<html><body><div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000"><div aria-label="Compose body">Thanks, Marco. Well-written stuff. </div><div><br></div><hr id="zwchr"><div style="color:#000;font-weight:normal;font-style:normal;text-decoration:none;font-family:Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;font-size:12pt;" data-mce-style="color: #000; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; font-family: Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><b>From: </b>"Marco McClean" <memo@mcn.org><br><b>To: </b>"kzyxtalk" <kzyxtalk@lists.mcn.org><br><b>Sent: </b>Monday, August 24, 2015 11:43:30 PM<br><b>Subject: </b>Re: [Kzyxtalk] KNYO: The way real radio works. No dictatorial and superfluous program director required.<br><div><br></div>KZYX business underwriting coordinator David Steffen wrote:<br><div><br></div> >Question for Marco.<br><div><br></div> >Since you advise a potential programmer that using "swears" before <br>10:00pm is a problem, how do you resolve the problem if a programmer <br>uses prohibited language before 10:00pm? What is the method used to <br>bring the station back into compliance?<br><div><br></div> Marco here. Question for David Steffen.<br><div><br></div> I carefully and laboriously searched the KZYX website and also the <br>FCC website and found no notice that KZYX's broadcast license has been <br>properly renewed. It just isn't there. A couple of months ago I asked <br>about this of John Sakowicz, the only MCPB boardmember who will respond <br>to me anymore --imagine that-- and suggested he pass my question along <br>to the rest of the board and to the so-called news department, as an <br>item to be investigated and reported on; Sakowicz sent my question to <br>Stuart Campbell, who is the head of your politburo (president of the <br>board, self-annointed CEO and general manager, elections fixer, definer <br>of and appointer to all committees, and so on) and Stuart snipped that <br>KZY/Z/ (no mention of KZYX) had been renewed so there's nothing to see <br>here and certainly it isn't news (!) so the so-called news department <br>won't be getting involved in this. (For general information, KZY/Z/ is a <br>tiny transmitter about as powerful as a light bulb, that gets its signal <br>from KZY/X/ and that rebroadcasts nothing but static if KZYX is out.)<br><div><br></div> On the KZYX website, the KZYX license is listed as having expired <br>on 12/01/2013, twenty-one months ago.<br><div><br></div> Here: http://kzyx.org/Board/KZYX%20License.pdf<br><div><br></div> In addition to my nearly 35 years of overground teaching, <br>publishing, radio and television work I have some experience with <br>broadcasting illegally, having built and operated, for about a month in <br>1985, an automated truly public access radio station in Mendocino as a <br>proof-of-concept project. It was less than a watt, and I paid a $400 <br>fine for having done it, but the liability was listed as potentially <br>$10,000 per day of the offense. That's something to think about <br>regarding KZYX, whose transmitter is as powerful as three bathroom <br>electric heat logs, and so the question of its legality is in fact <br>newsworthy, as is the fatuous and Nixonian cartoon character Stuart <br>Campbell.<br><div><br></div> As a subscribing member and so part owner of the station I wrote a <br>three-minute statement on a number of matters to be read into the record <br>by a boardmember --any boardmember-- at the June board meeting and also <br>to be inserted into the station's public inspection file. I stated this <br>in no uncertain terms. Stuart Campbell spoke for the full board in <br>several private emails, probably devoting an hour to this, refusing to <br>read the statement, and I have no confidence it was ever placed into the <br>public inspection file as the law requires. (Every communication a <br>member of the public sends to the station intended for the public <br>inspection file must be filed. That's the law.) That's a huge FCC issue, <br>a license-threatening issue-- that is, an issue threatening translator <br>station KZYZ, which actually has a license on file to be threatened by <br>Stuart's pouty refusal to act according to the law.<br><div><br></div> Okay, here's my question, David: What have you or the so-called <br>program director or the various managers or the other superfluous <br>bureaucrats at KZYX done --in return for the millions of dollars of tax <br>grant money you've sucked out of the station for yourselves over the <br>years-- to bring KZYX back into compliance on terms that the real-world <br>FCC actually cares a great deal about?<br><div><br></div> People who write for my show are not "programmers" under my or <br>anyone's thumb. They are writers, and their work gets on the air as-is <br>because this is America not Communist China. The FCC explicitly states <br>on its website that it isn't even slightly interested in hearing <br>complaints about profanity and blasphemy aired during the Safe Harbor <br>Hours --Mary Aigner's ongoing coyly prudish chilling of free expression <br>at KZYX notwithstanding.<br><div><br></div> People who do radio shows on KNYO are not "programmers" doing <br>programs assigned to and prescribed for them by a mother hen program <br>director ready to yank them off the air and banish them forever at any <br>moment if they don't kowtow acceptably to her. They are radiopeople <br>doing their shows their way. I don't expect you to understand that, <br>David, but I'm holding it right up in front of your face; try to grasp it.<br><div><br></div> KNYO and the Federal Communications Commission, unlike Mary Aigner, <br>are willing to allow actual radiopeople a reasonable amount of slack <br>because, again, the United States of America, not Communist China.