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</head><body><p style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Bravo, Marco.</p><blockquote type="cite">On May 8, 2018 at 8:45 PM Marco McClean wrote:<br><br><br>An open letter to the board of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting <br>Corporation (KZYX), including of course the new board members:<br><br>I read about a charity company that contracted out the work of mentally <br>slow and otherwise relatively disabled people, and the sweet-talking <br>Nice People running the company were paying themselves /very/ good <br>money, with medical and dental and other benefits, and all the while <br>they were paying the workers one dollar an hour /or less/ and making up <br>the rest with gift cards. It turns out that's against the law. You can't <br>pay people with gift cards, even retarded people. I think MCPB's <br>practice of promising people free membership in the station in return <br>for working to bring the crooks who run KZYX all the money is exactly <br>like paying the workers with gift cards. And it's wrong. And you're <br>terrible and unethical for cheating the real workers the way you have <br>done since 1989 and for all this time.<br><br>I'd like to mention current manager Jeffrey Parker here: Every day a man <br>who's paid himself circa $90,000 so far (in about a year and a half) to <br>pretend to run a community radio station has got up and had breakfast <br>and made the cruel, deliberate decision to kick me personally in the <br>stomach by keeping my excellent, proven show, a show that's more to the <br>point of community radio than most of what you're running on your <br>channel, off the air. Just about every week since February of 2012 when <br>I applied for my show to be put on the schedule I've written to the <br>manager and the program director, and the only reply I ever got was a <br>little more than a year ago when the then-new program director told me <br>that everything I'd been sending to anyone at the station was going <br>directly into the trash unread. And the next thing she told me was that <br>there's no place at KZYX for my show, and thank you for playing our <br>little game.<br><br>I work harder and longer at real radio than any half a dozen people at <br>KZYX, including the manager. When I talked to your manager four or five <br>managers back --John Coate, who had as little love for real airpeople as <br>the schmuck you have now does-- he was /furious/ that I'd shown up at <br>the station to talk to him at all. "You come in here, looking for a <br>confrontation! I'm tryna get outta here. What. Do. You. Want." That was <br>the first thing he ever said to me. I had walked in and said, Hi, I'm <br>Marco McClean. To be fair, I should say he was sitting facing me, <br>looking at his laptop monitor. He slammed it shut and put it in a bag. <br>Who knows what I surprised him looking at. It might have been the bogus <br>financial sheets he was cobbling together. It might have been child <br>pornography. Maybe it was just personal bad news and that would explain <br>the attitude; I dunno.<br><br>You have your cheerleaders and your enthusiastic supporters, and your <br>reps have always pointed at that as though that's validation of the way <br>you do things, but the worst radio station in the world, whichever one <br>is currently the worst, has proportionally as many enthusiastic <br>supporters. When I was at KMFB (FM) in 1983 to play records all night on <br>Friday and Saturday nights, when I first went to work there Jack Millis <br>(RIP) was the engineer, and there was an AM station also in the same <br>building, using the same tower; that was KPMO. KPMO was fully automated, <br>with the automation equipment of the time, which was two <br>refrigerator-size boxes of three big reel-to-reel tape players that each <br>could play several hours of country music, stop and start and shift <br>between the decks at the end of each song to randomize them, so you'd <br>never get the same two songs playing in the same order, and it had a <br>cartridge carousel with the station I.D. and advertisements loaded in <br>that. It was cam-and-relay operated, washing-machine technology. That <br>KPMO automation machine was called Mother. Jack told me, "If you're <br>doing your show [on KMFB] and it's a time KPMO is on and something goes <br>wrong with Mother the alarm will sound. Come in here and flip this <br>switch." I said, "What does the switch do?" He said, "It shuts the alarm <br>off."