[Kzyxtalk] Hi, Anne. I wrote something for the local papers in Mendocino and it just occurred to me that you might like to see it.

[Marco McClean]

Anne:

I do a radio show on KNYO-LP in Fort Bragg (CA) and KMEC-LP in Ukiah. I 
read aloud local announcements and whatever people send me to read, and 
then the interesting parts of whatever else I've been reading all week, 
and I don't encourage people to call, but sometimes they do and I put 
them right on the air, and sometimes people walk in off the street with 
their guitar or whatever and play a short set into the guest mic. For 
breaks I play recorded music (I've played a great deal of your and Chris 
Chandler's catalog over the years). I've been doing this same show since 
early 1997 (on KMFB for the first almost 15 years. At the end of 2011, 
when KMFB was bought up by a radio station flipper and converted to 
automation and Fox News, I started applying to get my show on KZYX, but 
they've been ignoring and stonewalling me ever since. I'm not gonna bore 
you with that entire sordid story, but I think this might interest you, 
since it mentions you favorably in your capacity as a dedicated folk singer:

Dear Editor (Anderson Valley Advertiser, Willits News, Ukiah Daily 
Journal, Fort Bragg Advocate/Beacon:

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 KZYX 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 
Corporation 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 
(Monday). 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, Albion
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com