[Kzyxtalk] KNYO: The way real radio works. No dictatorial and superfluous program director required.

[Marco McClean]

KZYX business underwriting coordinator David Steffen wrote:

 >Question for Marco.

 >Since you advise a potential programmer that using "swears" before 
10:00pm is a problem, how do you resolve the problem if a programmer 
uses prohibited language before 10:00pm? What is the method used to 
bring the station back into compliance?

     Marco here. Question for David Steffen.

     I carefully and laboriously searched the KZYX website and also the 
FCC website and found no notice that KZYX's broadcast license has been 
properly renewed. It just isn't there. A couple of months ago I asked 
about this of John Sakowicz, the only MCPB boardmember who will respond 
to me anymore --imagine that-- and suggested he pass my question along 
to the rest of the board and to the so-called news department, as an 
item to be investigated and reported on; Sakowicz sent my question to 
Stuart Campbell, who is the head of your politburo (president of the 
board, self-annointed CEO and general manager, elections fixer, definer 
of and appointer to all committees, and so on) and Stuart snipped that 
KZY/Z/ (no mention of KZYX) had been renewed so there's nothing to see 
here and certainly it isn't news (!) so the so-called news department 
won't be getting involved in this. (For general information, KZY/Z/ is a 
tiny transmitter about as powerful as a light bulb, that gets its signal 
from KZY/X/ and that rebroadcasts nothing but static if KZYX is out.)

     On the KZYX website, the KZYX license is listed as having expired 
on 12/01/2013, twenty-one months ago.

     Here: http://kzyx.org/Board/KZYX%20License.pdf

     In addition to my nearly 35 years of overground teaching, 
publishing, radio and television work I have some experience with 
broadcasting illegally, having built and operated, for about a month in 
1985, an automated truly public access radio station in Mendocino as a 
proof-of-concept project. It was less than a watt, and I paid a $400 
fine for having done it, but the liability was listed as potentially 
$10,000 per day of the offense. That's something to think about 
regarding KZYX, whose transmitter is as powerful as three bathroom 
electric heat logs, and so the question of its legality is in fact 
newsworthy, as is the fatuous and Nixonian cartoon character Stuart 
Campbell.

     As a subscribing member and so part owner of the station I wrote a 
three-minute statement on a number of matters to be read into the record 
by a boardmember --any boardmember-- at the June board meeting and also 
to be inserted into the station's public inspection file. I stated this 
in no uncertain terms. Stuart Campbell spoke for the full board in 
several private emails, probably devoting an hour to this, refusing to 
read the statement, and I have no confidence it was ever placed into the 
public inspection file as the law requires. (Every communication a 
member of the public sends to the station intended for the public 
inspection file must be filed. That's the law.) That's a huge FCC issue, 
a license-threatening issue-- that is, an issue threatening translator 
station KZYZ, which actually has a license on file to be threatened by 
Stuart's pouty refusal to act according to the law.

     Okay, here's my question, David: What have you or the so-called 
program director or the various managers or the other superfluous 
bureaucrats at KZYX done --in return for the millions of dollars of tax 
grant money you've sucked out of the station for yourselves over the 
years-- to bring KZYX back into compliance on terms that the real-world 
FCC actually cares a great deal about?

     People who write for my show are not "programmers" under my or 
anyone's thumb. They are writers, and their work gets on the air as-is 
because this is America not Communist China. The FCC explicitly states 
on its website that it isn't even slightly interested in hearing 
complaints about profanity and blasphemy aired during the Safe Harbor 
Hours --Mary Aigner's ongoing coyly prudish chilling of free expression 
at KZYX notwithstanding.

     People who do radio shows on KNYO are not "programmers" doing 
programs assigned to and prescribed for them by a mother hen program 
director ready to yank them off the air and banish them forever at any 
moment if they don't kowtow acceptably to her. They are radiopeople 
doing their shows their way. I don't expect you to understand that, 
David, but I'm holding it right up in front of your face; try to grasp it.

     KNYO and the Federal Communications Commission, unlike Mary Aigner, 
are willing to allow actual radiopeople a reasonable amount of slack 
because, again, the United States of America, not Communist China.

