[Peace-discuss] contacts at UPTV

[Randall Cotton]

For those that attended today's meeting and heard me provide an update on
UPTV's lack of progress in getting Democracy Now! going, Here is the contact
info for UPTV personnel (I erroneously said in the meeting I had posted this
before, but now I see I hadn't - I'd just sent it to one person).

Most of the time, my primary contact has been:

Chris Foster
UPTV Coordinator
384-2452
clfoster at city.urbana.il.us

But after a string of long, unreasonable delays and broken promises, I've
concluded that he's really not a good contact for this right now. At the
minimum, it seems that he is either largely unwilling or, more likely (for
whatever reason) unable to speak authoritatively on this or keep any
promises he makes on this. The issue seems to be out of his hands at the
moment anyway (and on his boss' plate). So it seems to me that if you're
interested in calling yourself (some at the meeting suggested they were
interested), I'd suggest calling Chris' boss:

William (Bill) Dejarnette
Information Services Manager
384-2354
bhdejarnette at city.urbana.il.us

And here's a copy of Bill's "non-response" response to my extended nastygram
of last Wednesday:

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "DeJarnette, Bill" <bhdejarnette at city.urbana.il.us>
To: "Randall Cotton" <recotton at earthlink.net>
Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 10:37 AM
Subject: DN!/FSTV


Randall:

Thanks for your input.  As soon as I hear from legal I will contact you and
let you know the status.

If you have any further questions please feel free to call or email.

Bill
----- END -----

I intend to continue attempting to contact Bill by phone and get specifics
like:

what exactly is the legal issue at stake?
who made the decision to put this through legal review?
who is conducting the legal review?
how long can the review be expected to take?

It seems suspicious to me that he is providing no specifics to answer my
questions of last Wednesday. He is being evasive and ambiguous. This is the
kind of response I would expect to see if an intentional stall/stonewall was
intended. Not saying it proves anything, but it's mighty suspect,
particularly since NONE of the existing 108 affiliates have ever had any
legal concerns with the FSTV affiliate agreement (according to FSTV
themselves). I could be paranoid, I guess, but this all keeps smelling
fishier and fishier.

If you do call, I'd appreciate hearing from you with a note on how it went.

Thanks
R