May 22 2014
Uprising Expands to KPFA in Northern California!
Uprising is thrilled to announce that our program, which is produced at KPFK in Southern California, has now expanded to our sister station KPFA, based in Berkeley, with a signal area reaching San Francisco, Oakland, and more.
KPFA Press Release on the Announcement:
Pacifica Broadcaster Sonali Kolhatkar Joins KPFA Morning Drive Time Line-Up
May 22, 2014
KPFA is delighted to announce that award-winning Pacifica programmer Sonali Kolhatkar is bringing her hour-long program Uprising Radio to KPFA’s morning line up at 8 a.m. For the past two years, Sonali has served as a co-host of KPFA’s 7 a.m. drive-time program Up Front, with Brian Edwards-Tiekert. At the same time, she has produced Uprising Radio on our sister station KPFK in Los Angeles. KPFA is excited to now be able to offer our Northern and Central California audience a simulcast of her program on KPFK.
Sonali welcomed the move to KPFA, saying, ” I’m thrilled that Uprising is expanding to KPFA and will strive to live up to the high standards that Pacifica listeners expect from their beloved station!”
The interim general manager of KPFA and KPFK, Richard Pirodsky said, “This week’s broadcast of Uprising Radio on KPFA and KPFK during our spring on-air fund drive has produced spectacular results. We’re pleased to bring Sonali’s smart, progressive program to KPFA’s airwaves – and to know that listeners will respond during our fund drive”.
Uprising’s move to KPFA comes as Sonali has just completed a successful crowd funding campaign to expand the reach of her program to Free Speech TV. Starting in July, her program will be carried on nationwide television, in a project endorsed by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, as well as writers and activists including Chris Hedges, Robert McChesney, Arun Gupta, Antonia Juhasz, Erin Aubrey Kaplan, Blase Bonpane, Roberto Lovato, David Barsamian, Thom Hartmann, Mimi Kennedy, and Craig Aaron.
Sonali has broadcast Uprising Radio on KPFK since 2003. The Los Angeles Press Club nominated her three years in a row for Best Radio Anchor. Sonali has won numerous awards from community organizations such as the South Asian Network, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Koreatown Immigrant Workers Alliance. She is also a weekly columnist for Truthdig.com and the co-Director of the Afghan Women’s Mission, a US-based non-profit that works in solidarity with Afghan women activists. In 2006, after a visit to Afghanistan, she wrote the book Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (Seven Stories Press, 2006) with James Ingalls.
Sonali has appeared as a guest expert on numerous media outlets including MSNBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and Democracy Now. Her recent Tedx Talk was entitled “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Journalist: Or How I Found Meaning In My Life.” She has a Masters Degree in Astronomy, and lives in Southern California with her husband and two sons.
Uprising Radio is also produced by Bipasha Shom, who holds a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology from Cornell University and a Master’s degree from The Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania. She had an extensive background in film and video editing before joining Uprising. She was recently nominated for an LA Press Club Award for her piece on the California Prisoners Hunger Strike.
The broadcast of Uprising Radio on KPFA is but the latest collaboration between the Pacifica “Left Coast” stations KPFA-Berkeley and KPFK-Los Angeles. The popular Letters and Politics produced at KPFA by Mitch Jeserich airs on KPFK and the News Departments at KPFA, KPFK and KFCF Fresno collaborate to produce the Pacifica Evening News.
KPFA’s morning line up will now start with Democracy Now at 6 a.m., followed by Up Front with Brian Edwards-Tiekert at 7 a.m., Sonali Kolhatkar’s Uprising Radio at 8 a.m., Democracy Now at 9 a.m. and Mitch Jeserich with Letters and Politics at 10 a.m.
25 Responses to “Uprising Expands to KPFA in Northern California!”
Hello;
I am longtime and loyal member of KPFA and very much want it to be around forever.
I like Uprising quite a bit but also liked The Morning Mix a lot as it was exactly that – wonderful and important mix of many people-of-color and very community oriented , based and relevant.
What happened to that show and all the different hosts ?
