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

[John Sakowicz]

Bravo, Marco.

> On May 8, 2018 at 8:45 PM Marco McClean wrote:
> 
> 
>     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 mailto:memo at mcn.org
>     https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com
> 
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