[Kzyxtalk] Regarding the latest debacle at KZYX.

[Marco McClean]

Regarding the latest debacle at KZYX.  --by Marco McClean


     It's a great word: debacle. I like all three ways people pronounce it.


     Quite by chance I came across a visual metaphor for the modus 
operandi of KZYX since its inception. This, like that, is a syncopated 
comic masterpiece of failure and then jump-cut return to 
ready-to-fail-again state. It comes with commentary by James Vincent, 
and here's a link to it: http://tinyurl.com/AMetaphorForKZYX


     Study that, then read this: Recently Lorraine Dechter, having been 
sabotaged materially and organizationally from the get-go, wrote that 
her abrupt resignation as manager after six months (recall Raoul van 
Hall's having lasted only six weeks, so props to Lorraine) was a "mutual 
decision". Mutual between what parties? Because if the decision was 
mutual between her and the board, then the board met unethically. Again. 
And it's not merely unethical; conducting station business as a board 
without public notice or participation is against the law and threatens 
MCPB's corporate personhood.


     And there's nothing on the KZYX website about this situation, and 
of course no discussion on the air. I'm sure you remember my having 
pointed out numerous times how peeved-Nixon/Secret-Squirrel the inner 
politburo of MCPB is and has always been.


     All problems of KZYX could be solved by putting a prominent link on 
KZYX.org to an unmoderated forum open to airpeople and members and the 
public, who pay for KZYX in taxes whether we like it or not. $4,000,000+ 
just in tax derived money has disappeared into MCPB, plus another ten or 
eleven million dollars in membership and anonymous big-ticket donor 
money: a recipe for corruption. And that's while the MCPB board and 
their close sycophants laugh at the idea of paying a pittance to the 
airpeople, without whom they'd be just another automated NPR station, 
and they'd /still/ be paying the handful of shlubs in the office a 
quarter of a million dollars a year to sit there and watch the computer 
blink, and answer the phone to say that whoever you're calling for is 
not available, and let the needlessly overcomplicated infrastructure go 
to hell, so the airpeople have to declare on a regular basis, on the 
air, that something's wrong, and ask any listeners who might know who to 
call to fix it (!) to please do so.


     KZYX breaks down more often than KNYO does, and KNYO has several 
remote studios, and everything else KZYX must maintain, and also has a 
performance space, but does it all on a budget of less than $12,000 a year.


     Last year I applied to manage KZYX, from a position of a deep 
understanding of publishing and broadcasting in general and local radio 
in particular, both commercial and nonprofit. The Stuart 
Campbell-appointed manager-search committee chairman threw my 
application away without even considering it, and when a John Sakowicz, 
then on the board, read in the newspaper that I'd applied, and he 
wondered why he had to read it in the newspaper to find out, that same 
chairman lied to him that I had never applied. The board hired Lorraine. 
So why would they undermine her, and sabotage her, and /resign/ her? 
Because it's their nature. Again, see James Vincent's commentary on a 
comic GIF: http://tinyurl.com/AMetaphorForKZYX


     Just to get us all on the same page: in the real world running a 
radio station is dead easy. A transmitter is as reliable as a 
refrigerator and uses a comparable amount of electricity. A little home 
or office refrigerator (or a low power radio transmitter) uses a few 
hundred watts, and a big high power one uses a few thousand watts. 
Electricity costs about 15 cents per thousand watts, per hour. There is 
no way, short of abject crookery or mental retardation or a rat's nest 
of bureaucratic financial OCD for a radio station with a 4,000 watt 
transmitter and a fifty watt STL and two thirty watt translators to cost 
$600,000 a year to run. That is many times too much; it's /fifty times/ 
what KNYO costs. If the vermin at the heart of KZYX can be sieved out 
and exposed to the light, the airpeople can all be paid and the tech 
problems can be solved, and my show can be on KZYX at last, and there'll 
still be a fortune left over.


     I'm copying this to the board(*), to make sure that comes up as an 
agenda item for the boardmembers to discuss out loud with each other and 
the attendees at the coming meeting. Bring the financial books.


(*) Rather, I'm copying it to the /comment box/ buried in the website, 
as the individual board members still refuse to make their contact 
information available. This is another ongoing problem that should be 
addressed at the meeting, as there's no way to know that Stuart Campbell 
doesn't still have access to that box, to intercept and interfere with 
material meant for the other boardmembers, which he did routinely when 
he hijacked the office years ago, and why would he give up the keys, 
given his history? In fact, it would possible for a single person with 
such web and email keys to be the source of a great deal of at least the 
latest few years of never-ending dysfunction at KZYX. I wouldn't be 
surprised at all if that person turned out to be Stuart Campbell, though 
from what I've seen at board meetings Meg Courtney matches him for sour 
spite. Tch, the whole bunch of them have the sense of humor of a box of 
hammers. I'm not ready to lay down any bets, I guess.


-- 

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

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