[Kzyxtalk] Letter to the MCPB (KZYX) board of directors. Reply requested.

[Tim Gregory]

1] jeff wright 86'd from a board meeting? there's hope for us yet!

2] marco, the tin man, needs a heart...maybe then he'll do radio for us...
---


A few thoughts on the MCPB (KZYX) board meeting in the pool table and
ice machine room of the Cliff House in Fort Bragg on Monday, May 2.

The income statement slapped together for the meeting shows something
like $540,000+ to run the station this year, and every year before it's
similarly enormous-- $500,000 or $600,000-- I may be wrong but I think
one year it was $675,000. That's many times what it should cost.
(Compare: KNYO does the whole job for $12,000 a year.) So where are all
those mysterious extra hundreds of thousands of dollars going every
year? We're going to find out at some point; you might as well come
clean now. I know where $140,000-to-$190,000 have been coming /from/
every year --your tax-derived CPB grant, that bailed you out and saved
you from utter failure every year of MCPB's existence-- but you're still
getting that grant (and still failing were it to vanish) so...?  And
it's nice that you're paying lip service again to serving the Native
American population by squirting the Native American News podcast
through the transmitter, but that's a matter of a few mouse clicks to
schedule it in the automation and from then on it just cues up and plays
itself, and those mouse clicks were omitted by the last couple of people
you unwisely picked to pay to make decisions at the station, and that
came back to bite you when you lost $40,000 of your grant complement
this fiscal year because of not meeting a BOLDFACED REQUIREMENT to serve
the local Native American population.* It's nice of Lorraine to have
noticed and clicked that mouse, and maybe next year CPB will turn the
money flow back up to where it was, but that's all that amounts to:
getting back on the higher tier teat on the mutant public udder you're
used to, because you can't make it without Uncle Sugar, because you
won't even try to learn how. As long as KZYX is supported by tax money,
everyone in the listening area should have a vote on how things go
there, and a truly complete financial breakdown should be published. I
heard that several recent years of complete financial records are still
being withheld from even the paying members.

*Here's how I'd do it. Call the local Councils of Tribal Elders, or
whatever they call themselves --call a casino and find out; ask to speak
to Vinny or Chooch-- offer them regular airtime for free, and send them
each a fully configured suitcase studio ($300), and maybe a nice fruit
basket. And put them on the air.

Meg, your agenda-item thank-you to John Sakowitz for his years of
service on the board, where you ended with a very low but recordable
kvetch about how expensive it was to have him to kick around (now that
you don't have to anymore) said volumes about your misplaced focus. KZYX
has always been hemorrhaging money because of bad management that Sako
has always been trying to get to the bottom of and you thwarted him at
every turn, and the legal expenses you incurred punching your own self
in the face to swat away the pesky fly of the FCC complaint were your
cabal's own fault. John Sakowicz didn't cost you that money; you did.
You should smile sheepishly and admit it. And get some ice on that eye.
Ice is civilization.

I remember yez all praising John Coate to the skies about what a genius
he was at running the station, and I remember all the propaganda he
produced on his own behalf for the web page, including about putting
thousands and thousands of dollars and so much work into making things
reliable --professional battery backup systems, and so on-- and a
photograph of him on a ladder with the breeze ruffling his hair-- and
still when the power flinks off for ten minutes so does the entire radio
station. It isn't that it's such a big deal to have dead air or static
for ten minutes every once in awhile, it's rather that's just another
example of what terrible judges of character and quality and expertise
you boardmember insiders have been when you chose people to be
essentially the station's hood ornament. John Coate was a /disaster/ for
KZYX, in a long line of similar disasters. It's still too soon to tell
about Lorraine but, people, your track record is not good.

And the praise and applause I read about for Mary Aigner's reign when
she finally relinquished her deathgrip on things... Meg, outside your
bubble, Mary Aigner is nearly universally reviled, and for strong
reasons. I don't know if you saw the Johnny Depp /Alice In Wonderland/,
but Helena Bonham Carter (the Red Queen-- "Off with their heads!") in
that film is an uncanny portrayal of Mary Aigner in mannerisms and
persona, to anyone paying attention. And it's a testament to the
chilling attitude she engendered at KZYX that the airpeople who hated
and feared her during her power still fear to speak up about it, and
about their issues with bad station policy going forward. Like the
inability of you people to recognize that Safe Harbor is the law. It's
the law-- it's not something the jury's still out about; it's not a gray
area; go to the FCC's site and read it. It's been the law for decades.
Nobody at the FCC gives a rusty God damn if you swear during Safe Harbor
hours.

