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<b>Mary Pat Palmer</b> <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:mpatpalm@herbalenergetics.com"><mpatpalm@herbalenergetics.com></a> <b>wrote:</b><br>
<br>
>Dear Marco:<br>
<br>
>I have a radio show.<br>
<br>
>This radio show allows me to popularize alternative and
complementary medicine which I consider extremely important.<br>
<br>
>This radio show exposes me and my name to a far greater number
of people than any other means I can achieve without buying
advertisements.<br>
<br>
>We who have shows are not stupid Marco, however much you might
like to insinuate that. I do not begrudge the payments to the
hardworking staff. I wish everyone everywhere received $60,000/year.
I see how hard the staff work, and, particularly after the several
months preceding Diane & Rich's returns, what a very good job
they do, and I know how hard we all work - I don't simply count the
beans.<br>
<br>
>It is not about "no money to pay the airpeople", it is happiness
that the staff are paid for their hard work. Nothing REQUIRES us, as<br>
airpeople, to raise money on air for the management. It is
voluntary. All public radio stations do this. No, I am not a "little
person". I am<br>
someone who uses my intelligence to promulgate issues I deem
important and raise money, in the time honored way, for a public
radio station of which I am a part. Although the concept seems to
escape you, I consider myself part of a team and am regarded as
such. I certainly don't feel I have "bosses" there. What I do have
is people working hard to do tasks that I don't want to do.<br>
<br>
>I have opinions that sometimes counter those of the staff. I
simply voice them. I certainly agree with Meg Courtney. I don't feel
I "beg"<br>
for money for KZYX - I ask people to honor the station if they
listen. I do beg that no one votes for Sakowitz.<br>
<br>
>(signed) Mary Pat Palmer, co-host Holistic Health Perspectives.<br>
<br>
* * *<br>
<br>
Marco here. Okay, Mary, you think of yourself as being part of a
team, doing a service for the public, serving the greater good, and
so you don't care if none of you are paid. How about teachers?
Aren't they part of a team, serving the greater good, and so on? Do
you think schoolteachers should show up for work day after day, year
after year, and get paid nothing, while the administrator and the
secretary and bookkeeper and school board trustees keep and somehow
vanish /all/ the money both public and private? That would be
objectively nuts, and it's the same thing. Waitresses and nurses
bring hungry people food and bandage their wounds and fluff their
pillows and listen to their complaints and give them a shot.
Valuable, arguably creative services. If the hospital administrator
and the restaurant owner are being paid, shouldn't the waitress and
nurse be paid? Newspaper reporters should be paid if the publisher
is being paid. (Insert a catalog of public-serving occupations and
the owners of means of production here.) Further: How would you feel
about it if an autocratic administrator at KZYX were to kick you out
and keep you out, and no-one on your wonderful team would take your
side in this, because they're afraid they'd get kicked out too.
Because that happened to Mitch Clogg in 1989 at KZYX, and then to me
at the turn of 1990 for bringing Mitch on my show anyway, and we're
both still banned, and nothing has changed in 27 years. This
happened to plenty of others including, recently, four-or-five-term
Mendocino County District Supervisor Norman De Vall, who was
relieved of his airtime for merely starting a listserv forum for
people to freely share information about KZYX unfiltered by
management, because no-one was or is allowed to do that on the air
or off, under penalty of losing their show. If someone starts
talking about it on a call-in show they sabotage your call. Well,
they pre-sabotage their weekly call-in show. Listen to just the
first part of it and see. (Seven minutes of warnings and
admonishments to be respectful and make no negative statements, and
threats of being buttoned out by the delay system. In contrast, when
someone calls and I'm doing my show at KNYO, I put aside what I'm
reading, put them directly on the air and say, "You're on KNYO-LP
Fort Bragg. How can I help you?" and that's all there is to it.
