INSTRUCTOR OF WRITING, LITERATURE, AND DIGITAL PUBLISHING
KPFKRobertPayne@gmail.com
website: VideoAdventures.info (in process -- always)
Videos: YouTube / VideoAdventures
Statement for 2023 Local Station Board Election
I am a single issue candidate: The survival of KPFK
KPFK presents an alternative to the radio / tv / print chaos and lies of the corporate media.
Though I read and hear individual commentators and isolated programs of quality appearing in newspapers and broadcast programs, KPFK offers the single richest source of 24-hour, 7-day-a-week intelligent and challenging voices.
Writers, academics, practitioners, activists, musicians, witnesses, survivors ---- they speak to the world through KPFK.
And KPFK rejects commercial sponsorship. Corporations? Companies? Institutions? Political candidates? KPFK will not accept their money.
With commercial and political sponsors, come demands. KPFK will not accept those demands. In our region, AM radio stations broadcast offensive anti-fact rants to sell reactionary fantasies --- and the products of the corporate sponsors.
Even the important public affairs FM stations restrict their reportage to what corporations and political forces will accept as fit for public knowledge. And now, with the ongoing demands to cut funding of public radio programming, the same news reporters under threat of unemployment must write saccharine human-interest stories of the billionaire funders of the 527 / 501(c)(4) front groups attacking progressive politicians, rights activists, organizations, writers --- anyone or any organization not conforming to the corporate lock- step of the billionaires.
KPFK asks for money only from their listeners. This method of funding is chaotic and crazy-making. Yet, in this way, progressive movements succeed in presenting issues that would be otherwise lost in the vast urban expanse of Los Angeles.
I write novels.
I work video, audio, international websites, and digital print-on-demand.
I have worked in Central America, Asia, the Middle East, North America, and the many communities in Southern California.
As an artist, I designed, directed the manufacture of products, then advertised and sold those products.
As an academic, I worked as a professor of writing and literature -- I lost that position when I spoke against the Iraq invasion. Later, I worked as a media specialist to gain students for foreign universities. I have worked news / internet / street media for community elections. Now I work international video documentaries.
All these projects exploited whatever inadequate resources the low-budget projects offered to produce the maximum effect and/or profit.
I know the techniques of improvised, low-cost media. I have done so much with so little, sometimes I believe I can do anything with nothing.
I want to contribute my skills to KPFK via the Local Station Board.
As a media worker, I see KPFK as a channel of information presenting many opportunities. Opportunities to gain members and generate income.
My one issue: The survival of KPFK.
For questions or further information, email Robert Payne at
KPFKrobertpayne@gmail.com. All one word, KPFKrobertpayne@gmail.com.
Answers to Candidate Questionnaire
1. What experience, connections, skills or traits would you bring to the local station board to advance the station's mission?
MEDIA SKILLS:
Adobe: Premier & Audition & PhotoShop & Illustrator & InDesign & AfterEffects & DreamWeaver / international video & audio data management / poster design & trade show brochures & business cards.
I taught these skills colleges -- and in cyber cafes in other countries. Working with a non-profit, I teach university interns. If we can somehow keep our building, I can teach interns there.
PRESENT WORK
* International video assignments and projects. Clients include tourist bureaus of Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Malaysia, Azerbaijan. Charity media in Kenya. See VideoAdventures.Info. Nominated for awards as director and videographer. Google: Maasaicameramen
* Writing, publishing, and promotion via internet and print-on-demand in English, Spanish, Arabic
PAST MEDIA WORK
* Video productions and commercials in United States.
* Academic and tourism promotion in Syria as Media/SEO Specialist, see arabicindamascus.us. Operations suspended due to war. (Incomplete http://www.arabicindamascus.us remains in operation with hope of end of conflict.)
* Instructor of Presentations in Advanced American English -- Personal, Sales, Academic -– for Syrian professionals speaking to English-only international audiences. Assembled website and delivered material via text and audio for students. Website lost to war.
* National University instructor of American Literature, World Literature, Essay, Creative Writing, Technical Writing, Business Communications, and Information Research and Report Writing. Classes uploaded to university instructional websites.
