[Kzyxtalk] Loyalty and Labor Day

[Marco McClean]

On 9/4/2016 6:34 PM, John Sakowicz <sako4 at comcast.net> wrote:
 >
 > ...I'm thinking about taking Ed Keller's advice and finally filing my 
grievance over my suspension, so I can nail down this heretofore 
unwritten policy of a "loyalty oath", and sue the station to undo this 
policy.
 >
 > -- John


     John, it's not unwritten. The reason Sean Donovan banned me from 
KZYX in the first place, in 1989, was that I refused to sign a written 
oath to never talk about station business on the air, and then brought 
Mitch Clogg, who Sean had banned from KZYX probably for the same reason, 
to my show. I never got a grievance hearing --and who would have been 
the hearer? Sean Donovan? It was the same with you, John. Who would have 
conducted your hearing? John Coate? Stuart Campbell? Mary Aigner? Who 
would conduct it now?


     "Talking about station business on the air is grounds for losing 
your show." I think the airpeople still have to sign something like 
that. Certainly if an airperson were to so much as /squeak/ about 
wanting to be paid for his work he'd be canned in a Philo minute.


     By the way, here is exactly what Alice Woelfle-Erskine wrote, after 
I complained of having been treated like a bug and then ignored by the 
management of KZYX for a quarter of a century, and after I'd asked her 
who exactly makes the programming decisions now, if not the the program 
director, as I'd been told there was a "fresh new process for 
determining programming," and what exactly is that process? The proposal 
she mentions in the following paragraph was one I brought to the station 
in person in February of 2012 and emailed like clockwork every four 
months thereafter. In July of 2016, after Raul van Hall resigned after 
two months in disgust of the place, fresh program director Alice wrote 
to me (really, read this aloud to get the full benefit of the treatment):


 >"The way that programming decisions are currently happening is this: 
Potential programmers submit a proposal for a show. It is reviewed by a 
programming committee and that committee decides which shows are 
approved and when those shows will be aired. You submitted a proposal 
for a show, which I think sounds very interesting. The programming team 
has decided not to air it. We currently don't have an opening for a show 
of your format or length. One thing we consider when discussing 
programming is the programmer. It is important that the programmers on 
kzyx are reliable, accommodating, respectful, and committed to serving 
the station. The aggressive and demanding tone of your correspondence, 
and the mistrust you have of the operating procedures here at the 
station are not positive recommendations to you as a potential 
programmer. We are not motivated to give air time to people who display 
mistrust and aggression towards the station or its staff."


p.s., John, the chairman of the "new and improved" programming committee 
she describes is Stuart Campbell who, in one of his last acts as 
president of the board, appointed the chair of the /manager search 
committee/, who threw out my detailed offer to manage the station out of 
the hole it's in and then lied to a boardmember that I hadn't ever applied.


Why would I mistrust Stuart Campbell? Well, in Lord of the Rings terms, 
why would anyone mistrust Grimer Wormtongue? In A Series of Unfortunate 
Events terms, what's there to mistrust about Count Olaf?


I repeat: It's not possible for KZYX to cost anywhere near as much as it 
burns through every year. ($600,000). Either the board and management 
are phenomenally bad with money, or there's a clever thief among them or 
with his hooks in them, or both. Lorraine Dechter couldn't change the 
system there. Nothing has changed there since day one. Terrible, 
terrible people are in charge and they use bureaucratic chicanery and a 
cheerleading squad of naive sycophants and old junkyard dogs to keep 
change from happening.


A radio station is a microphone and a transmitter and federal permission 
to switch the transmitter on. All of that was taken care of at KZYX 
before the Berlin Wall fell. If electricity is 15 cents per 
kilowatt-hour and your transmitter continuously uses 4,000 watts, that's 
60 cents per hour. Sure, there are a few fees and rents and phone bills 
and a few old computers involved, but /$600,000 a year/? almost a third 
of which comes in a grant from CPB that they just have to play a few NPR 
shows to collect? and they can't pay the local workers?


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