[Kzyxtalk] In flagrante delicto. (was) Re: KZYX unfair to workers! (was) KZYX Board Election

[Marco McClean]

*Mary Pat Palmer* <mpatpalm at herbalenergetics.com> *wrote:*

 >Dear Marco:

 >I have a radio show.

 >This radio show allows me to popularize alternative and complementary 
medicine which I consider extremely important.

 >This radio show exposes me and my name to a far greater number of 
people than any other means I can achieve without buying advertisements.

 >We who have shows are not stupid Marco, however much you might like to 
insinuate that. I do not begrudge the payments to the hardworking staff. 
I wish everyone everywhere received $60,000/year. I see how hard the 
staff work, and, particularly after the several months preceding Diane & 
Rich's returns, what a very good job they do, and I know how hard we all 
work - I don't simply count the beans.

 >It is not about "no money to pay the airpeople", it is happiness that 
the staff are paid for their hard work. Nothing REQUIRES us, as
airpeople, to raise money on air for the management. It is voluntary. 
All public radio stations do this. No, I am not a "little person". I am
someone who uses my intelligence to promulgate issues I deem important 
and raise money, in the time honored way, for a public radio station of 
which I am a part. Although the concept seems to escape you, I consider 
myself part of a team and am regarded as such. I certainly don't feel I 
have "bosses" there. What I do have is people working hard to do tasks 
that I don't want to do.

 >I have opinions that sometimes counter those of the staff. I simply 
voice them. I certainly agree with Meg Courtney. I don't feel I "beg"
for money for KZYX - I ask people to honor the station if they listen. I 
do beg that no one votes for Sakowitz.

 >(signed) Mary Pat Palmer, co-host Holistic Health Perspectives.

* * *

Marco here. Okay, Mary, you think of yourself as being part of a team, 
doing a service for the public, serving the greater good, and so you 
don't care if none of you are paid. How about teachers? Aren't they part 
of a team, serving the greater good, and so on? Do you think 
schoolteachers should show up for work day after day, year after year, 
and get paid nothing, while the administrator and the secretary and 
bookkeeper and school board trustees keep and somehow vanish /all/ the 
money both public and private? That would be objectively nuts, and it's 
the same thing. Waitresses and nurses bring hungry people food and 
bandage their wounds and fluff their pillows and listen to their 
complaints and give them a shot. Valuable, arguably creative services. 
If the hospital administrator and the restaurant owner are being paid, 
shouldn't the waitress and nurse be paid? Newspaper reporters should be 
paid if the publisher is being paid. (Insert a catalog of public-serving 
occupations and the owners of means of production here.) Further: How 
would you feel about it if an autocratic administrator at KZYX were to 
kick you out and keep you out, and no-one on your wonderful team would 
take your side in this, because they're afraid they'd get kicked out 
too. Because that happened to Mitch Clogg in 1989 at KZYX, and then to 
me at the turn of 1990 for bringing Mitch on my show anyway, and we're 
both still banned, and nothing has changed in 27 years. This happened to 
plenty of others including, recently, four-or-five-term Mendocino County 
District Supervisor Norman De Vall, who was relieved of his airtime for 
merely starting a listserv forum for people to freely share information 
about KZYX unfiltered by management, because no-one was or is allowed to 
do that on the air or off, under penalty of losing their show. If 
someone starts talking about it on a call-in show they sabotage your 
call. Well, they pre-sabotage their weekly call-in show. Listen to just 
the first part of it and see. (Seven minutes of warnings and 
admonishments to be respectful and make no negative statements, and 
threats of being buttoned out by the delay system. In contrast, when 
someone calls and I'm doing my show at KNYO, I put aside what I'm 
reading, put them directly on the air and say, "You're on KNYO-LP Fort 
Bragg. How can I help you?" and that's all there is to it. Sometimes 
they talk for half an hour, and they say what they need to say, and 
that's radio.)

If you think of the benefit of having a show on KZYX as being to promote 
any part of your health business, as it looks like you're implying, 
that's absolutely unethical; KZYX is in the noncommercial educational FM 
band. I hope that's not what you're doing. Even if you don't promote 
quack homeopathic or other placebo treatments that you or your guests 
sell, if you're merely fortunate enough to be able to work for free, 
less and less of the world is. I have maintained a roller-coaster of 
between two and five part-time day-jobs all my life. I give my show and 
equipment and technical help for free to KNYO and KMEC now, but I don't 
feel bad about it because /no-one, not even the manager/ is being paid 
at KNYO, and I think also KMEC's manager is getting little or nothing. 
KMEC's yearly budget is about $25,000. KNYO's is less than half that, 
and KNYO has a performance space/studio downtown in Fort Bragg for 
events both on the air and off, and has a growing number of remote 
studios to broadcast live events (they just did one earlier tonight from 
Eagles Hall) and in some cases broadcast from home (I do every other 
show live from my wife's apartment in the Bay Area, using a studio setup 
that cost less than $200 to assemble, where KZYX spent $15,000 and 
several years trying to put a single remote live studio in Ukiah and 
they still haven't done it), and KNYO has internet and phone lines, and 
a rather innovative system for interconnecting studios and the 
transmitter, and all the necessary fees get paid, and all the necessary 
paperwork gets filed. Bob Young, manager of KNYO, has to do everything 
the manager at KZYX does to maintain a radio station both legally and 
electronically, and Bob accomplishes these tasks in a lazy afternoon per 
month. He does this work for free, so there'll be a radio station for 
him do his show, and for the rest of us to do ours. The only reason KNYO 
can't broadcast to the whole county the way KZYX does is the terms of 
the low-power license. The difference in operating cost between a 
100-watt transmitter and a 4,000-watt transmitter is about $15 a day. 
The rest of each radio station's expenses should be essentially equal. 
That they're so very unequal is due to a toxic combination of stupidity 
and incompetence on the part of the board and management of KZYX.