     As regards the time outside Safe Harbor hours, no U.S. radio 
station has ever lost its broadcast license because of a few swear words 
here and there. Nearly ninety years ago the Goat Gland doctor's 
permission to broadcast (at 100,000 watts) was revoked when the Federal 
Radio Commission (the FCC of the time) "found that Brinkley's broadcasts 
were mostly advertising, which violated international treaties, that he 
broadcast obscene material [medical advice, including the Latin terms 
for organs and appendages], and that his Medical Question Box series was 
'contrary to the public interest.'" [wikipedia]  The main point against 
him was the blatant advertising which, face it, we've all heard a lot of 
on KZYX though, even so, barely enough to cover the station's paying you 
to find ever more weaselly ways to fib that it's not really advertising.

     Speaking of which, David, I'd like to hear you explain how what you 
do is not unwarranted advertising, when insurance companies and alcohol 
factories and banks and multinational chemical agribusiness giants and 
the Koch Brothers pay for long ad-agency-prerecorded spots on the air, 
and keeping in mind that, despite the poor-mouthing script Stuart has 
the (unpaid) airpeople repeat ad nauseam about how the station needs 
$10,000 a week* to "keep the great shows on the air", on top of another, 
what, $25,000 just this coming Friday the 28th in a "mini pledge day" to 
"augment the news department's capabilities", in fact all the real 
operating costs of the station, including enough to pay the airpeople 
(though you don't, and why is that?), has always been covered by the 
ample Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant of, I repeat, tax money 
we, members or not, have already paid and continue to pay.

     Jesus Christ on a waffle: /$10,000 a week!/ Here's how much it 
really costs to run a 5000-watt transmitter: at 12 cents per kWh, $100 a 
week. That's a ten thousand percent markup you've got going on there, to 
provide a public service, yet. They don't even let Pentagon contractors 
get away with that.

     David, the purpose of an educational-band radio station is not to 
pay a handful of people at the top --that would be you, and Mary Aigner, 
and whoever Stuart will manipulate the board into selecting as the next 
manager now that John Coate has scuttled away-- to write disingenuous 
sniping emails to defend your indefensible jobs. The purpose of a radio 
station is to maintain the machinery of a medium for people like me to 
do our art and work on the air. You have failed and you continue to fail 
to justify yourself in any capacity. By any objective measure the whole 
bunch of you in the KZYX office are a pack of contemptible crooks, a 
closed club, a self-interested gang, a corrupt priesthood, a racket.

     Just the underwriters of my weekly late night show currently pay 
for about a sixth of KNYO's entire budget. Here's how they're 
underwriters: They pay the station's real bills, not any management 
salaries or perks or fluff, just the bills, and I mention them twice in 
seven hours: name, brief matter-of-fact description of service, address, 
telephone number; that's it. That's unambiguously underwriting, not 
advertising. Speaking of compliance.

     I'd be willing to bet that I put more concentrated time and effort 
every week just into preparing for my live KNYO show than anyone at KZYX 
puts into whatever they and you imagine you're doing there. Just for 
comparison with KZYX, look: at KNYO Bob Young alone does the work of 
everyone in KZYX' entire office, and he accomplishes this in one 
afternoon per month. And we stay in compliance with both the letter and 
the spirit of the law in every way noticeably better than KZYX does or 
ever has. And no need for days or weeks of unlistenable chuckleheaded 
pledge drives. And no bureaucratic aristocracy or their hangers-on or 
barking dogs keeping people out who want access to the natural resource 
everyone has a right to use. A radio frequency is a natural resource. It 
doesn't belong to you. It belongs to everyone.

*KZYX ran through $575,000 last year, when the entire operation and 
maintenance and overhead of the station, even as poorly managed as it 
is, cost about a tenth of that. The other nine-tenths of that, and the 
reason for your endless fundraising and interference with airpeople's 
work, and the firings, and the blackballing and ostracizing of good 
people who should be on the air there but aren't, is that people like 
you, David, are running the place for your own transparently selfish 
benefit. And that's why you all fly into a spitting rage at the "haters" 
when anyone points this out in public, like at a board meeting, say, or 
in the newspaper, because you and your co-conspirators have the 
undeserved power to prevent honest and open discussion of these issues 
on the air. Or do you have that power anymore, technically? /Is/ KZYX 
properly licensed? Inquiring minds want to know.

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

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