<br><div><br></div> As regards the time outside Safe Harbor hours, no U.S. radio <br>station has ever lost its broadcast license because of a few swear words <br>here and there. Nearly ninety years ago the Goat Gland doctor's <br>permission to broadcast (at 100,000 watts) was revoked when the Federal <br>Radio Commission (the FCC of the time) "found that Brinkley's broadcasts <br>were mostly advertising, which violated international treaties, that he <br>broadcast obscene material [medical advice, including the Latin terms <br>for organs and appendages], and that his Medical Question Box series was <br>'contrary to the public interest.'" [wikipedia] The main point against <br>him was the blatant advertising which, face it, we've all heard a lot of <br>on KZYX though, even so, barely enough to cover the station's paying you <br>to find ever more weaselly ways to fib that it's not really advertising.<br><div><br></div> Speaking of which, David, I'd like to hear you explain how what you <br>do is not unwarranted advertising, when insurance companies and alcohol <br>factories and banks and multinational chemical agribusiness giants and <br>the Koch Brothers pay for long ad-agency-prerecorded spots on the air, <br>and keeping in mind that, despite the poor-mouthing script Stuart has <br>the (unpaid) airpeople repeat ad nauseam about how the station needs <br>$10,000 a week* to "keep the great shows on the air", on top of another, <br>what, $25,000 just this coming Friday the 28th in a "mini pledge day" to <br>"augment the news department's capabilities", in fact all the real <br>operating costs of the station, including enough to pay the airpeople <br>(though you don't, and why is that?), has always been covered by the <br>ample Corporation for Public Broadcasting grant of, I repeat, tax money <br>we, members or not, have already paid and continue to pay.<br><div><br></div> Jesus Christ on a waffle: /$10,000 a week!/ Here's how much it <br>really costs to run a 5000-watt transmitter: at 12 cents per kWh, $100 a <br>week. That's a ten thousand percent markup you've got going on there, to <br>provide a public service, yet. They don't even let Pentagon contractors <br>get away with that.<br><div><br></div> David, the purpose of an educational-band radio station is not to <br>pay a handful of people at the top --that would be you, and Mary Aigner, <br>and whoever Stuart will manipulate the board into selecting as the next <br>manager now that John Coate has scuttled away-- to write disingenuous <br>sniping emails to defend your indefensible jobs. The purpose of a radio <br>station is to maintain the machinery of a medium for people like me to <br>do our art and work on the air. You have failed and you continue to fail <br>to justify yourself in any capacity. By any objective measure the whole <br>bunch of you in the KZYX office are a pack of contemptible crooks, a <br>closed club, a self-interested gang, a corrupt priesthood, a racket.<br><div><br></div> Just the underwriters of my weekly late night show currently pay <br>for about a sixth of KNYO's entire budget. Here's how they're <br>underwriters: They pay the station's real bills, not any management <br>salaries or perks or fluff, just the bills, and I mention them twice in <br>seven hours: name, brief matter-of-fact description of service, address, <br>telephone number; that's it. That's unambiguously underwriting, not <br>advertising. Speaking of compliance.<br><div><br></div> I'd be willing to bet that I put more concentrated time and effort <br>every week just into preparing for my live KNYO show than anyone at KZYX <br>puts into whatever they and you imagine you're doing there. Just for <br>comparison with KZYX, look: at KNYO Bob Young alone does the work of <br>everyone in KZYX' entire office, and he accomplishes this in one <br>afternoon per month. And we stay in compliance with both the letter and <br>the spirit of the law in every way noticeably better than KZYX does or <br>ever has. And no need for days or weeks of unlistenable chuckleheaded <br>pledge drives. And no bureaucratic aristocracy or their hangers-on or <br>barking dogs keeping people out who want access to the natural resource <br>everyone has a right to use. A radio frequency is a natural resource. It <br>doesn't belong to you. It belongs to everyone.<br><div><br></div>*KZYX ran through $575,000 last year, when the entire operation and <br>maintenance and overhead of the station, even as poorly managed as it <br>is, cost about a tenth of that. The other nine-tenths of that, and the <br>reason for your endless fundraising and interference with airpeople's <br>work, and the firings, and the blackballing and ostracizing of good <br>people who should be on the air there but aren't, is that people like <br>you, David, are running the place for your own transparently selfish <br>benefit. And that's why you all fly into a spitting rage at the "haters" <br>when anyone points this out in public, like at a board meeting, say, or <br>in the newspaper, because you and your co-conspirators have the <br>undeserved power to prevent honest and open discussion of these issues <br>on the air. Or do you have that power anymore, technically? /Is/ KZYX <br>properly licensed? Inquiring minds want to know.<br><div><br></div>Marco McClean<br>memo@mcn.org<br>http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com<br><div><br></div>-end-<br><div><br></div>_______________________________________________<br>Kzyxtalk mailing list<br>Kzyxtalk@lists.mcn.org<br>http://lists.mcn.org/mailman/listinfo/kzyxtalk<br></div><div><br></div></div></body></html>