Sometimes they talk for half an hour, and they say what they need to
say, and that's radio.)<br>
<br>
If you think of the benefit of having a show on KZYX as being to
promote any part of your health business, as it looks like you're
implying, that's absolutely unethical; KZYX is in the noncommercial
educational FM band. I hope that's not what you're doing. Even if
you don't promote quack homeopathic or other placebo treatments that
you or your guests sell, if you're merely fortunate enough to be
able to work for free, less and less of the world is. I have
maintained a roller-coaster of between two and five part-time
day-jobs all my life. I give my show and equipment and technical
help for free to KNYO and KMEC now, but I don't feel bad about it
because /no-one, not even the manager/ is being paid at KNYO, and I
think also KMEC's manager is getting little or nothing. KMEC's
yearly budget is about $25,000. KNYO's is less than half that, and
KNYO has a performance space/studio downtown in Fort Bragg for
events both on the air and off, and has a growing number of remote
studios to broadcast live events (they just did one earlier tonight
from Eagles Hall) and in some cases broadcast from home (I do every
other show live from my wife's apartment in the Bay Area, using a
studio setup that cost less than $200 to assemble, where KZYX spent
$15,000 and several years trying to put a single remote live studio
in Ukiah and they still haven't done it), and KNYO has internet and
phone lines, and a rather innovative system for interconnecting
studios and the transmitter, and all the necessary fees get paid,
and all the necessary paperwork gets filed. Bob Young, manager of
KNYO, has to do everything the manager at KZYX does to maintain a
radio station both legally and electronically, and Bob accomplishes
these tasks in a lazy afternoon per month. He does this work for
free, so there'll be a radio station for him do his show, and for
the rest of us to do ours. The only reason KNYO can't broadcast to
the whole county the way KZYX does is the terms of the low-power
license. The difference in operating cost between a 100-watt
transmitter and a 4,000-watt transmitter is about $15 a day. The
rest of each radio station's expenses should be essentially equal.
That they're so very unequal is due to a toxic combination of
stupidity and incompetence on the part of the board and management
of KZYX.<br>
<br>
Why should the manager and other office people of KZYX, who for the
most part have no apparent interest in doing radio themselves, get
$250,000 a year for all the same easy jobs the manager of KNYO does
by himself for nothing but the love of radio? If you feel the
manager and the other superfluous people in the KZYX office really
deserve to be paid, and maybe they do, why not pay them all by the
hour for just the few hours they actually work at doing what needs
doing, alongside paying the airpeople for doing the real work the
radio station is there for in the first place?<br>
<br>
Mary, when you work for no money, for people who are not only being
paid quite well but are keeping /all/ the money for themselves,
where people who are good at radio and /need to be fairly paid/ are
unjustly kept from work, you're a scab. That's the word for that:
/scab/. And I think it's worse at KZYX than at other workplaces
because Mendocino County Public Broadcasting Corp. gets from the
U.S. government the priceless gift of control of three frequencies
in Mendocino County, one of them high-power, and also gets a
six-figure grant of tax-derived money, totaling well over $4,000,000
over the course of KZYX' existence.<br>
<br>
I'm gonna repeat that in all caps: OVER FOUR MILLION DOLLARS. When
radio is nearly free to operate compared with any other collective
human enterprise. Once the transmission system and studio equipment
are in place, which was done and paid for at KZYX almost thirty
years ago, and you have permission to switch on the transmitter, it
costs just a few dollars an hour to run even the most complicated
system. And even the most elaborate Rube Goldberg contraption of
studio-transmitter links and translator stations is no more
complicated nor expensive to maintain than the ordinary internet
connection and wireless and wired home computer network in
everyone's house. Broadcast equipment is rock-reliable. It's more
reliable than a refrigerator. When's the last time you had to repair
or replace your refrigerator? Transmitters typically go decades
without maintenance; the only moving part is the cooling fan. The
only thing a manager has to do to "keep the great shows on the air
and keep the station strong" is to not lock the airpeople out and
not stumble drunkenly into the transmitter shack and kick the plug
out of the wall.<br>
<br>
So a broadcast license is practically a license to coin money. Yet
if it hadn't been for those fat undeserved grants, MCPB (KZYX) would
have gone between $120,000 and $140,000 into the red /and failed/
every year of its existence; this year, last year, the year before,
the year before that, all the way back to 1989. KZYX has
mysteriously pissed away well over half a million dollars every
year. Not too long ago there was a single year where they blew
$760,000. For that much money you could run /thirty/ radio stations
like KMEC, /sixty/ like KNYO. That's not just a few beans to count
or not count, Mary, that's how bad the people who run KZYX are at
it, in addition to their having kicked out and kept out some of the
best radio people anywhere, because they pissed them off by being
who they were, instead of sucking up to the poobahs the way you do.
