<html><body><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div>Brilliant!</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><hr id="zwchr"><div style="color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;"><b>From: </b>"Marco McClean" <memo@mcn.org><br><b>To: </b>"kzyxtalk" <kzyxtalk@lists.mcn.org><br><b>Cc: </b>editor@theava.com, "MCPB Board" <BOD@kzyx.org>, discussion@lists.mcn.org<br><b>Sent: </b>Wednesday, April 15, 2015 4:29:47 PM<br><b>Subject: </b>[Kzyxtalk] John Coate, KZYX dog in the manger<br><div><br></div>[Editor, there are some italics, that I indicate by slashes, and there's <br>a URL at the end. Please include these if you can.]<br><div><br></div>John Coate, KZYX dog in the manger<br>--by Marco McClean<br><div><br></div> >John Coate wrote: "KZYX is the public FM station I manage. There is a <br>group of people - I call them a hate group because they defame me by <br>lying in letters to the editor and in online talk groups - who tries <br>every year to get elected onto our Board of Directors so they can fire <br>me. They lose every year. This year they were much better organized and <br>their public statements were even more hateful than usual. But they lost <br>big."<br><div><br></div>Oh, Jesus, where to start?<br><div><br></div>The fact is, John Coate, you and your pet board of directors, like all <br>KZYX managers and enabling boards before you, manage KZYX so very badly <br>that if it hadn't been for its annual six-figure (!) government bailout <br>KZYX would have collapsed into dust every year of its existence. You are <br>that bad at what you do, and every year you personally, John, suck the <br>equivalent of well over half of all membership money out of the system <br>for yourself, even though the station badly needs that money to solve <br>the ever increasing signal integrity problems and to move the main <br>studio and office, the face of the station, someplace where there are <br>people. It wouldn't need the money if it were cared for properly by a <br>good manager paid fairly for hours actually worked. But it isn't; it has <br>you, and you are not caring for it properly but rather sucking it dry.<br><div><br></div>I repeat, since you came to KZYX, John, you personally have sucked half <br>a million dollars (!) out of the station, while the sound and <br>reliability and reputation of the station have become a running joke. If <br>you were worth the salary you're paid, KZYX would be shining in the sun, <br>the Cadillac of radio stations, running like a top. It's not.<br><div><br></div>And you're a coward, as are every one of the boardmembers and David <br>Steffen and Mary Aigner, for hiding from a regularly scheduled straight <br>honest leisurely uncensored live back-and-forth conversation /on the <br>air/ about this and other glaring issues with the station, a <br>conversation that should involve not only members but the general public <br>who pay with their taxes whether they want to or not, and who should <br>also get a vote but don't, speaking of the board elections, which as <br>conducted are consistently a farce with a turnout and trust level worse <br>than any banana republic's.<br><div><br></div>About your personal broadcast plea for money that makes an analogy of a <br>restaurant serving food and then the customers can pay what they want <br>later, so it's implied they should be ashamed to not pay... You have it <br>backward and twisted but, okay, let's go with the restaurant idea. Tax <br>funded Corporation for Public Food grants enough money to a private <br>corporation, MCPB, to cover all overhead and meat and vegetables and <br>supplies and equipment of this restaurant, so it can make and serve <br>experimental and odd and provocative food that a commercial restaurant <br>might have trouble making a profit on, and thereby educate the <br>collective palate of the populace. But you and Mary and David, etc., <br>/shovel every membership dollar into your own pockets/ in return for <br>telling the (unpaid) prep cooks and (unpaid) chefs and (unpaid) waiters <br>what kind of food to put on the tables, restricting it to the kind of <br>food you feel comfortable with. People wander in and eat what's there, <br>and it's food, so why should they complain; and if anyone, knowing the <br>story and wanting to improve the situation, does complain you lie to <br>them that they have control of the restaurant because they're members <br>and they vote for the board that employs you so they should shut up, and <br>they should especially shut up about how the restaurant only needs money <br>to continue because it's burdened by you. And then they don't shut up, <br>because why should they, and you get all butt-hurt about it, but you're <br>keeping all their money for yourself anyway. See, it's a little <br>different from the way you put it.<br><div><br></div> >And John Coate wrote: "Well if you have to tell certain people they <br>can't be on the radio in the way they want, it can make them very angry. <br>But that is part of the job. In some cases their response is to come <br>after me personally instead of getting their own act together."<br><div><br></div>John, those of us who you and Mary and the board and so on trash every <br>day for years by shutting us out of airtime, on a frequency that doesn't <br>belong to you but to the public, have our acts together. I've been <br>writing and publishing and working in theater and doing radio all my <br>long adult life, and I've forgotten more about media in general and <br>radio in particular than you will ever know.<br><div><br></div>Here's how to get /your/ act together: Voluntarily give up the better <br>part of what you and Mary and David are paid to sit on your thumbs, and <br>instead spend it on fixing the STL signal path and on paying the people <br>who are doing their shows: what the station is there for in the first <br>place: quirky educational experimental non-commercial radio. And then <br>leave them alone to do their work and their art without interference. <br>Every one of them puts more time and energy into preparing for and doing <br>their shows under your thumb than you put into maintaining the station <br>in a state of staticky mediocrity, and you and Mary and David and the <br>board deserve neither the power over others nor the personal income you <br>guard like a pack of junkyard dogs.<br><div><br></div>Educational band FM radio was established by law to do things that the <br>power structure and economics of commercial radio screen out. Yet the <br>power structure at KZYX has always made airpeople as un-free to do those <br>wonderful things as commercial stations do. You --John Coate, the MCPB <br>board and the few fatuous rich wino friends you embrace-- are the <br>problem. Maybe the junkyard dog image isn't right. Maybe you're more <br>like a dog in the manger. You know, like in Aesop's fable of the dog <br>keeping the ox away from the straw. You don't have a use for radio <br>yourself; you don't know what to do with it except to sit on it like a <br>lump, and when anyone comes along who wants to use it for what it's for, <br>you dick us around and drive us away /just because/, and then you exult <br>about it, as though you'd done some brilliant rock-star thing. What is, <br>after all, the purpose of you?<br><div><br></div>Marco McClean<br>memo@mcn.org<br>http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com<br><div><br></div>-end-<br><div><br></div>_______________________________________________<br>Kzyxtalk mailing list<br>Kzyxtalk@lists.mcn.org<br>http://lists.mcn.org/mailman/listinfo/kzyxtalk<br></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>