<br><br>That sort of radio station is a terrific waste of a high-power broadcast <br>frequency. It's so bad. I'm sure even you would agree it's not radio at <br>all and no station should be allowed to keep its license operating like <br>that. But people would call every day about KPMO and say how great the <br>station was and how much they liked the music, and they'd request songs, <br>and we were supposed to say, "Of course. I'll tell the deejay right <br>away. Thank you for listening." A great deal of what you're running on <br>KZYX is automated, recorded shows from a thousand miles away that the <br>computer just plays without any attention required, and much of the rest <br>is smiley-face cloyingly saccharine self-congratulatory crap and <br>slackers I.D.ing the station and playing CDs or merely pressing a button <br>to play a playlist. The few who are seriously working at it deserve to <br>be paid for their work. Even the slackers deserve to be paid for their <br>work. They show up, don't they? They do their time, don't they? You <br>can't justify paying the manager, who does nothing, $60,000 a year more <br>than all the airpeople working to prepare and then show up and do their <br>shows, all of them, all put together, all year long. One guy doing <br>nothing being paid everything. A hundred people doing everything being <br>paid nothing. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe you can justify that. Try. Do it on <br>the air.<br><br>And he really does /nothing/. The program director directs the programs. <br>The business underwriting coordinator coordinates the business <br>underwriting. The operations manager manages operations. The bookkeeper <br>keeps the books. And when something breaks that nobody at the station is <br>competent to fix, there's a real radio engineer a phone call away. <br>What's left for a manager to do for all those hours? He doesn't even <br>answer the phone when you call the station. You know, he has people to <br>do that for him. So how is he worth the $5,000 he sucks out of the <br>station for himself every month, month in and month out? He knows <br>/nothing/ about radio. He's only in it for the money. And you know that. <br>And you hired him and you keep paying him. Seriously, trustees, WTF.<br><br>Your cheerleaders and people who don't know any better defending what <br>you do is no indication that you're doing it right, and it's nothing to <br>be proud of. You know what would be? If anyone at KZYX could think of a <br>single name of a person who ever spoke out, on or off the air, against <br>the management, against the way you allow management to run things, and <br>got to keep his airtime, paid or not. But you can't, because there isn't <br>anyone like that, and that's tyranny. That's the definition of tyranny. <br>It's not community radio, and it's not public radio. There's nothing <br>special about you. You're a run-of-the-mill NPR satellite station, a <br>private club squatting on public frequencies, keeping others who can do <br>a much better job, and who really do a much better job, from having a turn.<br><br>For general consumption: Facts: the manager and his gang lieutenants in <br>the office at KZYX pay themselves close to $300,000 a year, all told. <br>That's nearly twice the money /all/ the pledge drives all year actually <br>bring in. So when they tell you that the station needs your money to <br>keep the great shows you love on the air, that's clearly a lie. Except <br>for when the bosses step in, the people begging you for money on the air <br>are not being paid at all. It costs no more than a dollar an hour to <br>keep all MCPB's transmitters and all the electronics and all the studios <br>on and running, and every penny you pledge to KZYX in return for calling <br>yourself a member, whatever that means, goes directly into the bank <br>accounts of the people who pretend to run the station. And the only <br>thing the manager truly must do to keep the station on the air, besides <br>a lazy afternoon's worth of every few weeks, is to somehow arrange his <br>life to not stumble drunkenly into the transmitter shack and kick the <br>plug out of the wall. Radio equipment is astounding reliable. A <br>broadcast transmitter can easily go twenty years without requiring <br>repair, and usually what goes wrong is a five-dollar cooling fan wears <br>out, and the solution is to get another five-dollar fan, take the old <br>one out and stick the new one in.<br><br>If you'd rather support real radio and help out a real radio station <br>that really needs your money, and that really spends all the money it <br>gets on rent and equipment and license fees and water and electricity <br>and phones and internet and so on, go to KNYO.org or KMECradio.org and <br>click on donate and you can trust that you're getting your money's worth <br>there. KNYO-LP serves Fort Bragg. KMEC-LP serves Ukiah. And if you want <br>airtime on either of those stations for your quirky radio project you <br>can get it, and you won't be waiting years for that, either.<br><br>--<br>Marco McClean<br><a href="mailto:memo@mcn.org">memo@mcn.org</a><br><a href="https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com</a><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>Kzyxtalk mailing list<br><a href="mailto:Kzyxtalk@lists.mcn">Kzyxtalk@lists.mcn</a>.org<br><a href="http://lists.mcn.org/mailman/listinfo/kzyxtalk" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">http://lists.mcn.org/mailman/listinfo/kzyxtalk</a></blockquote></body></html>