[Kzyxtalk] KZYX.

[Marco McClean]

I see in the MCN announce listserv that Janie Rezner --80 years old 
now-- is still needing a place to move to on less than $700 a month 
after doing radio at KZYX for, what, fifteen years, probably. If 
management had been paying airpeople even a pittance for their work, 
which they could always easily do but have chosen not to in favor of 
sucking out of the station for themselves /two or three million dollars/ 
(!) over that same fifteen years, she might have 5-10 thousand dollars 
saved up in her mattress to make this difficult transition.

Sunday Richard Karch wrote to announce that Anne Feeney, folk musician 
in the old tradition and champion of workers everywhere, would be on 
folksy drawlin' Fred Wooley's deejay show on KZYZ at 1pm that day. I 
missed the event, but I wonder if Anne at all addressed the horrendous 
injustice of just the manager paying himself all of $60,000 a year 
before paying any of the real workers, Fred Wooley included, even a 
penny out of the $600,000 that Mendocino County Public Broadcasting 
pisses away every year. That's five or six times what it actually costs 
to keep the station's paperwork in order, and keep it housed and fed 
with electricity and communications services, and keep the transmitters 
switched on, so airpeople can bring their material in and do radio. In 
the real world radio is practically free. It's the monopoly of it that 
makes a commercial station worth a fortune to buy and sell, and a 
pumped-up podunk noncommercial station like KZYX, which should be even 
freer, relies on the public's false association of radio with great expense.

KZYX is constantly broke and constantly begging listeners and businesses 
for money, even with the $160,000-a-year tax-derived bailout they get 
from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and even though they have 
free use of three frequencies that together cover the whole County of 
Mendocino, and a high-power broadcast license is a /license to coin 
money/. That's how bad the board of MCPB and each new manager they hire 
for a hood ornament are at running KZYX. They are that bad at it. Or 
that crooked. You decide.

They're having another one of their pretend board meetings tonight. Like 
with all of their board meetings, it's an average round-trip drive of 
three hours to attend, for anyone who wants to and can afford to do 
that. They won't be putting the meeting on the air because, to them, why 
should they ever? And, in fairness, nothing ever comes of any of their 
meetings. No real discussion ever happens there. All votes among the 
board are unanimous. Nothing about the way they run the station or about 
the station itself ever changes or improves, and no-one even slightly 
clever and willing to take a chance and experiment is allowed to do 
radio there. It's like Kevin said to Randall in /Time Bandits/: "I don't 
understand you, Randall. You've got this brilliant thing and you're just 
/wasting/ it." What's their motivation for just squatting dully on those 
three educational band FM broadcast frequencies? Why are they preventing 
them from being used for what they're /for/? It's truly baffling.


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