[Kzyxtalk] KNYO: The way real radio works

[Tim Gregory]

thanks for toning down the usual mmcc hyperbole, and for a 'mccleaner' summary of
your aggravations...

small is beautifuller, but not always beautiful. if you put a 40-hp vw motor in a
jetta, you won't get out of the driveway...marco, you still don't allow for
fundamental questions of scale, in terms of content as well as actual mechanics...

the historically direct symbiosis we have with npr is the most obvious omission from
your straw dog/knyo comparisons. legal exposure is another.

straw dog: [urb dictionary] In business, something (an idea, or plan, usually) set
up to be knocked down. It's the dangerous philosophy of presenting one mediocre
idea, so that the listener will make the choice of the better idea which follows.
It backfires with some frequency, as the listener (out of sheer perversity) will
insist on the straw dog.

cf. also aesop's 'the fox without a tail'...
---

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

-end-

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