[Kzyxtalk] MCPB Corporation (KZYX) board meeting, 6pm Monday night, Fort Bragg Senior Center.

[Marco McClean]

KZYX board meeting, 6pm Monday night, Senior Center, 490 N. Harold St., 
Fort Bragg.

Some new trustees, though one of them is Bob Bushansky, replacing his 
wife Meg Courtney, so technically not all that new. Bob's campaign 
paragraph was all about how the station needs to /aggressively get more 
money/. I think that's all Meg cared about; that's all he cares about: 
just keep everything the same and somehow get /more and more and more 
money./ Because that's the purpose of radio for people like that. I 
think it's creepy but, you know, it takes all kinds to make a world.

KZYX already flushes away $600,000 every year; that's many times what it 
should cost. A lot of that is because the manager pays himself and his 
gang lieutenants in the office $300,000 a year. Just Jeffrey Parker 
sucks $60,000 out of the station every year for himself. Keep that 
number in your mind for a moment.

Corrected for week-splitting alternates and schedule fudges, the station 
has about 60 airpeople, and they are /not/ being paid. Imagine paying 
those 60 airpeople $1000 a year each. That's $60,000. The manager gets 
that amount for doing essentially nothing. He's been there eighteen 
months, so he's sucked ninety grand out of KZYX so far; that's money the 
station can't use to replace old equipment or pay bills or paint the 
shed. Right now the airpeople get paid nothing, and they're doing all 
their shows all year, showing up and doing the real work, even the 
slackers among them; they do /everything/ including participating in 
pledge drives, begging the public for money to, you know, keep their 
shows on the air. But, see above, the money is all going to the people 
in charge. The shows aren't affected one way or the other by that money. 
They'd still be on. And the federal CPB grant of like $160,000 a year 
/way/ more than pays for all the syndicated shows.

So why don't the airpeople complain? you might ask. Well, try to think 
of the name of any airperson ever at KZYX who got up on his hind legs 
and spoke even slantwise about management, on or off the air, and got to 
keep his airtime. Some airpeople at KZYX are retired or independently 
wealthy and don't need the money; it's a hobby to them, like roses or 
golf or wine. A lot of them don't know any better and think this is just 
the way things have to be. But everyone knows that at KZYX --and it's 
been this way from the beginning-- anyone who speaks up is thrown out 
like trash and they're out permanently. The place has been selectively 
culled of the sort of people who are likely to stick up for themselves. 
And the ones remaining are the kind who will band together to defend 
their own oppression. It's not exactly Stockholm syndrome, but it's 
pretty close. No, it's more like /Animal Farm./

Anyway, Bob Bushansky. He, like everyone else on the board so far except 
for a couple of crackpot pariah minority boardmembers a few years back 
who dared to ask to inspect the station's secret ledgers (the /cheek/ of 
those guys) and so were forced out, thinks everything is perfect just 
the way it is except there just should be even /more/ money than 
$600,000 a year involved, where in fact it costs less than a dollar an 
hour to keep all the transmitters, STL units, studios, lights and 
computers pumped with electricity, no matter how many deejays sit down 
before the mic. Welcome, new MCPB (KZYX) board member Bob Bushansky. 
Maybe you can show the new treasurer, whoever that turns out to be, how 
to make some quick cash by stealing paintbrushes and selling them on 
eBay, and then yez can parley that into something fabulous.

See you Monday night.


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