[Kzyxtalk] Safe Harbor at KZYX, by Dennis O'Brien

[Marco McClean]

Re: Safe Harbor at KZYX, by Dennis O'Brien (in AVA)


Dennis, go to http://jukebox.kzyx.org/ and then play Up In The Night, 
Saturday, May 7, 10pm. Skip ahead two hours into the show (about 
midnight, coincidentally when I was driving past the station on my way 
to Juanita's) and you'll hear motherfucker this and motherfucker that 
and tits and ass and dicks and cunts and so on, and there's nothing 
wrong with that, and there won't be a problem for that airperson nor for 
KZYX because no harm, no foul. The FCC explicitly states that it cares 
not a whit for swears during Safe Harbor hours.


In fact, just about every time I have tuned to KZYX in the last /year/ 
there have been swears aired, and not just in the Safe Harbor hours. 
There was a Women's Voices show at 7pm around Xmastime, during Mary 
Aigner's reign, where a woman in a recorded speech about the New Age and 
comets and the transformational vibratory power of wymyn ejaculated a 
few choice swears, for example. I was listening in the car, and when I 
got to where I can use high-speed I went to the website and saved it, 
you know, to be able to bring it up later in conversation and back the 
story up. And there are swears in music on other shows, of course; 
you're right about swears in popular music played on thousands of radio 
stations regardless of time of day and how stupid it would be to require 
a deejay (or a special employee --yes, that's right; they actually have 
a special employee for this at KZYX now) to listen to every new song (!) 
and vet it for nursery suitability. (When I had a show on KMFB in the 
early 1980s, the entire record library there had been vandalized by a 
station manager from the Matt Huber era who went through the thousands 
of LPs on the yards and yards of shelves and took a screwdriver and 
gouged a divot across every track whose content offended him.)


Mary Aigner, when in her terrible power at KZYX, used swears in music 
and speech solely as an excuse to eject and keep out airpeople she 
didn't like, not because they were doing bad radio --they weren't-- but 
because they just bugged her by not constantly kowtowing properly to 
her. Ones she liked could /stab a kitten to death/ and keep their show. 
That's all there was to it. Now, Lorraine Dechter probably won't allow 
Machiavellian retaliation of the Mary Aigner kind. We don't know yet. 
Lorraine has only been there for a couple of months.


/My/ show hasn't been on the air on KZYX for a quarter of a century. 
When Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio is scheduled on KZYX, you'll have 
some indication that things have really changed for the better, and that 
the old days are over. Until then, not.


Talking and writing to the board doesn't do any good; it's like talking 
to a wall. Keep it up --I will, too-- but there's zero indication that 
the individual boardmembers even get what you write to them by using the 
form buried in the website. I wrote to them a week ago and none of them 
replied. I've written to Raoul every week since he moved in; he's never 
replied, even to say, "Got your email, thanks." Lorraine invited me to 
talk to her and she gave me an hour and a half, and that was 
encouraging, but however wonderful and soothing a den mother Lorraine 
is, the job of managing KZYX is not worth $5000 a month, especially with 
an office full of superfluous chair-fillers collectively getting even 
more than that for doing make-work projects that really the manager 
should either be doing herself or generating shortcuts for or outright 
rejecting as nonsense.


If the bosses are being paid for whatever they imagine /they're/ doing, 
the airpeople should be paid for their best work, encouraging them to 
/do/ their best work, even --especially-- the ones who swear like Volga 
bargemen (the kid they've got on Saturday night plays a great show). And 
freedom of speech has to mean freedom of speech, because otherwise no 
words mean anything at all.


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