Thanks;
Patrick
I enjoyed Uprisings when it aired on KPFA on Saturday mornings at 11 am. I stopped listening to KPFA on Saturdays since it has been removed. The Saturday morning time slot is where Uprisings should be returned – and NOT put in place of the Morning Mix. As mentioned above, the Morning Mix is excellent, especially the every other Monday coverage of labor news and the Friday Project Censored show. It seems in very bad form to just fire the Morning Mix crew, who all volunteered there time to make the show happen, without any listener input. In fact, many people who donated during the current fund drive, donated to support the Morning Mix. How deceptive!!
I’ve heard from family members in LA who like Uprising, and as a Bay Area resident I welcome the show being broadcast on KPFA from time to time.
However, out of respect for the Bay Area community that enthusiastically supports our own home-grown Morning Mix shows in the 8:00-9:00am time slot, I would request Ms. Kolhatkar to ask for Uprising to be broadcast at a different time on KPFA, perhaps in the early afternoons or Saturdays. Thank you.
Welcome to KPFA’s airwaves! We need your kind of cutting-edge news and analysis with voices from hte grassroots. The naysayers you may be hearing from are people who want to keep control of the 8AM hour, even though they aren’t able to create compelling programming. The lack of a core program since the morning show was cancelled has been tragic for KPFA. You voice and talents will be SO welcome!!!
Dear Ms. Kolhatkar:
We have enjoyed your show when it was on Saturday mornings here on KPFA. We think it is an important show. We were shocked and very sad to hear that it has now replaced our 8am Morning Show on KPFA. We agree with Marilyn that we have a wonderful and well supported local show, Morning Mix on from 8-9am, and we would appreciate your respecting that local issues are of importance in every community and requesting a different time slot for Uprisings. Thank you.
Hi,
I look, or better put, “listen forward” to having you on KPFA, but letting your show be used to bump off the local Morning Mix is not fair to the quality of those shows and their listeners. The comments above mention you used to be on Saturday late mornings, a prime slot for sure. How, who are making these decisions at KPFA? The little I know of our wonderful local station the more opaque and weird the process seems to be.
Thanks.
Sonali,
You’re letting you and your show be used. I couldn’t say it better. Show some solidarity with your fellow producers and tell them this is not the way. The existing programming made the same amount of money hourly that you have made at KPFK for years. It’s not true that they lack support or audience. You are being played. This sort of action will only ensure more ongoing turmoil that hurts everyone involved. Pacifica needs to do better than this. You were put on KPFK in the morning years ago as a new local voice and a young woman of color. Let the local voices at KPFA have the same privilege you did. The maintenance of the Morning Mix as an open community space not owned by any particular broadcaster indefinitely is crucial to the kind of Pacifica we all want to see, and the kind you once believed in. The Mix is doing important work and it needs to continue. If Uprising has to expand, there are plenty of other less destructive ways to do it.
KPFA has a responsibility to keep its morning drive time open to local voices on local struggles.
Syndicated programming from LA between 8 and 9 am is neither appropriate nor popular within KPFA’s fm signal area.
Dear Sonali Kolhatkar,
I appreciate and applaud your programs and support your efforts, having been a regular listener for the 7 am on KPFA as well as on-line via KPFK archives. Regarding the placement by fiat of Uprising 5 days/week 8-9 am, in lieu of the Morning Mix, I appeal for you to stand up, decline and refuse to allow your program to be used to supplant the Five great local Morning mix programs at KPFA. The Morning Mix programs have played a vital role in energizing the Bay Area community with a signal which extends to more than 5 counties. These programs have changed the spectrum and participation in many areas and covering many issues which would never have been known by the people affected. These are the unique opportunities and resources for all of our community, which are not available anywhere else for direct and real time airing of issues affecting communities and issues which do not have voices.
The implanting of your program will silence all of this multidimensional communication and activity. I could give so many examples of ideas, issues, causes, struggles, celebrations, arts creations, understanding, bringing together of people, which never would have occurred in the absence of these programs, which represent so many different faces of people. There is no other place where varied communities of color and working persons can have and find platforms to be heard and the possibility of others to listen in hours when they can heard over the airwaves, particularly where this is more important than the digital realms and especially at this time when the basis of life is so disrupted by the increased economic stratification, gentrification and domination of the media by the powerful and anything which rubs against dominant paradigms even in “progressive liberal” realms which may touch upon race, class and corporate trajectory. There are many events where the cause of justice or heart in a community different from my own or in my own community have struck my own interest resulting in my lending a hand (along with many others I encountered, who had been informed via KPFA Morning Mix programs), participating, deepening my understanding, telling others whats going on or just knowing whats happening.
