[Kzyxtalk] Ongoing KZYX management fraud.

[Norman de Vall]

Marco,
Good piece of work.  Please invite readers on the Announce
list to join the  kzyxtalk list.
Voter registration should be the same as state law.
Norman


> On Jan 29, 2018, at 1:50 PM, Marco McClean <memo at mcn.org> wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
> 
> 
> 
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