[Kzyxtalk] Kzyxtalk Digest, Vol 27, Issue 25

[Marco McClean]

John Sakowicz wrote:
> Subject: Re: [Kzyxtalk] Three Radio Stations on Sourcewatch
> To: kzyxtalk <kzyxtalk at lists.mcn.org>
>
> What does this mean, Scott?
>
> BTW, I owe you a call. I haven't forgotten your excellent work on the deficient KZYX audits during Coate's eight years. I hope that doesn't put the station's current management in jeopardy. I think Lorraine and Raoul want to do the right thing. -- John


John, Marco here. If Lorraine and Raoul want to do the right thing, why 
are they still sucking all the membership money out of KZYX and into 
their own personal bank accounts? I hate to sound like a broken record, 
but if Lorraine is getting $60K a year and Raoul $40K, that's the 
equivalent of 2000 $50 yearly memberships, and that's more paid 
memberships than MCPB even has. So when the airpeople, who are not being 
paid at all, are dragooned --or bamboozled, rather-- into giving their 
airtime over to begging listeners for money "to keep the great shows on 
the air", that's a big fat lie every time they repeat it. None of that 
money is doing the station any good; it's sliding though the station and 
out the other side like crap through a goose.


All the paid-for syndicated shows don't add up to $30,000 as an expense. 
The electricity for the transmitters and studios, and the phone and 
internet bills and music publishers' fees and tower space and studio 
rent and overhead and all the other expenses all put together come to 
less than $100,000. In short, all along, the station could easily have 
been entirely supported for less than a fourth of the way more than 
half-a-million-dollars that get processed in MCPB's mysterious 
bookkeeping system every year. Uncle Sugar has already given MCPB four 
million dollars to date, in six-month installments that so far have 
vanished as quickly as they appeared because of crooked and/or stupid 
management by MCPB from the beginning.


There's an old Chinese saying: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty 
years ago. The second-best time is right now." The so-called enlightened 
new regime can do the right thing right now. That would be for Lorraine 
to fire freshly-hired "program director" Raoul --he's got a lovely 
stereotypical avuncular FM radio voice and I'm sure he does a competent 
job of inserting a jazz CD in a slot and pressing /play/, but he's 
entirely unnecessary in the office; and she can fire David Steffen 
--also a superfluous chair-filler-- and take at least a 50% pay cut 
herself by offering to be paid by the hour for hours actually worked for 
the station, and use the fountain of money freed up to pay the airpeople 
for their shows and for prep time, the way the NPR airpeople are all 
paid for their shows, the way all the airpeople at KMFB were paid for 
our independently produced shows by a manager doing a manager's job. And 
that's just the most self-evidently obvious right thing on a long list 
of right things to do, right up there with figuring out and exposing to 
public view where all the rest of those millions and millions of dollars 
went, because they didn't just vanish into a crack in the time-space 
continuum, having never existed; they existed, and someone took them. 
Someone is still taking them, and it can't hurt the station to find out 
who they all were and are; it can only help.

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

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