[Kzyxtalk] An open letter to the board of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corporation (KZYX).

[Marco McClean]

An open letter to the board of Mendocino County Public Broadcasting 
Corporation (KZYX), including of course the new board members:

I read about a charity company that contracted out the work of mentally 
slow and otherwise relatively disabled people, and the sweet-talking 
Nice People running the company were paying themselves /very/ good 
money, with medical and dental and other benefits, and all the while 
they were paying the workers one dollar an hour /or less/ and making up 
the rest with gift cards. It turns out that's against the law. You can't 
pay people with gift cards, even retarded people. I think MCPB's 
practice of promising people free membership in the station in return 
for working to bring the crooks who run KZYX all the money is exactly 
like paying the workers with gift cards. And it's wrong. And you're 
terrible and unethical for cheating the real workers the way you have 
done since 1989 and for all this time.

I'd like to mention current manager Jeffrey Parker here: Every day a man 
who's paid himself circa $90,000 so far (in about a year and a half) to 
pretend to run a community radio station has got up and had breakfast 
and made the cruel, deliberate decision to kick me personally in the 
stomach by keeping my excellent, proven show, a show that's more to the 
point of community radio than most of what you're running on your 
channel, off the air. Just about every week since February of 2012 when 
I applied for my show to be put on the schedule I've written to the 
manager and the program director, and the only reply I ever got was a 
little more than a year ago when the then-new program director told me 
that everything I'd been sending to anyone at the station was going 
directly into the trash unread. And the next thing she told me was that 
there's no place at KZYX for my show, and thank you for playing our 
little game.

I work harder and longer at real radio than any half a dozen people at 
KZYX, including the manager. When I talked to your manager four or five 
managers back --John Coate, who had as little love for real airpeople as 
the schmuck you have now does-- he was /furious/ that I'd shown up at 
the station to talk to him at all. "You come in here, looking for a 
confrontation! I'm tryna get outta here. What. Do. You. Want." That was 
the first thing he ever said to me. I had walked in and said, Hi, I'm 
Marco McClean. To be fair, I should say he was sitting facing me, 
looking at his laptop monitor. He slammed it shut and put it in a bag. 
Who knows what I surprised him looking at. It might have been the bogus 
financial sheets he was cobbling together. It might have been child 
pornography. Maybe it was just personal bad news and that would explain 
the attitude; I dunno.

You have your cheerleaders and your enthusiastic supporters, and your 
reps have always pointed at that as though that's validation of the way 
you do things, but the worst radio station in the world, whichever one 
is currently the worst, has proportionally as many enthusiastic 
supporters. When I was at KMFB (FM) in 1983 to play records all night on 
Friday and Saturday nights, when I first went to work there Jack Millis 
(RIP) was the engineer, and there was an AM station also in the same 
building, using the same tower; that was KPMO. KPMO was fully automated, 
with the automation equipment of the time, which was two 
refrigerator-size boxes of three big reel-to-reel tape players that each 
could play several hours of country music, stop and start and shift 
between the decks at the end of each song to randomize them, so you'd 
never get the same two songs playing in the same order, and it had a 
cartridge carousel with the station I.D. and advertisements loaded in 
that. It was cam-and-relay operated, washing-machine technology. That 
KPMO automation machine was called Mother. Jack told me, "If you're 
doing your show [on KMFB] and it's a time KPMO is on and something goes 
wrong with Mother the alarm will sound. Come in here and flip this 
switch." I said, "What does the switch do?" He said, "It shuts the alarm 
off."

That sort of radio station is a terrific waste of a high-power broadcast 
frequency. It's so bad. I'm sure even you would agree it's not radio at 
all and no station should be allowed to keep its license operating like 
that. But people would call every day about KPMO and say how great the 
station was and how much they liked the music, and they'd request songs, 
and we were supposed to say, "Of course. I'll tell the deejay right 
away. Thank you for listening." A great deal of what you're running on 
KZYX is automated, recorded shows from a thousand miles away that the 
computer just plays without any attention required, and much of the rest 
is smiley-face cloyingly saccharine self-congratulatory crap and 
slackers I.D.ing the station and playing CDs or merely pressing a button 
to play a playlist. The few who are seriously working at it deserve to 
be paid for their work. Even the slackers deserve to be paid for their 
work. They show up, don't they? They do their time, don't they? You 
can't justify paying the manager, who does nothing, $60,000 a year more 
than all the airpeople working to prepare and then show up and do their 
shows, all of them, all put together, all year long. One guy doing 
nothing being paid everything. A hundred people doing everything being 
paid nothing. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe you can justify that. Try. Do it on 
the air.

And he really does /nothing/. The program director directs the programs. 
The business underwriting coordinator coordinates the business 
underwriting. The operations manager manages operations. The bookkeeper 
keeps the books. And when something breaks that nobody at the station is 
competent to fix, there's a real radio engineer a phone call away. 
What's left for a manager to do for all those hours? He doesn't even 
answer the phone when you call the station. You know, he has people to 
do that for him. So how is he worth the $5,000 he sucks out of the 
station for himself every month, month in and month out? He knows 
/nothing/ about radio. He's only in it for the money. And you know that. 
And you hired him and you keep paying him. Seriously, trustees, WTF.

Your cheerleaders and people who don't know any better defending what 
you do is no indication that you're doing it right, and it's nothing to 
be proud of. You know what would be? If anyone at KZYX could think of a 
single name of a person who ever spoke out, on or off the air, against 
the management, against the way you allow management to run things, and 
got to keep his airtime, paid or not. But you can't, because there isn't 
anyone like that, and that's tyranny. That's the definition of tyranny. 
It's not community radio, and it's not public radio. There's nothing 
special about you. You're a run-of-the-mill NPR satellite station, a 
private club squatting on public frequencies, keeping others who can do 
a much better job, and who really do a much better job, from having a turn.

For general consumption: Facts: the manager and his gang lieutenants in 
the office at KZYX pay themselves close to $300,000 a year, all told. 
That's nearly twice the money /all/ the pledge drives all year actually 
bring in. So when they tell you that the station needs your money to 
keep the great shows you love on the air, that's clearly a lie. Except 
for when the bosses step in, the people begging you for money on the air 
are not being paid at all. It costs no more than a dollar an hour to 
keep all MCPB's transmitters and all the electronics and all the studios 
on and running, and every penny you pledge to KZYX in return for calling 
yourself a member, whatever that means, goes directly into the bank 
accounts of the people who pretend to run the station. And the only 
thing the manager truly must do to keep the station on the air, besides 
a lazy afternoon's worth of every few weeks, is to somehow arrange his 
life to not stumble drunkenly into the transmitter shack and kick the 
plug out of the wall. Radio equipment is astounding reliable. A 
broadcast transmitter can easily go twenty years without requiring 
repair, and usually what goes wrong is a five-dollar cooling fan wears 
out, and the solution is to get another five-dollar fan, take the old 
one out and stick the new one in.

If you'd rather support real radio and help out a real radio station 
that really needs your money, and that really spends all the money it 
gets on rent and equipment and license fees and water and electricity 
and phones and internet and so on, go to KNYO.org or KMECradio.org and 
click on donate and you can trust that you're getting your money's worth 
there. KNYO-LP serves Fort Bragg. KMEC-LP serves Ukiah. And if you want 
airtime on either of those stations for your quirky radio project you 
can get it, and you won't be waiting years for that, either.

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