[Kzyxtalk] KZYX Universal PerspectiveThursday 7pm, Promo, the activist edition

[Marco McClean]

  On 6/16/2021 10:48 AM, Chris Skyhawk wrote:
 > Please join host Chris Skyhawk on KZYX/Z Thursday night 6-17 at 7pm...

Marco here. Chris, as an activist, please demand, of so-called Mendocino 
County Public Broadcasting Corporation, to be paid for your valuable 
radio work. A handful of people in the office of KZYX continue to suck 
out of the station for themselves entirely unearned /hundreds of 
thousands of dollars a year/, while you and your fellow airpeople are 
paid nothing at all but a pat on the head for showing up week after week 
to do all the work the radio station is there for in the first place. 
Just the so-called manager and program director, two neither very 
qualified nor competent radiopeople, take for themselves /all the 
membership money/. KZYX boasts of having 2,000 fifty-dollar-per-year 
members. 2,000 times fifty is $100,000. The manager and program director 
take that entire $100,000 a year in direct deposits into their personal 
bank accounts, as well as getting premium medical and dental and other 
perquisites. So it's not at all "member supported community radio". With 
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant, and the wine millionaires 
and real estate and weed and rich heir and heiress money constantly 
pouring in to buy controlling interest in the place to, among other 
things, keep lifelong dedicated radiopeople like me out, MCPB Corp. is 
/swimming/ in money and always has been. KZYX pisses away $600,000 every 
year under opaque management, changing nothing, taking no chances, 
innovating no innovations, exposing no perfidy in either government or 
private spheres, just blandly, middle-of-the-road authoritarianly, 
hypocritically plodding along, when the real expenses of maintaining the 
station amount to a small fraction of that. All the electicity to run 
all the transmitters and light and heat all the studios and keep all the 
computers and mixing boards and microphones and phones and internet 
servive on all at the same time in all the rented space, and paying for 
the space too, and paying music publishers' fees and tower fees and 
surprise repairs-- everything-- comes to well less than $100,000 a year. 
(How much less? Try to find out and see how fart you get.) And the CPB 
grant covers all the paid-for canned crap from thousands of miles away 
with plenty left over. And they're eligible for the CPB grant because 
they already are the recipient of the priceless taxpayer gift of a 
license to broadcast at high power (for about a dollar an hour in 
electricity) from the top of a mountain.

Every regular airperson at KZYX should demand to be paid a stipend of at 
least $1000 a year merely as a token of goodwill, if not as a foot in 
the door or a camel nose in the tent. Counting prep time, for most of 
you that's considerably less than federal minimum wage, so forward this 
to the other airpeople and let them know. In the real world what's been 
going on at KZYX for thirty years is theft of all of your work, and it 
hurts workers everywhere, not just radio workers, not just creative 
workers. And if yez are all independently wealthy and you don't need the 
money any more than KZYX does, you can pass your thousand dollars a year 
along to anyone you want to, like, say, KNYO*, which /needs/ the money. 
Just one annual tax-derived CPB grant that KZYX gets essentially for 
being already rich would entirely support KNYO-LP Fort Bragg for more 
than ten years. That's a measure of how badly KZYX is run: If it weren't 
for that yearly six-figure government shot in the arm, KZYX would have 
gone completely under this year, and last year, and every year going 
back to the beginning. It's that way with most NPR-colonized stations. 
Imagine what would have to change before management at KZYX, or the even 
more creepily opaque management of NPR, would allow a discussion on the 
air about /National Public Radio's/ Olympic-size swimming pools full of 
money, and who and where it all flows from and to.

* https://knyo.org

IN OTHER, UNRELATED NEWS (except that I'll be reading it on KNYO on 
Friday night): My latest dream journal post to Medium:
https://tinyurl.com/MarcoDreamsMidMay2021

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