[Kzyxtalk] Further KZYX corruption and the wine-boiled fish heads bobbing in luxury at the center of it.

[Marco McClean]

Re: Further KZYX corruption and the wine-boiled fish heads bobbing in 
luxury at the center of it.

CEO of MCPB Corporation Jeffrey Parker wrote to Bruce Anderson through 
gritted teeth: "Thank you for your inquiry. KZYX has five full-time 
staff, two part-time staff, three regular freelance contractors, 108 
volunteer programmers (at last count), great numbers of volunteers. 
/Staff compensation is confidential information./"

Marco here. Jeffrey, that doesn't even begin to answer the question. If 
KZYX had the private industry status you imagine it does, everyone 
involved might have a right to a certain degree of professional privacy, 
but it doesn't, and it can't, and you don't. And it's never been run as 
the community organization you lie that it is. You're a charity that 
survives on public money, tax-derived money. There's the $160,000-a-year 
CPB grant that several-times-over covers paying for your glut of 
non-local shows (that just play themselves from automation, no attention 
required once set). And there's the county-spanning high-power broadcast 
license. How much do you think the grant of that is worth? Never mind; 
I'll tell you how much it's worth: In the last thirty years so-called 
Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corp. has absorbed and pissed away 
between THIRTY AND FIFTY MILLION dollars in 2018-corrected money. How 
much of that circa-$40 million would it have been able to raise without 
the government grant of monopoly control of that broadcast license? 
Seven dollars? $1.35? $9.99? The license alone is forty million dollars 
MCPB owes the county and the American people for.

In the real world, people who benefit at that level from control of a 
utility or a natural resource have no expectation of privacy as to how 
they dispose of that money. A school district, the police, garbage 
pickup, public health, homeless services, city hall, etc.: all must 
release all such information. No-one who works in a government-funded 
charity public radio station --and certainly no-one who has anything to 
do with holding the license and controlling and operating the station-- 
can pretend to be a private person and hide himself or his dealings 
behind the opaque corporate logo. You have to tell how much of that 
money you give your friends, and what for, and how much is held over the 
heads of toadies to ensure their slobbering loyalty. And if you and your 
inner circle who split the money amongst yourselves say it's not very 
much money, well, fine, if it's such a piddling amount, how much is it? 
It's bound to be more than you're paying each of the airpeople, because 
KZYX's airpeople have never been paid. They're wonderful volunteers who 
are in it for radio, unlike you, who are only in it for the money. /Of 
course/ you want to keep everything a secret; your belligerent refusal 
to deal honestly in public view about the way you operate is the guilt 
shouting. It is a guilt-colored neon sign on your face that says /GUILT 
INSIDE/ while an airhorn honks /GUILT! GUILT!/

And speaking of charities, how do /you/ feel when you read about a 
charity company, big or small, that pays the handful of people in the 
office hundreds or thousands of times what they pay the people actually 
doing the work the charity is there to do in the first place? Pretty 
bad, huh? Despicable crooks, aren't they? That's what you're doing at 
KZYX. A /real/ manager of a /real/ radio station pays the airpeople 
before he pays himself, Jeffrey. You've been there awhile now; you've 
got at least that much experience of sitting in something that looks a 
little like a radio station, seeing who is actually doing the real work 
and knowing who's not. When will you begin to do the right thing? When 
will you begin to be different from everyone who came before you in your 
position, and instead do other than show up, plant your ass in the 
chair, pretend to be busy and slurp $60,000 dollars a year out of the 
radio station for yourself? I mean, you knew zero, squat, nada about 
radio when they hired you to run a radio station because they liked the 
cut of your jib! So how can anyone suppose the board of MCPB Corp. is 
any more clueful than you have been about how to learn and proceed and 
what sort of people to trust and support? I'd be really surprised to 
find that anyone on the board of MCPB has ever built a transmitter, much 
less a whole radio station. None of them have written and produced live 
radio drama on stage or anywhere else, nor started and operated any 
truly public-access radio or teevee show or print publication. None of 
them, any more than you, seem to have any idea of what to do with a 
radio station besides smile while others crank it to raise money for you 
and a half-dozen people to pretend to run it, and for some shadowy 
others who must be raking it in hand over fricking fist.*

So answer the question Bruce asked: Not just how many people are you 
paying, but who are they, and how much is each of them paid?

I'm adding a few more questions to go with that. When is the next MCPB 
Corporation board meeting in Fort Bragg? Is it the same day and time as 
the so-called candidates' forum in Ukiah? Because that would be a sleazy 
trick. It doesn't say anywhere on your website when the next board 
meeting is. (I understand that at the last board meeting hardly any 
boardmembers deigned to even appear, and no reports on any subject were 
released. If it hadn't been for Sheila Tracy, your meetings might as 
well not even be happening at all. I mean, ordinarily they're Potemkin 
meetings, pretend shows of process, but even the false front is becoming 
kind of a wreck.