In accordance with the ethos and principles which you express in your programs, you will recognize that the step to refuse and not offer your support and not to countenance this move, (which was done without any input communication, discussion of any kind with people who create and produce programming, the volunteers and the member community, much as the US generals Bremmer, Garner and the proconsuls of the recent occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, who sent out memos noticing curfews and communication edicts, shocking the populace, upon “liberating'” the countries ), you will gain. By your action of deferring and resisting based on an ethic of greater good goodness , you will be heroic for many and importantly to your own soul and this will go far and do more for the forwarding of your future (and that of many others.) All this has major import in the daily lives and future of our community.
The elimination of the multiple diverse persons and the group efforts who put together each of the well produced highly popular Morning Mix programs to bring in Uprising, is surely not just one of those breaks or vagaries, just/unjust, well considered or illogical in other venues such as non-profit organizations, corporations, commercial radio stations or sports team line-ups, where one could say “it wasn’t me, but whatever the tumult, I am still floating, as the river moves along”. This is not that. It is not out of your hands.
However noble, connected, well though, engaging with all the peace social-economic justice focuses etc of Uprising , the credos of motivating of listeners to take an active role in their communities and connecting global issues with local ones, the reality thatyour program, with one principal person, is based in Southern California, flies in the face of the contrasting large group of programs with large and growing audiences local to the Bay Region, which develop multiple specific issues and stories present with continuity, connected to and affecting the listeners and where they and multiple communities engage to bring authority to account, work together and help make positive change with their efforts. KPFA and the Bay Area would be diminished rather than enhanced by this change. Regarding your judgement in this matter, I wish to express that whatever transcendent faith guides you, I retain hopes in the basic goodness that we have agency to act on our better nature, as creatures of limited means who can sometimes form beliefs on the basis of evidence and act rationally upon them, along with our sympathetic and empathetic impulses and that this be honored and encouraged. I certainly wish you well in your endeavors with the syndicating of your successful KPFK program (for which many outlets and portals will develop) as well as continued work on the 7 am mornings at KPFA and the blooming of your family.
Yours truly,
Peter Whittlesey
Mill Valley, California
Great call-in this morning in support of the Morning Mix from Sharon Adams, VP of the San Francisco Lawyers Guild (.45 mins after the hour)
https://soundcloud.com/tracy-rosenberg/the-uprising-kpfa-monday-5-26
Good God, Peter W.!!! Please have someone edit your posts! Dude, your writing is horrendous!!
Sonali, please listen to KPFA’s take-back broadcast of our locally produced, locally relevant 8 am hour, https://soundcloud.com/tracy-rosenberg/the-uprising-kpfa-monday-5-26. Then, please, take a look inside and ask yourself whether you are so determined to advance your own career that you’re willing to collaborate in taking this away from our fm signal area community as it battles fossil feels, police violence, and gentrification on many fronts.
I certainly hope not.
Thrilled!!…..delighted!!…….HYPE
The Morning Mix was a real breakthrough show because it broadcast diverse alternative perspectives on important but ignored or poorly covered local issues during drive time. I can’t overemphasize how vital and well loved the Mix is to many Bay Area communities. Whatever its merits, Uprising’s sudden supplanting of the MM is very destructive. This decision was made without any input from KPFA’s unpaid staff or its listeners and, in fact, was undertaken as part of a political power play within KPFA. With the Morning Mix, KPFA has been able to strengthen and expand its connections to listeners and has achieved a degree of local political relevancy. Please don’t let your show be used to forward narrow power agendas within the station at the expense of KPFA’s listenership and of the station itself.
Several years ago, an attempt was made to change programming on KPFA at the 7am -9am period. An uproar precisely like this one was raised in opposition by the same people and using the same arguments. Despite arguments couched in moral and economic terms, there appeared to be a strong element of simple job protection and reluctance to give up valued airtime slots. Folks who have spent decades in their positions showed extreme aversion to allowing changes. This is the position now.
