The listeners of KPFT and the membership of the Houston Committee for People's Radio (HCPR) and the Houston chapter of the Pacifica Listeners Union (PLU) are gravely concerned about the censorship and removal from the Houston airwaves of the award-winning news show Democracy Now! For the past 5 years, the hour-long radio program DN! has served as a beacon of investigative reporting under the direction of stellar journalist Amy Goodman and her cohost Juan Gonzalez. DN!, which has aired in Houston for more than 5 years, is a unique, high-quality resource that presents a wider range of stories and voices than any other US news program. DN! routinely covers political, environmental and social justice topics (e.g. native peoples rights, corporate surveillance of workers and living wage campaigns) that are excluded from mainstream corporate media.

Recently, DN! has been come under attack by the executive management of the Pacifica Radio Network, which syndicates the show to its 5 stations and over 70 affiliates. This has included direct attempts to dictate program topics and unrelenting personal attacks against Goodman, the network’s leading reporter. Houston’s Pacifica station, KPFT, has also censored broadcasts of DN! most recently by blocking airing of a segment of the July 16th DN! show on the Pacifica listener lawsuits. Leading up to last week’s events, Goodman and the staff of Democracy Now! have faced an escalating campaign of harassment by a small number of Pacifica administrators including the manager at host station WBAI in New York City. These actions have included moving DN! to a substandard studio that was ill-equipped for production, physically accosting her and assaulting her daily with derogatory remarks.

On Tuesday August 14, to protect the safety of her staff, Amy Goodman moved production of DN! to a safe location and transmitted via specialized high-quality phone lines (a method used by two other daily programmers at Pacifica in New York). Despite the excellence of these broadcasts, several Pacifica stations including KPFT/Houston have refused to pick up the feed and instead have played DN! reruns.

As of this date (10/4/01), Democracy Now! is still being produced (and made available on the internet) every day by Amy Goodman and her staff, using safe facilities at Downtown Community TV in New York City. Pacifica and KPFT have refused to air these broadcasts and continue to run repeats broadcasts of DN! Pacifica affiliates (including WORT in Madison and WMNU in Tampa) have suspended their syndication contracts with Pacifica over failure to deliver live shows, as promised. The on-air slander of Amy Goodman by WBAI/NYC management continues unabated.

This act of censorship is the culmination of a year-long pattern of harassment and intimidation of Goodman by National Program Director Steve Yasko. The motives for this animosity are entirely unclear given that Goodman remains the most celebrated and beloved broadcaster at Pacifica. The result for Pacifica has been loss of listeners nationwide, loss of revenues for the cash-strapped network and the loss of one of the finest daily news shows broadcast in the United States.

HCPR and the Houston PLU are citizen groups founded in the last several years by KPFT listeners who were concerned about the lack of community input, loss of public affairs programming and heavy-handed management of KPFT and Pacifica. We believe that this shameful censorship episode by KPFT is further indication of the station’s abandonment of its commitment to community service and excellence in news programming. We the listener-supporters of KPFT demand the return of the authentic uncensored broadcast of Democracy Now! The loss of DN! would mean silencing the most important voice of independent journalism available to Houston’s citizens.

Democracy Now! needs to be back on the air, immediately.