down structure in which the autonomy of each radio station would be eliminated and create a new Board of Directors with a new set of rules that would defacto guarantee the Board would always be dominated by the KPFA Directors and their allies.
So they forced a bylaws referendum on us in 2020 when we had barely recovered from the events of 2019. That referendum was soundly defeated by a vote of both listeners and staff.
But the people behind that referendum, largely the same crowd that supported the shutdown of WBAI, were persistent and forced yet another referendum on us in 2021. That was the referendum backed by a group calling themselves New Day Pacifica. The nominal leader of New Day Pacifica was Jan Goodman, an attorney and a member of the Pacifica National Board from KPFK in Los Angeles. Ms. Goodman was also prominent in the shutdown of WBAI in 2019, being one of its supporters and meeting with the Executive Director and Pacifica’s attorney at the time with a group of Directors and behind the backs of the rest of the PNB.
The New Day Pacifica group had lots of money to finance their campaign through a list of contacts they gathered in an illicit manner. They were also guilty of numerous violations of the fair campaign provisions during the balloting for the referendum. When the votes were counted, they were able to convince about 55% of the listeners to support their bylaws rewrite. However, thanks especially to the solid opposition among staff at WBAI and WPFW they lost the vote among staff. WBAI, no doubt recalling the events of 2019 during which all WBAI paid staff were fired, voted 131 to 1 against the New Day rewrite of the bylaws. (WBAI listeners voted by a margin of 93% against the bylaws.) WPFW staff voted by a margin of 90% against the New Day bylaws, Because the referendum had a different impact on staff and listeners the referendum had to be approved by both classes of members in order to be approved. Since it was defeated in the staff election the National Elections Supervisor declared the Referendum to have been defeated. I was the Chair of the PNB when that referendum happened and was very active in the campaign to defeat it.
That should have been the end of the matter, but Ms. Goodman decided that no matter what the Elections Supervisor had declared, the New Day Referendum had won and she was suddenly the Vice Chair of Pacifica. In order to prevent Ms. Goodman and New Day from doing any damage to Pacifica by proclaiming that they won the referendum the Pacifica Attorney, Arthur Schwartz, went to court to enjoin New Day from continuing their destructive actions.
The case was finally heard and after discovery motions were completed a judgement was issued on April 23, 2023. The ruling from Judge Tavelman stated that,
“… Pacifica’s Motion for Summary Judgment/Adjudication on its first cause of action for Declaratory Relief is GRANTED, the Court concludes that a parallel vote was needed. “
That should have been the end of the matter again.
But a year later Ms. Goodman came up with the novel theory that the Referendum actually won because the staff vote at WBAI was fraudulent. She managed to file a cross complaint with the court making that claim. Her argument was not based on any evidence but expressed the opinion that the vote must have been fraudulent because it was otherwise not credible that 99% of WBAI staff had voted against the referendum. In fact, it was perfectly credible once you understand this history and how profoundly the WBAI staff despised the New Day Referendum. In any case the time to adjudicate allegations of fraud during the balloting would have been during the balloting when the National Elections Supervisor could adjudicate such disputes. In fact many disputes were adjudicated by the National Elections Supervisor during the balloting. Such an allegation made 3 years after the election was certified and a year after a summary judgement was issued should never have been entertained but the Pacifica National Board took it seriously in 2024. Some members of the PNB proposed that there should be a settlement of the case through negotiations between Ms. Goodman and Pacifica. When this attempt to replace Pacifica’s bylaws through the back door was placed before the entire PNB, it was met with outrage and promptly withdrawn.
Now let’s skip ahead to 2025 and the current PNB. In January a new PNB was seated that had a large majority of supporters of the New Day bylaws. They decided to bring back the settlement agreement that failed to gain a majority the previous year. In order to make that happen they first had to remove Pacifica’s legal counsel, Arthur Schwartz, who was strongly opposed to caving in to the demands of Ms. Goodman and New Day, especially since Pacifica had obtained a summary judgment against New Day. So the PNB majority removed the counsel who had been arguing the case since 2021 and substituted for him a hand-picked attorney who had no history with Pacifica but who would do what he was asked to do on behalf of the PNB majority.
All this was sprung on the PNB at a closed meeting on March 13 and we were forced to vote on a so-called mediation between Pacifica and New Day. We are not allowed to publicize who voted for and who voted against the proposed mediation. The mediation was in fact fraudulent because the side nominally representing Pacifica was not in reality opposed to the side representing New Day and refused to defend Pacifica’s arguments in the legal case. Those of us on the PNB opposed to this agreement tried to send a letter to the mediator alerting him to the fact that he may be participating in a charade meant to deceive the court. But we were not given the contact information for the mediator. We then requested that the Executive Director forward a letter from us to the mediator but she did respond to our request.
The following week, at another secret meeting of the PNB, the results of the mediation were announced, and surprise, surprise, Pacifica agreed to New Day’s demands that a version of the New Day bylaws should be adopted. The new bylaws that were agreed to in the settlement were for the most part the rewrite of the Pacifica bylaws proposed by New Day in the 2021 Referendum, but also included a few bylaw changes that were neither part of the original New Day bylaws nor the original Pacifica bylaws. This new set of bylaws were arrived at through a previously unknown mechanism of a half a dozen people meeting behind closed doors and imposing their will on the 45.000 members of Pacifica.
The settlement was then announced as if it were a done deal. There was a court hearing on the matter on Tuesday, April 8, but the Pacifica Executive Director treated the court hearing as a largely superfluous formality and went ahead and issued a Press Release proclaiming the New Day Bylaws are now in effect on the weekend prior to the court hearing.
Those of us opposed to this unlawful and unethical deal had hardly any time to prepare. A brief was filed with the court but was rejected by the court due to a technical error so we were not able to argue our case. There was in fact no hearing on April 8, just the filing of the proposal for the settlement. The Judge signed the papers on April 10 but left room for arguments to be heard against acceptance of the settlement. A further hearing on the matter has been scheduled for July 3. A small group is currently working on getting a hearing prior to that date so that the Judge is made aware that there is opposition to the settlement.
Others can speak about how undemocratic the new bylaws are but I want to alert you to the fact that the ED and Pacifica’s Officers are trying to establish a fait acomplis by claiming the bylaws are already in effect. A news release issued on the Pacifica.org website claimed that new bylaws are in effect even prior to the hearing on April 8. R. Paul Martin, the WBAI Treasurer, was told at a meeting of the National Finance Committee that he is no longer a member of that committee because the new bylaws do not allow LSB treasurers to be on the committee.
If you see an analogy to the way the PNB aligned New Day majority is behaving with Trump and Musk you are not wrong. They are tearing down whatever is left of democracy and input from listeners in Pacifica in the same manner that Trump and Musk are destroying our democratic rights and killing all the institutions that protect the public good. Even before imposing the new bylaws this PNB made it clear they want no input from the LSB or from committees. They have shut down virtually all the committees where listener members can participate such as the Programming and Elections Committees. They took away the right of the LSB to select candidates for General Manager. And they are as arrogant as Musk and Trump in their conviction that they can do whatever they want, regardless of its legality, with complete impunity.
We can and will resist this takeover.
Thank you.
Alex Steinberg,
Listener Representative from WBAI to the Pacifica National Board, member of the WBAI Local Station Board, former Chair of the Pacifica National Board