There is nothing sacred or unique about the confused “Morning Mix.”
Practically all the participants have plenty of airtime elsewhere in the schedule and the excellent and valuable Project Censored can easily be given a nice chunk of time somewhere on the schedule without needing ever more Davy D (who is terrific) or Miguel Molina, who is not.
As for me, my favorite KPFA programs and programmers have usually in the last twenty years or so come from elsewhere in the
system. Sonali Kolhatkar is a terrific addition to the daily lineup and, unlike too many of KPFA’s in home personnel, appears to lack an overweaning ego.
Thank you, Sonali, for all that you do.
Although Sonali’s program is interesting, for 50+ years I have been accustomed to the morning hours and more recently, the Morning Mix being focussed on local news, although I do not currently live in the Berkeley area.
Can Sonali please reschedule her program for a less “prime” time slot?
Thanks!
Dear Sonali Kolhatkar:
As a KPFA listener/supporter, I feel that it is a very bad move for your show “Uprising” to be moved to the 7 am-8 am slot to replace the “Morning Mix”. How different is that from the crisis in 1999 where the rogue Pacifica board then used canned programming piped in over KPFA’s airwaves? The current Pacifica board and management is certainly acting in the same manner.
One thing that the current situation teaches us, is that Pacifica and KPFA really honestly needs to come to grips with how things have been run over the years, and be transparent and open with the listeners,otherwise the network will not survive when it will be greatly needed in the years ahead. This means that the network MUST be independent and not tied in with those who would break it up and take it down!
Bring back the Morning Mix. The only truly diverse local morning news broadcast.
Am I the only person who wonders why Democracy now has two morning slots? It’s not THAT good. Why can’t Uprising be broadcast at 9am? Or 6am?
Dear Sonali Kohhatkar:
Again, you need to hear that you are supplanting excellent programming with your expansion–the Morning Mix was relevant to our local northern CA communities of color and those struggling with economic inequality–not a theoretical discussion but a real news show and voice for the disenfranchised. The person who said it wasn’t well liked or good quality may have just been someone with lots of benefits in life who doesn’t concern himself with those less fortunate financially. Standard Oil refinery in Richmond is a big deal in the SF North Bay; and you have put an end to the primary voice of the communities closest to this corporate giant that is literally dangerous to the people in those communities and the whole North Bay. Shame on you for silencing the voices of people you claim to champion. You have put an end to those local indigenous voices to bring us generic “liberal” programming that is not helpful for local social justice action by replacing the Morning Mix. And whose great idea was it on this morning’s show to announce to the world that the Occupy Movement should add the Marxist playbook to its strategies? Are you seriously thinking that most Occupy protestors consider themselves communists? That’s the paint brush the right wing would like to scare people with. Not so sharp unless you are opposed to the Occupy movement.
Hi, I like your program, but am very disappointed you are allowing it to destroy the Morning Mix here in Berkeley. We have learned so much about Richmond and other struggles from Andres Soto; Davey D is a very, very much needed voice for Af-Americans, so painfully missing from KPFA; the labor news on Mondays from Steve Zeltzer told us about labor actions that we never even knew existed; and needless to say: Project Censored. Instead of Proj. Cen. at some time in the middle of the day instead of when we have time to listen during our commutes.
The cancelling of the previous locally made programs at 8am has not only stripped out some great local news, but also 40% of the programs were by blacks or Latinos. We like the idea of “Uprising” coming up to the Bay Area, just don’t let it be used as a football to squash the great, quality local programming here.
Thank you, we look forward to some kind of comment from you — don’t make us have to assume that your silence means you support destruction of local programming and by African-Am.s and Latinos.
Hoping for a positive solution to this negative situation,
T.M. Scruggs, family, and friends and colleagues.
I BET I know who was behind the supplanting of the Morning Mix with Uprising and I BET it wasn’t Richard Pirodsky and I BET it wasn’t because it wasn’t pulling its weight in donations, I BET it was because it was too popular and I BET that some paid programmers saw it as a threat!
Return the Morning Mix to its rightful place on weekday mornings on KPFA!