Why should the manager and other office people of KZYX, who for the most 
part have no apparent interest in doing radio themselves, get $250,000 a 
year for all the same easy jobs the manager of KNYO does by himself for 
nothing but the love of radio? If you feel the manager and the other 
superfluous people in the KZYX office really deserve to be paid, and 
maybe they do, why not pay them all by the hour for just the few hours 
they actually work at doing what needs doing, alongside paying the 
airpeople for doing the real work the radio station is there for in the 
first place?

Mary, when you work for no money, for people who are not only being paid 
quite well but are keeping /all/ the money for themselves, where people 
who are good at radio and /need to be fairly paid/ are unjustly kept 
from work, you're a scab. That's the word for that: /scab/. And I think 
it's worse at KZYX than at other workplaces because Mendocino County 
Public Broadcasting Corp. gets from the U.S. government the priceless 
gift of control of three frequencies in Mendocino County, one of them 
high-power, and also gets a six-figure grant of tax-derived money, 
totaling well over $4,000,000 over the course of KZYX' existence.

I'm gonna repeat that in all caps: OVER FOUR MILLION DOLLARS. When radio 
is nearly free to operate compared with any other collective human 
enterprise. Once the transmission system and studio equipment are in 
place, which was done and paid for at KZYX almost thirty years ago, and 
you have permission to switch on the transmitter, it costs just a few 
dollars an hour to run even the most complicated system. And even the 
most elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption of studio-transmitter links and 
translator stations is no more complicated nor expensive to maintain 
than the ordinary internet connection and wireless and wired home 
computer network in everyone's house. Broadcast equipment is 
rock-reliable. It's more reliable than a refrigerator. When's the last 
time you had to repair or replace your refrigerator? Transmitters 
typically go decades without maintenance; the only moving part is the 
cooling fan. The only thing a manager has to do to "keep the great shows 
on the air and keep the station strong" is to not lock the airpeople out 
and not stumble drunkenly into the transmitter shack and kick the plug 
out of the wall.

So a broadcast license is practically a license to coin money. Yet if it 
hadn't been for those fat undeserved grants, MCPB (KZYX) would have gone 
between $120,000 and $140,000 into the red /and failed/ every year of 
its existence; this year, last year, the year before, the year before 
that, all the way back to 1989. KZYX has mysteriously pissed away well 
over half a million dollars every year. Not too long ago there was a 
single year where they blew $760,000. For that much money you could run 
/thirty/ radio stations like KMEC, /sixty/ like KNYO. That's not just a 
few beans to count or not count, Mary, that's how bad the people who run 
KZYX are at it, in addition to their having kicked out and kept out some 
of the best radio people anywhere, because they pissed them off by being 
who they were, instead of sucking up to the poobahs the way you do. And 
in some cases very talented and valuable /paid/ people were shoved out 
the door, like Christina Aanestad. She was the news director when John 
Coate, who had no interest in radio at all and clearly hated creative 
airpeople, fired the entire news department so he could continue to be 
paid to, you know, cut expenses around here. K.C. Meadows, Facilitator 
One (Joanna Schultz), Els Cooperrider, Beth Bosk, Phaedra Savage, Sheila 
Tracy (a crackerjack reporter), Doug McKenty... more, there's quite a 
list. Of course I don't think there's anything wrong with shoving 
someone out the airlock if the crime warrants it. There was that 
40-or-50-year-old guy in the middle 1990s who was fucking a fourteen 
year old girl on the chair in the main studio when her mother arrived at 
the station unannounced. I'm sure they got a new chair in there since then.

In flagrante delicto. That's the phrase I was looking for. Isn't that 
fun to say? In flagrante delicto. Say it.

