[Kzyxtalk] Start out on the right foot.

[Marco McClean]

 >Dennis O'Brien wrote: "Still looking for a candidate for Second 
District. May run ad if one not found this week. Received several 
requests for teleconference. We will set one up. We want to do our own 
mailer to membership. Postage alone will cost $1200, plus cost of 
printing, envelopes. Candidates can cover some, but we will be asking 
for support. The Proposals for Change have been well received..."

     Dennis, Marco here. Teleconference? Look into Skype: 
http://www.skype.com/en/features/group-calls/ Skype also works if your 
participants only have a land-line phone, though I think that actually 
costs something, only a pittance but something. But the cheapest and 
most sensible thing of all would be to have your meetings live on the 
air on KZYX, the way the radio station board meetings should be but aren't.
     They did a teleconference for a meeting of an advisory committee 
last year; they publicized it for a month in advance and the result was 
something like ten people connected at first. The sound quality was 
terrible. It was hard to understand what the committee members were 
saying; they were often talking at the same time as though they couldn't 
hear each other; participation was nearly impossible; it was bad. By the 
middle of it there were only two people listening in, blocked from 
speaking. In contrast, the radio station has excellent sound for anyone 
with a radio, and there's a bank of phone lines for people who need to 
comment. Your project is a perfect use for that. Taxpayers have already 
paid to put those things there, so you have a right to use them. And you 
already know how to use them.

     And thousands of dollars for postage to distribute a pamphlet and 
some forms? I'd be really surprised if as many as 3% of the members 
can't get email. Don't start out your effort to make things better by 
becoming just like the people you need to topple, who do everything the 
old-fashioned expensive hard way to justify their positions and 
ridiculous cashflow. Just get the membership email contact list and use 
that for free. Put forms on a web page and provide links to them. Also 
insist on using the radio station itself to disseminate your plans on 
the air during what's now merely a pretend news time.* A shake-up at 
KZYX is news. Everyone at any radio station, much more so a largely tax 
funded radio station, is a public person and so fair game. The board 
members and management and staff are all public people. Make the current 
powers at KZYX show their true colors, such as they are, by publicizing 
their refusal to play fairly. They keep their foot on the neck of the 
station and they keep their power and money by not playing fairly, and 
the county should have every opportunity to watch them demonstrate who 
and what they really are. That's news too.

     When you communicate directly with the membership, you will be a 
breath of fresh air by not asking for money. And you'd do well to point 
out that you're not any kind of a threat to the only thing members care 
about-- their favorite shows. Members will be able to hear brand new 
locally produced shows after the improvements to also number among their 
favorites, that they currently don't know anything about because they've 
been prevented from hearing them by the entrenched control freaks you 
must wrest control from to accomplish anything at all.

     You said earlier that you think it isn't feasible to cut back 
managers' pay to X dollars per hour actually worked, to equal what all 
airpeople should be paid per hour of airtime. It's important that you 
try anyway. This is an example in microcosm of the worldwide problem of 
concentration of wealth and power in the top fraction of one percent. 
Show that it can be fixed here in this little place where it's not only 
feasible but crying out to be done. You can do it.

     Also, in your suggestions for change you mention that afterward 
there would still be a strong prohibition against profanity. Look up 
Safe Harbor Hours on the Federal Communications Commission's own legal 
website. Start here and read carefully: 
http://www.fcc.gov/guides/obscenity-indecency-profanity-faq

     I'm not surprised that, after so many years of being afraid of 
being punished by a manager for expressing themselves in normal 
conversational English words, even many lifelong radio people are not 
aware that the FCC is, in the case of what the British call watershed 
hours and what we call safe harbor hours, not interested in addressing 
or even hearing complaints on the subject. Between 10pm and 6am radio 
people and callers and guests on the air are actually free to use the 
so-called seven deadly words without bringing any FCC wrath down upon 
either themselves or their station. That is solid law. KZYX management 
has, from the station's beginning, seized on even the most appropriate 
use of so-called swear words late at night as an excuse to get rid of 
people who won't kowtow properly to them. It's not only a test of 
whether you'll bend over for them or not; it's a trick they use to seem 
like they have no choice but to let you go, meaning kick you out, 
ostracize you and blackball you forever after. No-one ever points out 
that the incidents of actual serious real-world crimes occurring at KZYX 
that caused a great deal of trouble for the station have never at all 
involved people allowing passionate words to pass their lips on or off 
the air. In fact, it was /mismanagement/ that brought a lawsuit against 
the station and it was /mismanagement/ that brought complaints to the 
FCC resulting in the delay in renewing the license. Once more: 
/mismanagement/, not language.

