[Kzyxtalk] [MCN-Announce]- KZYX Board meeting last night -- update anyone?

[Marco McClean]

On 8/30/2016 3:20 PM, sako4 at comcast.net wrote:
 > Does anyone have anything to report about the KZYX Board meeting in 
Point Arena last night?
 >
 > Point Arena? Really? For a meeting as important as last night's 
meeting? For a station locked in what some are calling a death spiral?
 >
 > Point Arena is about as far away from the vast majority station's 
membership as any point on the county map as I can think of. I think 
it's been many years since the Board met in Point Arena.
 >
 > Clearly, the Board didn't want to field questions from the public 
about the recent resignations of Lorraine Dechter or Raoul Van Hall. Nor 
did the Board want to answer questions about the station's defective IRS 
Form 990s and other financial irregularities.
 >
 > Incidentally, no meeting agenda was ever posted by the Board.
 >
 > Secrets and lies. Secrets and lies. Same old story.
 >
 > -- John


     Yup. Several-hour round-trip almost no matter where it is, though. 
Who can go? And you're right, John; they count on that. Last year I sent 
a three-minute comment by email to the president of the board (Stuart 
Campbell then), to be read by a boardmember into the record of a meeting 
I couldn't attend, and he refused to allow it. So I told him to press 
/print/ and file the single sheet of paper in the station's public 
inspection file. Also no.


     Written public comments to a commercial radio station must go into 
the public inspection file, by law. Why shouldn't public comments to a 
noncommercial station also be available to viewers of the file? It takes 
more time to refuse than to just do it.


     It's not as though it's still the 1930s and you need an office 
floor of secretaries to do every little thing. An automatic, unmoderated 
forum open to everyone's participation, like the MCN Announce List, for 
example, but a web-based, not email-based forum, with a link on the 
front page of KZYX.org, and with all the boardmembers and the manager 
required to participate at least once a week, would solve all problems 
of the radio station by shining a light into its nether regions. And the 
record of it would be automatically inserted into the on-line public 
file. No more conniving. No more secret agendas, nor Nixonian 
personalities pulling strings from within their panic room, nor deciding 
on issues in advance, in secret, and then staging what I've long called 
Potemkin meetings to, as they actually wrote, inform the public about 
what they've already decided! Because it isn't just paying members who 
have a stake in KZYX; it's taxpayers who gave MCPB essentially 
indefinite use of three educational-FM-band frequencies, not to mention 
four million dollars-plus over the past 25 years, and who deserve better.


     I sometimes attend meetings of the Caspar South Water District. 
They have them in the library in Mendocino, three miles from Caspar 
South. The agenda is posted in advance, and information about the issues 
is brought to the meeting, and the issues are hashed out there with the 
active participation of affected taxpayers and ratepayers, and things 
are decided upon by the board /right there, in full view/. And the 
meetings are all recorded, and a boardmember /types up the entire 
minutes, including audience comments, naming all names/. And the water 
district has a smaller annual budget than MCPB (KZYX). And the water 
district pays everyone who works for them at the going rate, unlike 
KZYX, which pays a quarter of a million dollars every year to the 
superfluous shlubs in the office and pays zero to all the local 
airpeople actually doing the work of radio. Oh, and of course they ban 
from the air anyone who might point any of this out. "I know you have 
had problems with management here. You do good radio, but we're looking 
for people who are loyal," wrote Alice the program director.


     But, you know, even proper open meetings done splendidly, and held 
in an easy-to-get-to place, by people really trying to accomplish 
something beyond p.r. damage control and maintaining their own 
phony-baloney jobs, are difficult for many creatives to sit through. 
There's something about the psychic drone of a meeting. Here's a short 
video that expresses that:
http://boingboing.net/2016/08/30/bizarre-perfume-ad-by-spike-jo.html


     It's like Bret's Angry Dance but done to the Boom King song (in 
Flight of the Conchords) and in high heels. And it's an ad for some kind 
of perfume, but who cares? It's terrific. That's exactly how it feels, 
if not how it smells.


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