KMFB was a commercial station that had the same reach KZYX has. KMFB got 
zero dollars in government grants. And it had a yearly budget of less 
than a third what MCPB mysteriously shreds, none of the old people at 
KMFB flagrante delicto'd any fourteen year old girls in the broadcast 
booth, as far as I know, but other than that everyone was free-er to do 
their art and their craft (and in some cases just to goof around and 
enjoy themselves) than anyone has ever been at KZYX, and KMFB paid all 
its airpeople. So it's clearly possible. When I was at KMFB from early 
1997 to late 2011, Mary, if you had come in wanting to do your show 
there I would have helped make that happen. When I was doing my variety 
public-access teevee show in the middle-late 1980s in Fort Bragg, and 
later editing the /Mendocino Commentary/ and then publishing /Memo/ 
countywide, if my worst enemy were to want to do a segment of the show 
or have a regular column, all they had to do was show up and meet the 
deadline. Or call it in. All my life if I had any power at all over 
publishing or broadcasting I used that power to let people in and lift 
people up, give them the tools and get out of the way. I've built mixing 
boards and amplifiers and lighting systems from parts. I've made puppet 
theaters and musical instruments and microphones; I'm still using a 
powered microphone for a guest mic that I made 25 years ago. Remember 
Eduardo Smissen? Didn't he sound good on KZYX? I made the microphone he 
used in his home studio to prerecord his shows. I've built whole working 
radio stations; I put one of them in a trailer at the Albion Whale 
School for the kids to play with. One of those radio stations, in 1985, 
in Mendocino, was entirely automatic. You'd call the number on the 
phone, and a tape loop would identify the station and put you on the 
air, and you'd be on until you hung up, and then the next person could 
use it. Earlier than that I was teaching recording tech and radio 
production and writing and producing and staging live radio drama at the 
Community School. I make sound environments for theater shows. Whenever 
there was more money than a project of mine needed, which hardly ever 
happened but it happened, it was distributed among the people who helped 
make it possible. Right now I put 20+ hours of concentrated prep into 
every one of my weekly six-to-eight-hour written-word radio shows, and 
even so, I leave the door open when I do the show from the studio in 
Fort Bragg, so people can come in off the street and use the radio 
station for what they need to use it for. That's real radio. I am 
exactly the sort of radio person that KZYX should have been actively 
recruiting all along, and yet instead they have been maliciously 
shutting me and my ilk out.

The reason KZYX doesn't pay airpeople is not that it can't. It easily 
could if it were being managed properly. The reason is rather that the 
people who've been mismanaging KZYX all this time have got used to not 
paying the real workers. /Management feels entitled to not pay you./ 
Here, look: Somebody on the Announce listserv read what I wrote last 
week and sent me a creepily Donald Trump-sounding story about how, from 
his experience in business and as a landlord, nothing's wrong with 
paying yourself and not paying the workers, because, he said, "It never 
works to pay people you don't have to, that's how you go broke." Just 
take a moment and savor that. I wrote back, thanked him for the article 
and told him I'd read it on my show so he could listen, and he wrote to 
tell me not to do that nor publicize his writing in any way, because it 
was private. And when he writes for the listserv and puts his name on 
it, he's all sweet and warm and nice and loving-sounding and not at all 
like the Star Trek Ferengi he is in private. That's the low level of 
integrity a person like that has. Exactly like the people running KZYX. 
They are all sweet and warm and nice and loving-sounding in public, and 
in private, look out, and it's been like that since Sean Donovan set the 
tone for it. It interests me how many times someone has told me over the 
years that they think Sean Donovan's vile spirit somehow haunts the 
place. I feel it myself.

Maybe the new guy will be different. But Parker's the fifth manager 
they've had in just two years. None of the other ones, nor the ones 
before them, took a single step to reform the situation at the station, 
to free the system for real radiopeople to use it. Maybe he'll be an 
honorable man, go for the respect, change things now, shake things up. 
But how likely is that, Mary, do you think? He's had three months and 
nothing's rumbling yet. The water in the glass on the table is dead 
still. If the so-called directors of Mendocino County Public 
Broadcasting thought Jeffrey Parker was the sort of person who would 
change anything at all, he wouldn't be there now collecting /over half 
of all the yearly membership money/ in his own bank account for just 
showing up and saying good morning, would he.

Oh, right, you mentioned John Sakowicz. He's currently doing world-class 
shows on KMEC, interviewing nationally prominent guests, fighting the 
good fight. He had a show on KZYX, but he was kicked out and banned. 
When he was treasurer, on the board of MCPB, the other boardmembers 
colluded with the manager to keep important corporate financial 
information secret from him. Everything that was complained about to the 
FCC and CPB, and more, was deserving of complaint. There are plenty of 
management problems deserving of complaint now. You don't like him for 
the board, fine, vote how you feel like voting, but he does good radio, 
better than many of you, and his show should be on KZYX, and there isn't 
a chance of that happening, either, because KZYX isn't at all a 
meritocracy; it's way more like a feudal state, which was the point I 
was trying to make in my last letter.

p.s. I wanted to call Sean Donovan /vile and venal/, but I wasn't sure 
venal was the right word, so I went to http://thesaurus.com for the 
first time in a long while and I'm so glad I did. When you give it a 
word to find synonyms for, now there are slider bars to tweak the 
organization of the results. There's a slider for complexity, and one 
for word length. And you can choose whether the results show up in 
alphabetical order or in order of relevance. What a useful tool! Venal 
is pretty close to the right word. But vile works fine by itself.


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