By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, October 2012
In late October 2012, USC English-and-creative-writing professor Carol Muske-Dukes — a former California poet laureate — published a Huffington Post column taking KPCC 89.3 management to task for the way they had treated Patt Morrison. The Pulitzer-winning broadcaster and columnist had been removed from her weekday KPCC slot in early September; Muske-Dukes’s column framed the move as a substantive loss for LA public radio. The original FishbowlLA pickup tracked the cross-institutional pushback the schedule shuffle was now producing.
Then
The August 2012 KPCC schedule shuffle had already been covered in FishbowlLA — Brand & Martínez expanded from one hour to two, Patt Morrison’s daily show effectively ended, AirTalk moved an hour. Russ Stanton (VP for content) and Bill Davis (CEO) had been the public faces of the change. Carol Muske-Dukes’s HuffPost column came roughly six weeks into the new schedule and represented the kind of substantive academic-and-LA-cultural-community pushback that the schedule change had been generating.
Muske-Dukes herself was one of the more visible LA-academic-literary voices of the era — a Stanford-and-USC career, multiple poetry collections, a California Poet Laureate tenure from 2008 to 2011, and a recurring presence in LA-region public-affairs commentary. Her HuffPost column was structurally a high-status academic public-radio-listener intervention into the station-management conversation.
The original FishbowlLA framing was sympathetic. The piece treated Muske-Dukes’s intervention as substantive cultural commentary about how LA-region public-radio leadership was handling a longtime on-air personality — and quietly suggested that the listener-and-academic pushback was approaching the kind of critical-mass moment that station-management decisions periodically produce.
Now
Patt Morrison’s KPCC role continued in reduced form for years after the 2012 shuffle. Her LA Times column work has continued; she has remained one of the most-cited LA-public-affairs commentators across the post-2012 years. The post-shuffle Morrison career arc has actually been considerably more expansive than the immediate-post-September-2012 framing implied — she has continued in television, print, and event-moderation roles across the LA-region cultural ecosystem.
Carol Muske-Dukes has continued at USC across the years. Her broader academic-and-poetry career has continued; she has not been a recurring KPCC-specific commentator in the years since, but she remains one of the visible LA-academic public voices.
The 2012 Brand & Martínez schedule shuffle did not hold in its launched form — Madeleine Brand left within weeks of the relaunch, the show was rebranded to Take Two, and the broader station-strategy reorganization continued through subsequent cycles. The Russ Stanton VP-for-content era continued for several more years before transitioning to subsequent leadership; Bill Davis stepped down as KPCC president in 2020 after a 20-year tenure.
The 2012 Muske-Dukes intervention reads now as one of the documented moments when the LA-academic public-radio listenership formally pushed back at station-management programming decisions — a kind of cross-institutional public-disagreement that has become less common across the years since as the public-radio attention economy has dispersed across podcast-and-streaming distribution. The KPCC-LAist integration that began in 2018-2020 has substantially changed the editorial-and-management structure that produced the 2012 shuffle in the first place.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.