FYI
San Francisco Labor Council Resolution
Adopted June 9, 2014
Reinstate the “Morning Mix” drive-time radio show –
Say No to Cuts in Labor/Community Programming on KPFA Radio
Whereas, KPFA Radio 94.1 FM, with a powerful radio transmitter, has been a megaphone for community free speech radio throughout northern California for over 65 years, and is the flagship station of the Pacifica Radio Network; and
Whereas, for the last 3 and a half years KPFA has aired a ground-breaking labor and community program called the Morning Mix – broadcasting at a time when more working people could hear it, during “drive time” from 8 to 9 AM, Monday to Friday; and
Whereas, the rotating hosts of the Morning Mix radio shows on KPFA have featured the voices of Bay Area working people and their issues, to a degree not found on any other Northern California station with the reach and power of KPFA. This included regular reporting on labor and community struggles – about the postal workers’ fight against privatization; the concerns of teachers, dockworkers, transit and healthcare workers, and immigrant workers; as well as the community fight in the city of Richmond against toxic pollution by Chevron Corporation; and
Whereas, the Morning Mix provided regular announcements of Bay Area labor and community events, so working people could be aware of these activities and participate; and
Whereas, late in the evening on May 21, KPFA and Pacifica management abruptly, and without proper consultations, cancelled the Morning Mix and replaced it with a syndicated program “Uprising” produced in Los Angeles that does not cover Bay Area issues and events; and
Whereas, we need more local labor and community programming on KFPA radio, not less – especially since working peoples’ stories are almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. This program change is a tremendous loss for the radio listeners in the Bay Area.
Therefore be it resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council calls on KPFA/Pacifica management to reinstate the Morning Mix drive-time radio show. We need more labor and community programs on the radio – not less!
And be it further resolved, that this resolution be submitted to other Bay Area labor councils for concurrence and action.
So glad to hear you more often on KPFA, Sonali. Your show is wonderful, informative and a pleasure to listen to. It’s also a HUGE improvement on the Morning Mix, which had been put on KPFA during a political purge a few years back, when the stellar KPFA Morning Show was axed and its young hosts laid off. The only qualifications of the Morning Mix replacement program seemed to be that they were friends with Tracy Rosenberg, the disasterous “treasurer” who has driven the Pacifica network into the dust. Now she, and they, and protesting because they’ve been moved to afternoon time slots. It’s time for them to think of KPFA and the Pacifica network, rather than their egos.
ILWU 10 Support of Morning Mix Resolution
The executive committee of ILWU Local 10 adopted this resolution:
Reinstate the “Morning Mix” drive-time radio show –
Say No to Cuts in Labor/Community Programming on KPFA Radio
Whereas, KPFA Radio 94.1 FM, with a powerful radio transmitter, has been a megaphone for community free speech radio throughout northern California for over 65 years, and is the flagship station of the Pacifica Radio Network; and
Whereas, for the last 3 and a half years KPFA has aired a ground-breaking labor and community program called the Morning Mix – broadcasting at a time when more working people could hear it, during “drive time” from 8 to 9 AM, Monday to Friday; and
download
Whereas, the rotating hosts of the Morning Mix radio shows on KPFA have featured the voices of Bay Area working people and their issues, to a degree not found on any other Northern California station with the reach and power of KPFA. This included regular reporting on labor and community struggles – about the postal workers’ fight against privatization; the concerns of teachers, dockworkers, transit and healthcare workers, and immigrant workers; as well as the community fight in the city of Richmond against toxic pollution by Chevron Corporation; and
Whereas, the Morning Mix provided regular announcements of Bay Area labor and community events, so working people could be aware of these activities and participate; and
Whereas, late in the evening on May 21, KPFA and Pacifica management abruptly, and without proper consultations, cancelled the Morning Mix and replaced it with a syndicated program “Uprising” produced in Los Angeles that does not cover Bay Area issues and events; and
Whereas, we need more local labor and community programming on KFPA radio, not less – especially since working peoples’ stories are almost completely ignored by the mainstream media. This program change is a tremendous loss for the radio listeners in the Bay Area.
Therefore be it resolved, that the San Francisco Labor Council calls on KPFA/Pacifica management to reinstate the Morning Mix drive-time radio show. We need more labor and community programs on the radio – not less!
And be it further resolved, that this resolution be submitted to other Bay Area labor councils for concurrence and action.