     I've been availing myself of my full vocabulary --the right word 
for the right job-- since I started my current kind of show on KMFB in 
1997, and now at KNYO, with no problems legal or psychic, except where 
once in a great while --years between-- a deranged radio ad salesman in 
Ukiah would call to swear at me because he was so /angry/ that he heard 
certain /words/, you know, like /swell/, and /so's your old man./ It 
started in 2002 with an article I read about a scientific dispute 
between neighbors over whether or not dog urine would ruin decorative 
plants and, I dunno, maybe the guy had a bad experience that day with 
urine or something. I said, "Marco here; you're on KMFB," and he was 
screaming his head off about how no-one wants to hear anything about 
urine! and get off the air! and so on. And that was good fun and good 
radio. I was flustered and confused, but I dealt with it the best I 
could and that was that. A year or two later the same guy got upset 
about something else I said and went off in exactly the same way. And 
again in 2008. What can you do? There's always going to be somebody like 
that. That kind of person you can't fight or stop or reason with. You 
can only let them have their say, and that's good. That's the way it's 
supposed to be. It's just another one of the ways a radio station can 
and should serve the public.

     I had a show on KZYX, not like the show I do now but mostly just 
playing records, for four months in 1989, until Sean Donovan used my 
having described something as /bullshit/ at 2:30 in the morning to 
gleefully ban me from the air. Since then many much better radio people 
than I am have been dumped from KZYX on a similar pretext. It never 
comes from the listeners. Facilitator One comes to mind. She was the 
best, most interesting deejay they ever had, and Mary Aigner just didn't 
like her so Mary waited like a spider for a suitable trigger offense and 
then struck, and no more Facilitator One. That's the story I heard, 
anyway. I asked Mary about it and she clammed up and looked away. Ask 
her. Maybe she'll tell you.

     I suggest you change any kind of blanket prohibition of this or 
that to say something more like, "Just do your best as regards the law," 
which includes the Safe Harbor Hours, which are set aside for grownups, 
not that anyone has ever demonstrated that funny words can harm children 
in any way. Adult words on the street or in magazines or in a store or 
on television or radio don't harm children. The greatest danger to 
children is their own parents; children are in no danger from the 
conversation of strangers.

     Or don't even bother to say that. Isn't doing our best as regards 
the law what most of us are doing all the time anyway?

     I've been looking and looking, and I can't find where any American 
radio station in the history of the FCC has ever lost its license as a 
result of incidental profanity even in the daytime hours. /Obscenity/ 
was a listed factor in the Goat Gland Doctor's having lost a Midwest 
station eighty years ago, but the main issue in that case was not Dr. 
Brinkley's mention of terms for body parts, it was his constant barrage 
of advertising for quack bottle and jar medicine for which he received 
kickbacks from a network of pharmacies and manufacturers. Also he 
murdered hundreds of men by, among other means, surgically replacing 
their testicles with similar items removed from goats. (That's one thing 
I'll be reading about on my show this Friday. Brinkley was fascinating; 
at one point he spent his goat-gland money on putting up a 
one-million-watt radio station on the border of Texas and Mexico, that 
you could pick up all over North America, and that made wire fences and 
bedsprings zizz and spark for miles.)

     *And think of the strong prohibition against so-called character 
assassination in the same terms as prohibition of profanity. John Coate 
rejected Christina Aanestad from a proper place in doing news at KZYX 
because he's against --what's the term he used? --ah, activist 
journalism. Because she produced a news article where the questions she 
asked a politician struck John as disrespectful. Again, it's not a test 
of whether she could follow the rules --she was following the real rules 
of her profession, doing something that she knows all about how to do 
and John knows zero about how to do; it's rather a test of whether she'd 
kowtow to his control without his having to worry about it, and she 
failed that one, as anyone with any integrity would. Now, is it 
character assassination to point this out about John Coate? Or to list 
some of the good reasons I find him to be an angry, anxious, imperious 
prick entirely unsuited to manage an educational-band radio station? No, 
but he would think so. You must not set things up for the problems of 
the present administration to continue into the next. Because everyone 
who has ever tried to reform KZYX from the inside has made the same 
mistake of going along to get along. That's why nothing ever changes. 
You're just going to have to call a prick a prick once in awhile.

     The pretend news people now doing ten excruciatingly slow-motion 
and dull and safe minutes per day at KZYX can be replaced by a single 
bright little girl picked at random to read the Anderson Valley 
Advertiser aloud for half an hour and then mark her place for the next 
day. She'll be more comprehensive, more relevant, more informative, more 
timely and more entertaining, and everyone will be thrilled with 
Mendocino County's little sweetheart.

     More later. I'm sorry I missed your meeting. I could have got 
there, but I had a cold and I needed to sleep. It's probably better 
anyway not to go somewhere and spread a cold.

http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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