[Kzyxtalk] John Coate, KZYX dog in the manger

[Marco McClean]

[Editor, there are some italics, that I indicate by slashes, and there's 
a URL at the end. Please include these if you can.]

John Coate, KZYX dog in the manger
--by Marco McClean

 >John Coate wrote: "KZYX is the public FM station I manage. There is a 
group of people - I call them a hate group because they defame me by 
lying in letters to the editor and in online talk groups - who tries 
every year to get elected onto our Board of Directors so they can fire 
me. They lose every year. This year they were much better organized and 
their public statements were even more hateful than usual. But they lost 
big."

Oh, Jesus, where to start?

The fact is, John Coate, you and your pet board of directors, like all 
KZYX managers and enabling boards before you, manage KZYX so very badly 
that if it hadn't been for its annual six-figure (!) government bailout 
KZYX would have collapsed into dust every year of its existence. You are 
that bad at what you do, and every year you personally, John, suck the 
equivalent of well over half of all membership money out of the system 
for yourself, even though the station badly needs that money to solve 
the ever increasing signal integrity problems and to move the main 
studio and office, the face of the station, someplace where there are 
people. It wouldn't need the money if it were cared for properly by a 
good manager paid fairly for hours actually worked. But it isn't; it has 
you, and you are not caring for it properly but rather sucking it dry.

I repeat, since you came to KZYX, John, you personally have sucked half 
a million dollars (!) out of the station, while the sound and 
reliability and reputation of the station have become a running joke. If 
you were worth the salary you're paid, KZYX would be shining in the sun, 
the Cadillac of radio stations, running like a top. It's not.

And you're a coward, as are every one of the boardmembers and David 
Steffen and Mary Aigner, for hiding from a regularly scheduled straight 
honest leisurely uncensored live back-and-forth conversation /on the 
air/ about this and other glaring issues with the station, a 
conversation that should involve not only members but the general public 
who pay with their taxes whether they want to or not, and who should 
also get a vote but don't, speaking of the board elections, which as 
conducted are consistently a farce with a turnout and trust level worse 
than any banana republic's.

About your personal broadcast plea for money that makes an analogy of a 
restaurant serving food and then the customers can pay what they want 
later, so it's implied they should be ashamed to not pay... You have it 
backward and twisted but, okay, let's go with the restaurant idea. Tax 
funded Corporation for Public Food grants enough money to a private 
corporation, MCPB, to cover all overhead and meat and vegetables and 
supplies and equipment of this restaurant, so it can make and serve 
experimental and odd and provocative food that a commercial restaurant 
might have trouble making a profit on, and thereby educate the 
collective palate of the populace. But you and Mary and David, etc., 
/shovel every membership dollar into your own pockets/ in return for 
telling the (unpaid) prep cooks and (unpaid) chefs and (unpaid) waiters 
what kind of food to put on the tables, restricting it to the kind of 
food you feel comfortable with. People wander in and eat what's there, 
and it's food, so why should they complain; and if anyone, knowing the 
story and wanting to improve the situation, does complain you lie to 
them that they have control of the restaurant because they're members 
and they vote for the board that employs you so they should shut up, and 
they should especially shut up about how the restaurant only needs money 
to continue because it's burdened by you. And then they don't shut up, 
because why should they, and you get all butt-hurt about it, but you're 
keeping all their money for yourself anyway. See, it's a little 
different from the way you put it.

 >And John Coate wrote: "Well if you have to tell certain people they 
can't be on the radio in the way they want, it can make them very angry. 
But that is part of the job. In some cases their response is to come 
after me personally instead of getting their own act together."

John, those of us who you and Mary and the board and so on trash every 
day for years by shutting us out of airtime, on a frequency that doesn't 
belong to you but to the public, have our acts together. I've been 
writing and publishing and working in theater and doing radio all my 
long adult life, and I've forgotten more about media in general and 
radio in particular than you will ever know.

Here's how to get /your/ act together: Voluntarily give up the better 
part of what you and Mary and David are paid to sit on your thumbs, and 
instead spend it on fixing the STL signal path and on paying the people 
who are doing their shows: what the station is there for in the first 
place: quirky educational experimental non-commercial radio. And then 
leave them alone to do their work and their art without interference. 
Every one of them puts more time and energy into preparing for and doing 
their shows under your thumb than you put into maintaining the station 
in a state of staticky mediocrity, and you and Mary and David and the 
board deserve neither the power over others nor the personal income you 
guard like a pack of junkyard dogs.

Educational band FM radio was established by law to do things that the 
power structure and economics of commercial radio screen out. Yet the 
power structure at KZYX has always made airpeople as un-free to do those 
wonderful things as commercial stations do. You --John Coate, the MCPB 
board and the few fatuous rich wino friends you embrace-- are the 
problem. Maybe the junkyard dog image isn't right. Maybe you're more 
like a dog in the manger. You know, like in Aesop's fable of the dog 
keeping the ox away from the straw. You don't have a use for radio 
yourself; you don't know what to do with it except to sit on it like a 
lump, and when anyone comes along who wants to use it for what it's for, 
you dick us around and drive us away /just because/, and then you exult 
about it, as though you'd done some brilliant rock-star thing. What is, 
after all, the purpose of you?

Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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