I heard a couple of people whining about how /hard/ it is to run a radio
station. It's not, actually. But if it's that hard for /you/, if it's
just so /difficult/, maybe it has something to do with the way you're
doing it; I mean, maybe you're just really bad at it and you should look
around and turn your efforts to something that's not so hard for you.
I've run newspapers that were much more complicated operations than
KZYX, and much more open to letting people in to do what they need to
do, and --you talk about egos? these were /writers/. A radio station is
a collection of equipment that, set up properly, is as reliable as a
refrigerator, as easy to use as a refrigerator, for any number of
operators, and only slightly more expensive than a refrigerator to leave
plugged in and running. Thousands of dollars a month for just phones and
internet? That is a total failure of imagination. And the discussion
about buying special equipment and the difficulty of training people to
do a remote broadcast or two over the course of the next year? Half the
people at KNYO do a remote broadcast once or twice a week each, with
their own computers and mics and mixers --I do one myself every two
weeks-- and the instruction sheet has two lines: 1. Open B.U.T.T.*,
check levels, look at clock, press start. 2. To end your show, press stop.

*Broadcast Using This Tool, a free streaming program that sends your
sound through the web to the radio transmitter.

About the thing I keep hearing from KZYX cheerleaders and, the other
day, from Lorraine-- that the airpeople don't /want/ to be paid: Perform
this thought experiment with me: pay the airpeople right now for their
work for the past year. Now imagine how many of them will tear up a
check for hundreds of dollars and say your money's no good here, and how
many more of them will smile happily and spend it on something they need
to live, or a visit to the dentist, or a new set of tires. And if, as a
couple of your entitled cheerleading sycophants have said,  it's a
piddling amount of money so why bother? Well, if it's that piddling an
amount, and it is to you, why not just pay it? And if the added
bookkeeping is the objection, let the airpeople log on to the
bookkeeper's website and submit their time in chunks or all at once,
whenever it's convenient, and let a service like PayTrust send out the
checks. And let the bookkeeper use her bookkeeping program to send out
the 1099 forms at the end of each year.

Bob Page, the one with the throat ailment, who was leaving being on the
board, said essentially that there's no reason to ever say anything that
upsets people in a meeting, that it's not helpful. In fact, the person
he directed his stage-whisper at, Derek Hoyle, had been telling nothing
but the necessarily told truth, as had been the behoodied Mister Wright,
who yez called the cops on and had them twist his arms behind his back
and hustle him away. Stuart Campbell /is/ responsible for a great deal
of what was very wrong with the so-called old regime, as well as for the
abysmal administrative mess left for Lorraine to navigate in her first
month. And there he is on the board again, where he really, really
doesn't belong. Where is there any indication that he'll help or
properly represent the airpeople any more than he did last time? And the
paying members, much less the taxpayers who've been bailing out MCPB
every year, see above, /were not given the opportunity to vote either
for or against him/. Keep that in mind. If he ever votes on or even
attempts to use his position on the board to influence you on any issue
that doesn't directly relate to proper treatment of the airpeople,
that's not justice nor any kind of democracy, and it's probably also not
legal.

But there he is on the board, so-- Stuart, if you'll arse yourself to
take a step in the direction of doing what you're at least on paper in
the job to do, look into Romantic Rahoolio's having made an airperson
cry by berating her, nearly his first act as so-called program director.
Look into how he threw a monkey wrench into the prospect of having Jerry
Fraley stick around and make and keep various systems of the station
attached in the right places and functioning properly for the airpeople.
Instead, after Jerry graciously pulls your chestnuts out of the fire one
last time he's likely gone for good. You're the airpeople's
representative, Stuart. Represent the airpeople. And confront the rest
of the board to get the airpeople paid what they're worth, because the
ones preparing for and doing their shows are why the station's there in
the first, second and last place. And when my show is on KZYX, I will
expect to be paid.

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


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