* Los Angeles Mission College instructor of Literature and Essay. Assembled website to offer distance learning for students. Discontinued.
* Writer of 22 published novels, novels translated to five languages, one novel achieved New York Times Paperback Bestseller List for series, other novels scored other bestseller lists; sold cinema stories; poetry; wrote video projects.
* Writer/reviewer appearing in U.S. and foreign periodicals, including N.Y. Times ( Paper editions! Not online comments. ).
* Writer/designer of United States patents, technical manuals, Spanish language copyrights.
* Certificate, Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA
* B.A., M.A., American Literature
* Multiple for-profit enterprises in foreign cultures and foreign languages.
2. What do you appreciate and value in the station's current operations?
KPFK serves as my continuing education in world affairs. Writers, activists, American foreign policy experts, distant wars, developments in new technologies -- all come to me via KPFK. I want to expand the media spectrum of KPFK beyond the radio to video, websites, and print.
When I worked in Central America, audio reports on KPFK surpassed the shallow reporting of the LA Times and New York Times. The reports on KPFK provided cautionary information guiding me through very difficult situations. I may have survived the years in the wars due to information from KPFK commentators.
Without KPFK, many other writers and reporters operating in distant lands would blunder into bad situations, for unfortunate outcomes.
3. What would you like to see improved or changed in the station's current operations?
New administrations and policies at Pacifica and KPFK present opportunities for growth. I want to accelerate those changes.
4. Describe what you anticipate would be your top three priorities or areas of focus if you were elected to the local station board. Membership. Outreach for programming. Money.
5. Sustainability is an important part of any nonprofit operation. What are your thoughts on how the board can help to improve the station's financial footing?
Increased membership, digital media outreach, income.
In whatever way possible, members of the Local Station Board must engage with individuals, groups, and communities throughout Los Angeles and the world.
In my other work, I already meet and work with diverse individuals and groups. I need only add the link to KPFK.
6. Is there anything else you would like prospective voters to know?
In the United States, at this moment, we suffer under the unrelenting assault of corporations extracting all possible wealth from working Americans as those same corporations attack the other peoples of the world.
Ignorance, corporate lies, vast corporate wealth, and the political manipulation of our democracy threaten the future of our nation and the world.
Our nation now fights a civil war within the United States and multiple wars in distant lands.
And the enemies of Americans are winning.
Pacifica and KPFK offer defense and progress.
Here, in the United States, working people cannot gain from their labor. Students struggle under the debt of education. Entrepreneurs and innovators cannot enter the corporate-dominated economy.
We are losing our lives to low-pay work, children are denied time with their parents, parents cannot participate in the guidance and education of their children, we are losing our health to a toxic environment, youth suffer chronic illness, the old die young -- all for the profit of corporations owning our economic and political environment. Assaults come from all sides at all times.
The alternative media of Pacifica and KPFK can offer guidance in the chaos of our modern society.
As KPFK advances into alternative media, I want to offer training to activists in media. Volunteers will learn through action to change their future and the future of their nation.
Most people now carry cellphones with video cameras superior to cameras once used in low-budget feature films.
KPFK can become an engine of information and opportunity.
I offer this.
As a writer, photographer, and now maker of video documentaries, I have traveled and worked in many wars. Central America, South-East Asia, Syria, Los Angeles.
The international conflicts must end. The vast wealth wasted on warfare impoverishes all nations.
War does not bring victory or conquest. "Winners" of wars are they who lose less.
The recent wars of the United States against the world deny our nation a future.
The new F-35 costs the price of a college or hospital. The cost of training a combat pilot would pay for the education of a doctor and clinic for the doctor to operate. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the expense of maintaining one American soldier for a year wasted the expense of a four-year university scholarship.
That waste does not include the expense of wounds, medical care for life, and lost income.
Watch war news on television, listen to the fire of automatic weapons. If American forces trigger those bullets, when calcuations include the expense of training soldiers, arming the soldiers, transporting and maintaining those foreign lands, then caring for the wounded and their families ---
Every bullet is a day's pay taxed from the working people of the United States.
The nightmare of horror and waste must end. KPFK offers information not heard from other radio sources, not seen on network news programs.
Information can guide us to a sane future.
K P F K is the source.