[Kzyxtalk] Regarding the difficulty of unionizing KZYX airpeople.

[Marco McClean]

Regarding the difficulty of unionizing KZYX airpeople.

--by Marco McClean

     I read Toni Rizzo's self-righteous responses to John Sakowicz and 
Mary Massey. Here's a problem I see: after decades of management's 
tyrannical winnowing and arbitrary choosing and kicking-out of 
airpeople, the pool at KZYX is artificially stuffed with the sort of 
people to whom it would never naturally occur to do or say anything 
outside of the power's comfy margins, so people like Toni Rizzo actually 
/don't/ feel muffled or tyrannized over, so they're inclined to think 
anyone who objects to or even notices tyranny is wrong or even crazy, 
even people with genuine Kafka/horror stories about how they've been 
treated. There are people remaining on the inside (and people too newly 
arrived to have pushed one of Mary Aigner's freak buttons yet), 
airpeople who are too timid to break out and speak up, but-- say they 
do; the majority will overwhelm them the same way whether they squeak 
from behind a rock or shout from the housetops, and that's the catch: if 
this particular system were fair and democratic at all it would look 
much less fair and democratic for missing its false veneer of fairness 
and democracy. It's a kind of publicity math puzzle that naturally plays 
into the hands of the bad management/board. It's a propaganda trick that 
rigs itself.

     I agree with Mary Massey and so many others on the outs: Mary 
Aigner has got to join us in being on the outside. But so does Stuart 
Campbell, who plays information goalie for the board of directors who 
individually hide from dealing with the public on station issues. When 
you send something to the board, on the web page or via email, it 
doesn't go to the board; it goes to Stuart Campbell and /he/ decides 
what part of it to send along to the others, if any of it at all. It 
means the boardmembers are wielding power from behind (or underneath) a 
rock, given only the information Stuart wants them to have, and given 
(and giving) the false impression of transparency, and that is 
intolerable. Let Mary Aigner and Stuart keep their own radio shows, if 
they want to, but they shouldn't have any special power over everyone 
else. For the time being, Stuart's on the board; shouldn't that be 
enough power for him?

     If the rationale for Stuart Campbell being an information goalie is 
that it spares the boardmembers from having to spend five minutes a day 
dealing with the public, and the other boardmembers go along with that, 
then why are they directors of a public radio station? To accompany 
their power over the /tax funded station/ they should each be fully open 
to the public's input in every aspect of their byzantine pretzel of a 
process. And they should be individually contactable by airpeople who 
feel that this or that boardmember might be sympathetic to a problem 
they're having with, say, Mary Aigner or whoever becomes the general 
manager now that John Coate has fled, because once it's come to the 
point of recognizing a problem, that airperson has no incentive to 
discuss it with the very person who will be kicking him or her off the 
air on the next pretext that conveniently arises. Because, without 
access to the individual boardmembers, that's always been the entirety 
of the approved grievance procedure at KZYX: going to the same person 
who just unjustly yanked your airtime out from under you, in private, 
and expressing your disappointment, leaving unsatisfied, and then going 
away forever, having been told to keep your mouth shut, which I'm pretty 
sure wouldn't please Toni Rizzo. It's like anything else: until it 
happens to you it seems unlikely. Once it happens to you its a different 
story, though.

     The best answer to these problems --in addition to handing Mary 
Aigner her final paycheck and keeping her cleaning deposit, and if 
board/management will not allow a regularly scheduled truly open 
conversation on the air-- is to put an open unmoderated public forum on 
the KZYX web page, that airpeople and boardmembers and the public 
interested in the workings of the station can all read and participate 
in, out in the light of day. I've suggested that several times. I have 
had no indication that it got past Stuart, who replied simply, "We're 
not going to do that."

     Here's a start: the individual boardmembers' email addresses, at 
least, should be on the station's contact page.

     Matter of fact-- and I don't know why this didn't occur to me until 
now-- If you know individual MCPB boardmembers' contact info, send that 
to me and I'll hold onto it for a week or two, and if I don't see it on 
kzyx.org I'll just publish it myself. They're all public people engaged 
in a tax-funded public endeavor and they shouldn't expect to be allowed 
to go incommunicado like Secret Agent X-9.

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