[Kzyxtalk] Not even a pimp.

[Marco McClean]

SCOTT PETERSON: KZYX programmer Dan Roberts broadcasts Russian 
propaganda every Sunday via Sputnik Radio on his 'Shortwave Report'. And 
then has the nerve to hit KZYX listeners up for a donation to support it 
through a PayPal account. WTF?


JIM HEID: KZYX isn't the only station that Short Wave Radio Report airs 
on. Dan produces the show himself, in an off-the-grid cabin, not at KZYX 
facilities. Each show is posted online and freely available for 
rebroadcast. It isn't a KZYX show any more than Democracy Now is, not to 
mention all the other externally produced shows that solicit support 
from their listeners.


MARCO MCCLEAN: Over the years I've been waiting for someone, anyone, at 
KZYX to schedule my excellent, time-proven show there, I've been lied to 
more times than I can count. Mary Aigner told me that it's against the 
law for an airperson to read a calendar item about an event he has a 
connection to-- meaning that if I make sound effects for a Mendocino 
Theater Company play I wouldn't be allowed to talk about plays on my 
show! That's crap. Lorraine Dechter told me it's against the law for 
KZYX to run a show that's also on a low-power radio station somewhere 
else. That's also crap; KZYX does it all the time. Dan Roberts' show, 
for example, or Barry Vogel's, or David Packman, or Amy Goodman, and on 
and on. Lorraine told me she couldn't put me on the air, that would be 
up to the program director, so I should email him. The program director 
after Raul fled told me that everything I ever sent the station was just 
going directly into the trash, but that a /committee/ of people 
evaluates a program proposal according to an official process, and then 
I heard nothing for another several months, wrote again and copied it to 
the AVA, and she wrote to say the result of the process was that /they 
all decided there's no place for my show on KZYX/, and then, at the 
board meeting before last, when I noted that Stuart Campbell, the 
treasurer (after being board president and then manager, and after 
appointing the hiring committee chair who threw away my application to 
be manager and then lied that I'd never applied, and after refusing to 
place letters to the station in the public access file because, as he 
put it, "We have no provision for that"), was also listed on the KZYX 
website as the chairman of the Programming Committee, the president of 
the board told a roomful of people, television cameras and tape 
recorders that /that's a mistake, there isn't any programming 
committee/, and that the /manager/ just decides who's on the air and 
who's not. Someone said, "Or the program director?" (some whispering 
between boardmembers, then) "Oh, that's right, it's the manager and the, 
uh, program director."


However you feel about Donald Trump and the system that put him in 
power, that's how I feel about the tangled hierarchy at KZYX, and with 
good reason. KZYX pisses into the aether $500,000 to $600,000 a year. 
That's /fifty times/ what it costs to run KNYO. Without the CPB grant, 
KZYX would have failed every year of its existence; MCPB spends other 
people's money like water, and on all the wrong things and people. But 
MCPB keeps getting the grant because it has the high-power license. And 
it doesn't deserve to have it.


In early 2012, over five years ago, I was told to write up an 
application to the programming committee. I did that, but of course 
there was no way to find out who the committee was, so when I went to 
see Mary Aigner I printed out my application and brought it with me. 
Mary waved it away, sneering, and I quote, "Nobody's gonna read that." 
She also mentioned Sean Donovan. I said, "Are you in contact with Sean?" 
She said she just talked to him last week on the phone. Sean Donovan 
banned me from KZYX in 1989. Jim, look closely at what you're defending 
when you defend Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corporation. Behind 
the curtain it's a snake pit. The snakes are never going to let anyone's 
show on the air on an equal footing with them until people like you 
stand up to them. But will you do it? So far no-one on the inside has. 
You could be the first.


My experience has been: at /real/ public access radio and teevee 
stations, you contact them, they adjust the schedule and put your show 
on the air either right now or this week. They don't dick you around for 
decades lying to you and pretending their hands are tied by how very 
busy they all are running fundraisers and how heavy the weight is of 
their responsibilities. A person who has time to answer the phone has 
time to open the schedule in Excel or Wordpress.


I don't give a shit whether Dan Roberts asks for money for his project 
or not. He wouldn't have to ask on KZYX if the airpeople were paid to do 
their shows. And as long as the manager is paying himself $60,000 a year 
(that's /all/ the money the upcoming June pledge drive will bring; it 
all goes to him, that's a fact) just to show up five days a week and say 
hi, airpeople should be paid to do the work the radio station is there 
for in the first place: to do creative, educational radio in the 
nonprofit educational band, and to choose those shows without 
considering whether listeners or underwriters will pay or not. That's 
the law. That's why the noncommercial band, the channels below 92 on the 
FM dial, was set aside. That's what noncommercial radio is. Dan's show 
is Dan's show, not KZYX's but /on/ KZYX, you're right about that. He 
mentions KZYX in his show. Your show should be your show, Jim, wherever 
you do it from.


