During the show we invited you, our listeners, to call in to our station to give us your comments and feedback on our work and our broadcasts live on air with us.
Once again, KPFK is holding an urgent fund drive, hoping to overcome a serious and ongoing financial crisis that affects the whole Pacifica Network of independent broadcasting stations. Since the financial crisis of 2008 and with a smaller listener base due largely to the rise of social media, it has proven ever harder to raise the money needed to sustain an independent radio station that depends entirely on listeners like you to support its valuable work. Though increasingly people are tending to get their news via social media platforms, that only increases the unique value of broadcast radio. Unlike the self-selecting silos of Twitter or Facebook, KPFK’s signal, which covers almost all of Southern California, can reach a broad and diverse audience and not merely the already converted.
Now, even as Israel has announced that it intends to intensify its horrific bombardment of Gaza and increase the number of airstrikes in preparation for the long-awaited and dreaded ground invasion, the need for independent media voices could not be more urgent. Mainstream media and even the White House have been parroting and amplifying Israeli propaganda, erasing Palestinian lives and deaths, ignoring the 75-year history of Palestine’s ongoing Nakba, Israel’s apartheid regime and its violent project of ethnic cleansing, dispossession and settler colonialism. Without this context, the current phase of Israel’s violent war on Palestine cannot be understood but all that CNN or MSNBC can do is ask their few Palestinian guests to condemn Palestinian violence as their ticket to utter a few soundbites.
Today, we also bring you the recorded voices of Palestinians, expressing points of view that have largely been ignored by the mainstream media. Despite the fact that we must urgently fundraise to keep this show and this station on the air, we cannot forget or ignore the massacre unfolding in Gaza right now. The Pacifica Network’s refusal to take corporate funding and advertising allows it to continue bringing you and listeners here in SoCal and across the globe insightful analysis and critical perspectives, not the voices of power and privilege. But that means we desperately need your financial support. Without it, KPFK will need to lay off its skeleton paid staff and cut programs like ours in order to replace us with programs with a more mainstream appeal. And that will diminish the diversity of voices and perspectives that Pacifica has always succeeded in airing. Ultimately, this invaluable radio station, which has covered civil rights, US wars, union struggles, and LGBTQ issues for over 60 years, may go bankrupt and fall silent. This is the emergency we face.
If we are to survive and continue to bring you vital and insightful coverage of the region, we have to show that we have an extensive and supportive base of listeners. Your donations are a crucial way to indicate that support. If you have enjoyed and benefited from our programming over the years, whether by listening live to our broadcast shows or hearing them later on our podcasts, please consider donating to KPFK’s essential work in the next weeks or at any time online at kpfk.org.
If you can donate $75 or more, KPFK and SWANA Region Radio will send you a copy of the incarcerated Egyptian revolutionary activist and essayist Alaa Abd el-Fattah’s brilliant collection of essays, You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. We discussed this book and Alaa’s political imprisonment right here on SWANA Region Radio. Please, in donating, mention that you value SWANA Region Radio: it will help us stay on air! You can do this online by following the Pledge button at kpfk.org and entering in the show selection box your support for SWANA Region Radio, or on air by calling in at 818-985-5735.
