[Kzyxtalk] Mary Massey's FCC complaint about Mary Aigner's having allowed some swear words to reach the air and the obvious double standard.

[Marco McClean]

Re: Mary Massey's FCC complaint about Mary Aigner's having allowed some 
swear words to reach the air and also having a double standard.

--by Marco McClean

     On one hand I don't like the idea of people complaining about 
so-called dirty words that accidentally or artfully waft out onto the 
air, because it lends legitimacy to the screwy idea of it being against 
the law to just talk. It's not against the law to talk. On the contrary, 
it's unconstitutional to make any sort of law that even lightly chills 
talk, political or poetical or any other kind, at the beach, on the 
street or on the radio. The FCC pays better than mere lip service to 
this. Go to https://www.fcc.gov/guides/obscenity-indecency-profanity-faq 
and scroll down to /What is the safe harbor?/

     On the other hand, Mary Massey, your complaint points up the 
hypocrisy in Mary Aigner and Co. airing swear words on their own account 
without receiving a retributive thumping, while they continue to use the 
same words as an excuse to throw others out and blackball them and 
ostracize them ever after, which KZYX has been doing since the 
beginning. It happened to me 25 years ago in 1989. Sean Donovan hated me 
with a hot hate, and he used to drunk-call me on the phone, when I was 
doing my show, and tell me things like that he just got up to piss and 
he decided to give his old pal Marrrr-co a ring. So what's going on, 
Marrrr-co? /Ugh./

     He waited until I described something as /bullshit/ (at two a.m.) 
and that was it for me. No recourse, no opportunity to apprise others of 
the injustice, certainly no discussing it on the air --because no access 
to the air-- and then when I went to the next programmers' meeting to 
talk about it, Sean Donovan, the manager, was lording it over the 
programmers' meeting, and he told his flunky Johnny Bazzano to call the 
police (!) and have me arrested for trespassing at the radio station. 
Months later still, when I went to the next programmers' meeting at the 
private house of Beth Bosk, (who had stopped Johnny from calling the 
police by saying, "Sean! What are you doing!") she turned me away from 
that meeting at the door, because, she said quietly, "I don't want to 
lose /my/ show." But of course she lost her show anyway in the next 
crackdown on things even inching in the direction of being a little too 
free for the poobahs at the station to countenance.

     And a similar fate befell lots of people over the years. No-one in 
a position of authority at KZYX deserves that authority, nor ever has. 
All KZYX airpeople even today must be timid and careful in their public 
and private lives not to ever say or do anything that might turn the 
management's Eye of Sauron upon them. Because they don't want to lose 
/their/ show. And that's not freedom. Its oppressive bullshit. Sean 
Donovan set the tone for that and it's been the same song ever since.

     Jesus, Sean Donovan was a piece of work. I remember him giving an 
encouraging fundraising talk about how many old people there are in 
Mendocino County, and what a good idea it would be to encourage 
specimens near to meeting their maker to include KZYX in their will. "We 
might even call the old folks' homes."  I: "Are you serious?" Sean: 
"They're gonna die anyway. And the station needs the money." That's 
right, it needed the money /to pay Sean/, just like it needs so much 
money now to pay John Coate and Mary Aigner and John Steffen and...

     Come to think of it, during the next-to-latest in its endless 
series of egregiously unlistenable pledge drives, in a moment I lingered 
on KZYX on my way up the dial to KNYO, I heard someone say something 
just like that-- encouraging listeners to consider putting KZYX in their 
will.

     A current frustration is that I want to write email to the other 
paying members of MCPB to point out how wrong it is that the operators 
of KZYX refuse to allow members to communicate with each other without 
being limited, censored and supervised. And I can't write email to the 
other members, because the operators of KZYX refuse to give out the 
membership list --they say it's for privacy reasons-- but it would be 
the work of fifteen minutes to put an open unmoderated forum on the 
subject of station business and operation somewhere on the front page of 
kzyx.org, where such a thing belongs. John Coate could do it tonight, on 
his iPhone, at the dinner table.

     Another frustration is that everyone on the board and in management 
of KZYX pants-on-fire lies out loud when they say that the community and 
the members control the station. In real life there's no two-way 
communication between members of MCPB and the board-- neither in private 
nor on the air. I've written to the boardmembers on several occasions 
and have never got even a /got your email, thanks/ in response. I did 
once get an email from Stuart Campbell saying that the board all (except 
for one-- Sakowicz probably) agreed (in what must have been a private 
unposted session) on Stuart's response to me, which did not provide an 
answer to any of the questions I've ever asked them but instead was 
Stuart's one-sentence statement that the board fully supports John 
Coate. That's it. Oh, right, also I got email from Stuart Campbell in 
jumping caps and exclamation marks that their not sending me a ballot 
until it was too late for me to use it to vote was in no way to be 
construed as preventing me from voting in the board election! That was 
an election with like a 25% turnout, so how many others didn't get a 
ballot? And I did get a pleasant note welcoming me as a member of the 
KZYX family when they cashed my membership check, and with the note came 
a photocopy of the schedule of shows, none of them my show nor anything 
at all like it but, you know, thanks /so/ much for the money.

     Another frustration is that they flush away hundreds of thousands 
of dollars (!) every year to pay a handful of bobbleheads in the office 
to wander in and out and behave as they please, and pay everyone else 
nothing. Just the amount the management suite --Mary Aigner, John Coate, 
David Steffen, etc.-- is paid would easily fully fund a dozen other 
little radio stations. Every membership dollar and even a little more 
goes directly into management's pockets; none of it helps the station in 
any way. Keep that in mind when you're asked to become a member and 
pledge money. If the managers were worth what they're being paid, KZYX 
would be the Cadillac of radio stations, and would distribute a full 
catalog of fine new local shows to hundreds of NPR stations. They're 
not, it isn't, and it doesn't.

     In addition KZYX receives vast sums of tax money every year, and in 
return for this it sits on a county-spanning collection of frequencies 
in the educational band and keeps out anyone who might say any of this 
on the air, much less do the kind of quirky innovative local free radio 
experimentation that the low end of the FM dial was set aside for. I 
want /my/ show on KZYX. It's a better show than most of what's there, 
including the NPR shows. And that's never going to happen until at least 
John Coate and Mary Aigner are removed, and-- I think I'm being very 
fair here, and I'm addressing the board specifically when I say this-- 
you don't have to remove them by firing them, if you're afraid to hurt 
their feelings; simply adjust their pay to be more in line with what the 
people actually doing the work of radio at KZYX are being paid --which, 
see above, is zilch-- and they'll quit on their own, demonstrating what 
they're really in it for in the first place. They're not in it for 
radio, and they're not good for the station.

     So I am a little conflicted about your complaint, Mary Massey. If 
your method of getting rid of bad, oppressive management just sets up 
whoever comes next to keep me and others like me on the outside for 
another eon, then the good news and the bad news cancel each other out. 
In another 25 years I'll be in my eighties. I and my listeners would 
like some positive action on this issue while I can still go several 
hours between toilet breaks and while I still have all my own teeth.

--------------

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