[Kzyxtalk] Pay the local airpeople.

[Marco McClean]

On 5/20/2021 2:25 PM, Chris Skyhawk wrote:
 > Please join host Chris Skyhawk tonight at 7pm on KZYX for Universal 
Perspectives. There will be an update on the tree sitting in Jackson 
Demonstration State Forest, which has recently become a focal point for 
coastal youth who are concerned about the health of this publicly owned 
forest, as well as the health of our planet in this time of climate 
change. Our next guest will be Daniel Sheehan. Mr. Sheehan is a staff 
attorney for the Lakota People’s Law Project. This group protects Lakota 
children by trying to keep them in their tribal communities, as well as 
working in areas of environmental protection in ways that protect 
traditional tribal culture.


Marco here, Chris. Be sure to demand at some point to be paid for doing 
your valuable and essential show, Chris. KZYX --and NPR-- for all their 
poor-mouthing, are swimming in corporate money, and the people in power 
at KZYX are keeping the bulk of the money for themselves. They're paying 
themselves a bloody fortune while you local airpeople, the ones doing 
what the radio station is there for in the first place, preparing for 
and showing up and doing all your shows all year long all put together, 
are paid nothing but a pat on the head and the opportunity to work for 
free some more. And no-one who points this out in private or in public 
can ever be allowed to do their show on KZYX. When you work for nothing 
so management can make out like bandits, you're hurting workers 
everywhere, not just radio workers and creative workers. Chris, you're 
in a good position now, heroically coming back from a major health 
challenge, to also challenge the status quo at KZYX.

For thirty years Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corporation has 
been the recipient of a yearly six-figure Corporation For Public 
Broadcasting grant that pays for all the recorded crap from thousands of 
miles away and then some, and it's the recipient of free use of three FM 
broadcast frequencies, including the /priceless/ license to broadcast at 
high power from the top of a mountain, to use to constantly beg for 
money "to keep the great shows you love on the air." And they burn 
through an absolutely insane $600,000 a year to maintain a system that, 
without the nearly $300,000 paid to the handful of people in the office, 
really costs way less than $100,000 including all maintenance and 
replacement equipment and electricity and music publishers' fees and 
bookkeeping and insurance and communications and tower fees and the roof 
over your head when you're at the mic. Also I suspect that the handful 
of people in the office are also recipients of COVID pay-supplement 
money which, all things considered, would be another item on the list of 
corrupt grabs on their part, and unnecessary whether or not the place 
were being managed by people who are incompetent or crooked or both. 
Think of it this way: KZYX has a total of about 2K yearly $50 
memberships, 2000 times 50 is $100,000. Just the so-called manager and 
the so-called program director suck $100,000 out of the system each year 
to pay themselves, and that doesn't include their terrific medical and 
dental plans. Not a single penny of the membership money goes to keep 
the great shows on the air-- that whole $100,000 goes directly into the 
personal bank accounts of two people who would not be missed if they 
both at once decided to quit pretending how valuable /they/ are and take 
a week or a month off at a healing mud spa somewhere. If airpeople were 
to suddenly vanish, it would be a different story. And local wineries 
and businesses and heirs to business fortunes regularly dump ten 
thousand dollars here and ten thousand dollars there --$100,000 in one 
lump less than two years ago-- on KZYX just to keep it so they only ever 
hear a positive word and never hear a discouraging word. There's a 
special paid employee, the /business underwriting coordinator/, whose 
job is to encourage this advertisement, which is not called 
advertisement, but it's the same thing.

Chris, MCPB can easily pay you for your show and your work, and they 
should. They should have been paying, all along, at least a 
thousand-dollar stipend to each regular airperson per year, that's less 
than $20 a show; less than minimum wage, and for skilled work. Compare 
that to the approximately $400,000 a year I read Ira Glass and his 
producers are paid for his one-hour-per-week show. KZYX management can't 
go back in time and pull back all that money they squandered and spent 
and pay you back for all the work they stole from you in the past, but 
they can start paying you now. And if a few people on the air at KZYX 
are independently wealthy and $1000 is ice-cream money to them, they can 
tear up the check, or donate it to another radio station that actually 
needs the money, one that doesn't have the high-power license and the 
reach. Like KNYO Fort Bragg, for example, whose entire budget --rent on 
studios and transmitter site, storefront performance space, electricity, 
phone, internet, fees, maintenance and equipment, water to flush the 
toilet, management (unpaid management)-- comes to ten-to-twelve thousand 
/a year/. If KNYO had a license for a transmitter as powerful as KZYX's, 
the budget would balloon, because of the cost of electricity, to $20,000 
a year. For everything. That's how cheap radio really is to do. But KNYO 
and other little stations /need that money/. KZYX does not.

If the small group of people in charge of KZYX weren't always only 
concerned about keeping their reliable taxpayer-supported cash cow 
pumping cream into /their/ faces in the way it always has, by not 
rocking the boat, they might sometime, oh, I dunno, change something to 
try to improve the station in the direction of creativity, and of 
calling out local power on transgressions, and taking a chance here and 
there, and trying out new things, allowing the station to improve in 
actually fulfilling the education and experimentation mission of the low 
end of the FM band, rather than merely squatting on /three/ broadcast 
licenses and harmlessly, perkily, genially-stoned-soundingly filling the 
time and lying like a rug about where the money really goes, and they'd 
pay you.

The NPR mission, through its colonized stations, to "let every voice be 
heard" is not fulfilled by a three-minute limit on calls in a 45-minute 
call-in show per week, after the moderator has explained you will be cut 
off in seconds if you express a negative opinion about anybody or 
anything of consequence in the real local world.

Please pass this along to the others there, too, Chris. In fact, put it 
on the bulletin board. And when they take it down, lean on your cane if 
you have to, but put it back up.


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