Some more it doesn't say on your website: How about /contact 
information/ for all the candidates for the MCPB board, to distribute to 
the press, as well as contact information for all the people on the 
board now. And quickly, because the candidate forum is two weeks away. 
The widget on your website for writing a comment to the boardmembers 
doesn't get to them any better than it did when Stuart Campbell was 
intercepting all mail to the board and tossing it directly into the 
trash if it displeased His Majesty. And I want contact information for 
all the regular and alternate airpeople. And don't forget to add the 
names of all the paid employees and the dollar amounts they each are 
paid, and their job descriptions (see above). Why not just put that 
information on the website and send me a heads-up? Do it some time when 
you can't sleep, or tap it into your phone while you're in the toilet.

I want the dollar amounts of all donations above the standard membership 
fee for the last, say, ten years. I'm not asking for the names of the 
donors; it doesn't threaten anyone's privacy; I just want an idea of the 
generosity level of the people bribing you for a measure of control and 
influence. I want to make a bribe-shelf graph to put on posters in shop 
windows.

I can take the data as an Excel file, or a comma-separated-entry file. 
Whatever's easiest for your bookkeeper; just have him click the four or 
five clicks necessary and send it to my email address, which is 
memo at mcn.org. And, again, I'm still waiting to hear you justify, in your 
own words, sucking out of the station for yourself $60,000 a year and 
not paying even a groat to the airpeople whose work brings you all that 
money and more. Just take a breath and start talking. Do it on the air 
so you don't have to do it a hundred times on the phone. That's the 
great thing about radio; it's so much more convenient.

Really, for *$600,000+ a year --and I remember a $760,000 year, or was 
it 790,000? that KZYX did awhile back; I was talking with a former 
boardmember, on my show on KNYO and KMEC, who said that KZYX somehow did 
a million-dollar year while he was there-- given that it never cost more 
than 60 cents an hour to keep the transmitter transmitting, KZYX should 
be the dazzling hippie Cadillac bus of radio stations, a fountain of 
creativity and freedom and experimentation and a lively forum of 
contentious back and forth dialog on all subjects, including of course 
the subject of management or mismanagement of the station, with a brisk 
turnover in shows and material and offerings and surprises, and it's not 
any of those things; it's safe and harmless and dumb and chained down, 
smothered in canned shows from thousands of miles away, with anyone with 
a scintilla of wild creativity banned outright and forever, and with 
equipment and services that break down more often than at radio stations 
that cost a tiny fraction of the gold dust KZYX mysteriously flushes 
away, and that's your fault, now, Jeffrey, because so far you've been at 
least as big of a pathetic fraud as all the previous CEOs of MCPB Corp., 
and you know it. If you're not capable of actively doing better at least 
release what information is there; take the black tarp off like ripping 
off a bandaid; let a little light and air into the inner workings and 
comic-horror-noir back-room sleazery of the place. At least do that.

Also, arse yourself to do the three-to-five minutes of work it takes to 
schedule my excellent show on KZYX, which I've been patiently waiting 
for someone there to do since early 2012. Open the website, edit the 
schedule, make a few phone calls, done. I'll want $3,822 (52 weeks of a 
7+-hour-weekly live show at California minimum wage; you don't even have 
to pay me for the 20+ hours of concentrated prep before each show), and 
after a year we can negotiate from there. I'll bet that's less than the 
station is paying for just your dental insurance. And you know what I 
just figured out? If you were to pay the same minimum wage to all the 
live-local-show airpeople for just their airtime too, it would add up to 
very close to the goal of your most recent pledge drive, so even if 
there were no economies to be made in alleviating other areas of 
corruption (besides you), which there are, and even if there were no 
holes to be pinched shut in important arteries to slow or stop the 
constant hemorrhaging of money your terrible management is responsible 
for, which there are, you could pay us all by simply ripping up your own 
undeserved paycheck, and then try out being in it for radio and 
community and the public good, the way all of the rest of us have been 
and are, instead of being in it entirely for the money for your selfish 
self.

Because the work of the airpeople you list is the /very source of all 
your personal loot./ And you're not at all the cause of the radio 
station and all the shows there existing and continuing. Airpeople are. 
If you were to sleep in for a week and not show up or call at all, and 
then another week, and another, and so on, what would stop? What 
urgently requires your attention? There's a program director to direct 
the programs, a bookkeeper to keep the books, a business underwriting 
coordinator to coordinate the business underwriting, an operations 
manager to manage the operations, and if the operations manager finds 
himself stumped, a real engineer is a phone call away for him. "Come and 
fix this," he can say. What's left for you to do? What does anyone need 
you for, at any pay rate, much less $60,000 a year? As things stand, 
what is the point of you?

Schedule my show. I deserve, as much as or more than anyone you know, to 
use KZYX to do real radio. Dump a few stupid shows from far away, push a 
few shows this way and that, put your IT person in contact with me so we 
can add my portable remote studio, and dozens of similar radio people's 
remote studios, to the automation, pay me for my work, and start paying 
all the others at the same time. You can do it; you can learn and grow 
and change and evolve as a person, and improve the radio station in the 
direction of making it magnificent, with practically the stroke of a 
pen. But you need to pick that metaphorical and real pen up and stroke 
it. Look at your own hands and think about making them do the right 
thing for once.

p.s. One more thing: Press /print/, print this email and slip it into 
the KZYX public inspection file. As a matter of fact, start putting all 
letters from the public about the operation of the station in the public 
inspection file. All MCPB Corp. managers before you have angrily refused 
this simple request. Just do it; consider it part of the job. Small steps.


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