[Kzyxtalk] The Big Lie

[sako4 at comcast.net]

SOMETHING TO KEEP IN MIND WHEN CONSIDERING TO PLEDGE TO KZYX -- THEY LIE! 

by John Sakowicz 


The budget of KZYX is about $570,350. Meanwhile, the budget at KMEC in Ukiah is something like $19,000. 

The difference? 

KMEC is all-volunteer. On the other hand, KZYX has paid staff that sucks the very life force out of the station. They are bankrupting KZYX. 

And what is the lie? 

The lie you're being told during the current pledge drive is that local programmers at KZYX need that $570,350 to stay on the air. It's a lie. A big fat lie! The programmers don't need the money, because they don't get the money. Any money. Zero. Zilch. Nada. They don't see a cent. Not even gas money. Who gets the money? KZYX staff gets the dough. Lots of it. $234,502 in salaries and benefits, with another $18,554 thrown in for taxes. 

Don't believe me? See: http://kzyx.org/Board/MCPB%20FY2015%20Budget%20As%20Passed%207-7-14.pdf 

Think about it. 

We do great radio at KMEC. Maybe even better than KZYX with their big bucks. Just this week, I did an interview with Hedrick Smith, who has won two Pulitzer Prizes for news reporting as the Washington bureau chief at the New York Times and three Emmy Awards for documentaries on Frontline at PBS. 

Earlier this year, I've done a series of interviews with equally well-known and respected whistleblowers: Tom Drake, Bill Binney, Kirk Wiebe, and Russ Tice at the NSA; Coleen Rowley at the FBI; Ray McGovern, Mel Goodman, and Patrick Eddington at the CIA; Elizabeth Murray at the National Security Council; Mathew Fogg at the U.S. Marshall's Service; and Peter Van Buren and Mathew Hoh at the U.S. Department of State. 

All of these interviews are archived. Many are posted with video to Youtube. Our Youtube audience is big, and it's getting bigger every day. Our interview with Ray McGovern has already attracted over 3,500 viewers 

Soon, these interviews will also be posted for the widest possible distribution through NPR's Public Radio Exchange and Pacifica's Radio4All. And the interviews have already attracted attention...national attention. A major foundation wants to fund a curriculum based on the interviews for the next generation of whistleblowers in Washington. It''s pretty exciting. 

Keep in mind that I am one of only 15-20 programmers at KMEC. We all do good programming...really good programming. And we do it all for about $19,000 a year. 

How do we do it for only $19,000? Because we're all volunteers. KMEC is truly "community radio", as is also true for KNYO, where our friend Marco McClean hosts a wonderful show. 

His op-ed is found below. 

The truth? 

KMEC and KNYO are community radio stations. KZYX is not community radio. KZYX is more accurately described as a jobs program for the people who work there. 

And oh, by the way, the folks at KZYX won't disclose their salaries. And that, my friends, is truly pitiful for a station that purports to call itself "community" or "public" in any way, shape, or form. 

How do I know all this? Well, I'm not only a programmer at KMEC, I'm also on the Board at Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, the parent of KZYX. And I ask questions...questions that you, the listener, should also be asking during this pledgge drivve. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Marco McClean" <memo at mcn.org> 
To: "kzyxtalk" <kzyxtalk at lists.mcn.org> 
Cc: "announce list @ MCN" <announce at lists.mcn.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, June 3, 2015 4:38:35 AM 
Subject: [Kzyxtalk] Announcing a timely point or two about KZYX, or rather MCPB. I've made them before, so I'll be brief. 

(I don't mean to clutter the Announce list. If you want to discuss this, 
please check the address field and follow up in kzyxtalk or Discussion 
list or reply directly to me. I'll be happy to read what you have to say 
on my radio show on 107.7fm KNYO in Fort Bragg.) 

A timely point or two about KZYX: 

When airpeople tell you in a pledge drive that KZYX needs your money to 
keep their shows on the air, they're telling you something that is not 
true. They may not realize they're lying-- they may really believe what 
they're saying-- but if that's so it's because information has been 
deliberately kept from them by very bad managers who have been using them. 

The total of all money required to operate KZYX and "keep the great 
shows on the air" never even approaches half the amount in the annual 
CPB grant, without which the station would have failed utterly every 
year of its existence-- that's how bad the management is. It means: 
every dollar pledged or donated or sent in as membership money goes not 
to operate or house or improve the station but to enrich a handful of 
people at the top. John Coate alone sucks $60,000 out of the station 
every year. That's 1,200 fifty-dollar memberships. Mary Aigner and David 
Steffen and Rich Culbertson each suck $40,000 out of the station every 
year. (I /think/ they do. The financial records which by law should be 
readable by any member are obfuscated where they're not withheld, so I 
have to estimate.) From what I'm able to glean from the deliberately 
confusing financial reports, just Mary, David, Rich and John represent 
an ongoing annual $180,000 drain on the station. That's the equivalent 
of 3,600 fifty-dollar memberships, where the station only has about 
2,000 active members. The solution to this should not be to plead for 
ever more money; it should be to spend existing money on the station 
itself instead of on the CEO and his cronies. 

When I and other members pointed this out and when I suggested that John 
Coate take a voluntary pay cut to solve the signal problems of the 
station he's supposed to be managing, we were called /haters who want to 
destroy the station/. 

And here, I'll just repeat one paragraph from my latest letter to the 
editors of the Anderson Valley Advertiser and the Ukiah Daily Journal: 

If the airpeople are expected to volunteer their time and energy and 
talent, why is it beneath John Coate and Mary Aigner and David Steffen 
to similarly volunteer? If it's ridiculous to consider even mildly 
throttling back on the money diversion that John's and Mary's and 
David's salaries represent --which amounts to endlessly hemorrhaging 
many times the actual cost of running the station-- how can the board 
continue to declare it ridiculous to pay the airpeople a meaningful 
stipend for the airpeople's essential work? If the board's reasoning is 
that John and Mary and David do better work for being paid, why should 
that not apply to the airpeople? They call the airpeople their 
"wonderful volunteers" --well, get John and Mary and David to 
wonderfully volunteer and they can be wonderful volunteers too, and the 
station will have hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to spend and 
never have to do another smarmy pledge drive ever again. Think of it: 
they could dispense with all their soul-shriveling lying about how much 
the station needs pledges and donations "to keep the great shows on the 
air." The board could just live and enjoy it and be people and do their 
own unique shows, if they're the sort of people who want to do radio and 
lift people up to do radio and give people access to the tools to do 
radio and then step out of their way, and if they're not, why are they 
on the board of a community radio station? 

The people who are really hating are not the ones who point out true 
things like this, they're the bad managers and the board of directors 
who enable the bad managers. And the currently suspended broadcast 
license is not the fault of the members who complained to the FCC in an 
effort to shake some sense into the board to either rein in the bad 
managers or replace them with good ones; it's the fault of the enabling 
directors on the board and the bad and/or greedy and/or incompetent 
managers they enable. 

The apparent opinion of the board's Locutus (Stuart Campbell) --that 
KZYX is such a vast and complicated operation that it requires a 
well-paid tyrannical bureaucratic cabal to make the trains run on time-- 
is clearly not true. Other community radio stations live quite well on a 
tenth the money KZYX wastes (!) and they make improvements, and their 
airpeople show up to functioning studios and do their shows. And when 
things break they get fixed, and when electrical problems arise they get 
dealt with, and their finances and operation are transparent and the FCC 
doesn't yank their license. 

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

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

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