[Kzyxtalk] Ongoing KZYX management fraud.

[Marco McClean]

Here's what I sent to the AVA last night. A reply to the discussion 
about Bruce Anderson's bid for a seat on the board of Mendocino County 
Public Broadcasting Corporation:

--

  11 Responses to Mendocino County Today: Monday, Jan. 29, 2018

     January 29, 2018 at 3:36 am

     Re: Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corporation board elections.

     Bruce, make sure to pass along to people considering paying for a 
membership in order to be eligible to vote, that the deadline for that 
was December 31, 2017. Paying for a membership now means you can vote in 
2019, not this year, not this coming board election in March. See what 
they did there? For your $50 you will get a laser-printed form letter 
welcoming you to the station’s family, whatever that means, and someone 
might even have deigned to scribble his name on it with a pen, but you 
will not get a ballot, because you were not a member by New Year’s Day.

     Also, all the membership money paid by ALL the members all year 
long adds up to less than half the amount the CEO of the corporation 
pays himself and his gang lieutenants in the office. That’s a fact. 2000 
members at $50 each is $100,000. Just the manager alone sucks $60,000 
out of the station for himself. And that’s the guy who lies to the 
airpeople that there’s no money to pay them for actually doing what the 
station’s there for in the first place. The money is to make sure /he/ 
gets paid. Essentially, he takes $5,000 every month in return for 
instructing others to raise money to pay him to make the executive 
decision to never pay the real workers. That’s a neat trick.

     Other public radio stations get along fine without funding an 
expensive hood ornament to sit on his thumb in the leather chair. KMUD 
has no paid CEO. KNYO’s entire budget –rent, fees, phones, internet, 
equipment, repairs, electricity, everything– would easily be covered for 
/five years/ with the $60,000 Jeffrey Parker snatched for himself out of 
the KZYX cookie jar in just the year he’s been there.

     And even if they were run with clockwork precision and certified by 
the Pope of Rome himself, elections at MCPB Corp can’t help but be 
bogus. They’re the ultimate in gerrymandering. Leaving it up only to 
people who have paid –and that includes big-money donors who’ve paid /a 
lot/– means that the only people allowed to vote are people who /like 
things exactly the way they are and don’t want any change/. They like 
their favorite shows on at the times they expect it; that’s what they’re 
paying for. If a few members want something different, something better, 
the only lever or button or control they can touch is to vote for a 
vocal-opposition-minority boardmember who, even if the miracle were to 
occur and he got elected, would be treated like shit by the entrenched 
boardmembers, locked out of any decisionmaking process, kept from 
examining the station’s books, and rendered impotent to improve 
anything. That has happened to maybe a dozen people over the years. 
That’s how they do it. That’s what you’re in for, Bruce.

     All decisions about who’s on the air and who’s not are made 
primarily to not disturb the fountain of money. Which is the reverse of 
the way noncommercial radio is supposed to be. The low end of the FM 
band was set aside by the FCC for radio projects to do what the money 
considerations of commercial radio make difficult, to do wild and crazy 
things, to experiment, to educate, to explore, because with /commercial/ 
radio the capitalist owners need to be paid, and it’s the law that they 
pay the airpeople. The license that goes with a radio station is a 
monopoly on the station’s frequency; even in today’s advertising climate 
it is a license to coin money, and that’s what makes buying a radio 
station so pricey, it isn’t because it’s expensive or hard.

     Actually doing radio, keeping a station going, is incredibly cheap 
and easy. All the major expenses for every radio station in America were 
taken care of, were fully paid off, by the first day the station was 
ever on the air, and fun noncommercial projects would be squeezed 
entirely out of the radio band without noncommercial band protection.

     But the people who run KZYX have from the beginning been throwing 
up an impenetrable fog of lies and obfuscation and fake make-work about 
everything to keep it artificially expensive, to keep hard control over 
what goes out on the air, /by/ keeping people in charge who like money 
rather than people who love radio and want more people involved in the 
making and doing of radio.

     Here’s how you tell. Ask them. Ask Jeffrey Parker how long he’d 
stay at the station in his capacity as manager if they told him tomorrow 
that if he were to stay they weren’t going to pay him anymore, and that 
he had to give back the $60,000 he’d already taken home and spent. “What 
the hell are you talking about?” he’d say. “That’s crazy talk.” I’ll 
tell you what he will /not/ say. He will not say, “Okay, that’s fine, 
pay the real workers with it –pay the airpeople. That’s fine with me. 
What do /I/ need with money. I am in it for the love of radio.”

     But those of us who’ve been doing radio for decades and continue to 
do it, and who work harder and longer at it than anyone in the office at 
KZYX, ever, and who aren’t currently being paid for it, are still doing 
it after all these years, because we are in it primarily for /radio/ and 
not in it for the money.

     And if you come across an unpaid airperson who says, “Oh, I’m happy 
to it for nothing, because I love the station so much, and I just love 
to be on the air, and we’re doing such important, vital, 
consciousness-raising work here (and so on),” ask him this: /Would you 
stop doing it if they suddenly began to pay you what you’re worth? If 
they gave you now, say, $1000 for what you did last year, would you quit 
in insulted disgust? Or would you say thank you, thank you, and take the 
money and pay your car insurance and a month’s rent with it, and come 
back next week and do your show again?/

     When my show gets on KZYX –and I repeat: I’ve been waiting for it 
to be scheduled there since I applied in early 2012– I expect to be 
paid. You know me, Bruce, you know my work in public television, in 
publishing, on KMFB (for which I was paid) and now KNYO and KMEC; you 
know I’m worth it.

     Something to keep in mind: just Ira Glass and his two producers get 
$500,000 a year for their one-hour-per-week show, and they take three 
full months off every year, and MCPB pays into that, so I know they 
recognize that radio work is work deserving of pay. They should pay 
local radio workers too, if they’re going to even pay lip service to the 
idea that they’re running a community radio station, and not just a tiny 
run-of-the-mill mediocre NPR satellite station out in the middle of 
fricking nowhere, which somehow, on paper, they raise more than $600,000 
a year to keep the doors open on, when you can get a pack of three 
rubber doorstops at the dollar store and if one doesn’t work you can 
stick another one in there. I mean, if it’s really true that they go 
through that much money they can well afford to pay the airpeople. All 
of them, even the ones who show up with nothing and slack off and 
sleepwalk through their airtime. Even they are doing the work of radio, 
and KZYX management is not.

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