You know as well as I do that simple computer automation manages the 
shows from Boston and L.A. and Minnesota and Colorado and etc. Those 
things switch on and off of KZYX without any operator required; they 
only need to be scheduled once and they play themselves. You know as 
well as I do that local airpeople show up on time and do their shows, 
and that it doesn't cost any more to have 100 people take turns using a 
transmitter than if it's just one schmuck playing Windows solitaire 
while the money rolls in. And you know how cheap radio really is to do, 
and how easy to manage and operate it is. I use a portable satellite 
studio that I built for under $200 to do my show on KNYO and KMEC, and 
it sets up in five minutes wherever I am, and I plug it in and turn it 
on and click one click and I'm on the air. There's no excuse for KZYX 
being the fabulously expensive closed club that it is, where the only 
people allowed to do shows there are people who will tape the corners of 
their mouth back in a permanent smile and pretend to like the system. Or 
people stupid or naturally subservient enough to actually like being 
lorded over by people who know next to nothing about public access, 
radio or otherwise. Historically and to the present day KZYX managers 
chosen for the job took the reigns knowing zero about radio and, with 
few exceptions, didn't even want to do radio themselves. John Coate 
/hated/ radio, he /hated and feared/ radio people; he had no desire nor 
any idea how to do a show on any subject. Even going into a room with a 
microphone in it freaked him out. And, you'll recall, his first act in 
office was to dismantle what at the time was a pass-fair news team and 
keep it dismantled so the board could give him a ridiculous pay raise, a 
raise that's still in effect for managers long after he fled. (There's a 
lot of fleeing, isn't there. There've been five managers and three 
program directors in just the last two or three years.) (Technically 
Lorraine didn't flee. She was /forcibly resigned/.) There are some 
people pretending to do news now, reading press releases for ten minutes 
a day, neither comforting the afflicted nor afflicting the comfortable, 
but I guess that's something, anyway. Their mouths are moving, the 
recorder is running, and there's the word /news/ in the title. I've 
tried to get their attention and interest them in investigating the 
ongoing management fiasco at KZYX from the inside, with predictable 
results, meaning no results.


My show is better and more to the point of public radio than any regular 
show currently or ever on KZYX, and you know it. I've been doing it for 
decades on other stations, and it's been good for those stations and 
still is. I put more than 20 hours of concentrated prep into every one 
of my weekly 6-to-8-hour shows, and I've never missed an airdate, and 
I've never caused even the least bit of legal or FCC trouble for any of 
those stations, and my show has always paid off for them. It even paid 
off for KMFB, a commercial station, that got no government grant but the 
right to use the main and translator frequencies, and KMFB paid all the 
airpeople for all our shows, plus a cut of the underwriting money we 
brought in, and paid the manager and the owners, and reached the same 
county KZYX reaches but cost well less than half as much to operate as 
KZYX does. and KMFB was as transparent in its outer and inner workings 
as a pane of glass, and everyone on the air there had greater autonomy 
and freedom than anyone at KZYX ever has.


If you, or anyone at KZYX, within the snakepit or guarding the edges of 
the curtain around it, had wanted time on my variety teevee show, you 
would have got it just by showing up, and also you would have got a free 
spaghetti dinner. If you wanted a regular column in my paper, all you 
would have had to do was get your writing in under the deadline. If you 
want to participate in my current show on KNYO and KMEC, email me your 
story or, if it's a week when I'm doing the show from in town and not by 
remote (this Friday isn't; Friday the 26th will be), just walk into the 
radio station, 325 N. Franklin, next to the Tip Top, head for the 
lighted room at the back, get my attention away from whatever it looks 
like I'm doing, and sit at the guest mic. If you want your own show, I 
will make that happen; I will help you or anyone, on your meds or off. I 
have always been all about letting people in and lifting them up to 
whatever level of power and access that I have and as far above that as 
I can reach to push them up higher. And KZYX has never been and there's 
very little chance it will ever be. And that's down to the snakes in 
charge of it and the people who carry their water, Jim.


I feel a little bad about calling Richard Parker, the current manager, a 
pimp. It's inaccurate. He's not technically a pimp. He takes for himself 
and his gang lieutenants all the money the workers produce, whereas a 
pimp gives a little something back once in awhile so the workers can buy 
a bra or a sandwich or something. There is a clear difference.


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