And in some cases very talented and valuable /paid/ people were
shoved out the door, like Christina Aanestad. She was the news
director when John Coate, who had no interest in radio at all and
clearly hated creative airpeople, fired the entire news department
so he could continue to be paid to, you know, cut expenses around
here. K.C. Meadows, Facilitator One (Joanna Schultz), Els
Cooperrider, Beth Bosk, Phaedra Savage, Sheila Tracy (a crackerjack
reporter), Doug McKenty... more, there's quite a list. Of course I
don't think there's anything wrong with shoving someone out the
airlock if the crime warrants it. There was that 40-or-50-year-old
guy in the middle 1990s who was fucking a fourteen year old girl on
the chair in the main studio when her mother arrived at the station
unannounced. I'm sure they got a new chair in there since then.<br>
<br>
In flagrante delicto. That's the phrase I was looking for. Isn't
that fun to say? In flagrante delicto. Say it.<br>
<br>
KMFB was a commercial station that had the same reach KZYX has. KMFB
got zero dollars in government grants. And it had a yearly budget of
less than a third what MCPB mysteriously shreds, none of the old
people at KMFB flagrante delicto'd any fourteen year old girls in
the broadcast booth, as far as I know, but other than that everyone
was free-er to do their art and their craft (and in some cases just
to goof around and enjoy themselves) than anyone has ever been at
KZYX, and KMFB paid all its airpeople. So it's clearly possible.
When I was at KMFB from early 1997 to late 2011, Mary, if you had
come in wanting to do your show there I would have helped make that
happen. When I was doing my variety public-access teevee show in the
middle-late 1980s in Fort Bragg, and later editing the /Mendocino
Commentary/ and then publishing /Memo/ countywide, if my worst enemy
were to want to do a segment of the show or have a regular column,
all they had to do was show up and meet the deadline. Or call it in.
All my life if I had any power at all over publishing or
broadcasting I used that power to let people in and lift people up,
give them the tools and get out of the way. I've built mixing boards
and amplifiers and lighting systems from parts. I've made puppet
theaters and musical instruments and microphones; I'm still using a
powered microphone for a guest mic that I made 25 years ago.
Remember Eduardo Smissen? Didn't he sound good on KZYX? I made the
microphone he used in his home studio to prerecord his shows. I've
built whole working radio stations; I put one of them in a trailer
at the Albion Whale School for the kids to play with. One of those
radio stations, in 1985, in Mendocino, was entirely automatic. You'd
call the number on the phone, and a tape loop would identify the
station and put you on the air, and you'd be on until you hung up,
and then the next person could use it. Earlier than that I was
teaching recording tech and radio production and writing and
producing and staging live radio drama at the Community School. I
make sound environments for theater shows. Whenever there was more
money than a project of mine needed, which hardly ever happened but
it happened, it was distributed among the people who helped make it
possible. Right now I put 20+ hours of concentrated prep into every
one of my weekly six-to-eight-hour written-word radio shows, and
even so, I leave the door open when I do the show from the studio in
Fort Bragg, so people can come in off the street and use the radio
station for what they need to use it for. That's real radio. I am
exactly the sort of radio person that KZYX should have been actively
recruiting all along, and yet instead they have been maliciously
shutting me and my ilk out.<br>
<br>
The reason KZYX doesn't pay airpeople is not that it can't. It
easily could if it were being managed properly. The reason is rather
that the people who've been mismanaging KZYX all this time have got
used to not paying the real workers. /Management feels entitled to
not pay you./ Here, look: Somebody on the Announce listserv read
what I wrote last week and sent me a creepily Donald Trump-sounding
story about how, from his experience in business and as a landlord,
nothing's wrong with paying yourself and not paying the workers,
because, he said, "It never works to pay people you don't have to,
that's how you go broke." Just take a moment and savor that. I wrote
back, thanked him for the article and told him I'd read it on my
show so he could listen, and he wrote to tell me not to do that nor
publicize his writing in any way, because it was private. And when
he writes for the listserv and puts his name on it, he's all sweet
and warm and nice and loving-sounding and not at all like the Star
Trek Ferengi he is in private. That's the low level of integrity a
person like that has. Exactly like the people running KZYX. They are
all sweet and warm and nice and loving-sounding in public, and in
private, look out, and it's been like that since Sean Donovan set
the tone for it. It interests me how many times someone has told me
over the years that they think Sean Donovan's vile spirit somehow
haunts the place. I feel it myself.<br>
<br>
Maybe the new guy will be different. But Parker's the fifth manager
they've had in just two years. None of the other ones, nor the ones
before them, took a single step to reform the situation at the
station, to free the system for real radiopeople to use it. Maybe
he'll be an honorable man, go for the respect, change things now,
shake things up. But how likely is that, Mary, do you think? He's
had three months and nothing's rumbling yet. The water in the glass
on the table is dead still. If the so-called directors of Mendocino
County Public Broadcasting thought Jeffrey Parker was the sort of
person who would change anything at all, he wouldn't be there now
collecting /over half of all the yearly membership money/ in his own
bank account for just showing up and saying good morning, would he.<br>
<br>
Oh, right, you mentioned John Sakowicz. He's currently doing
world-class shows on KMEC, interviewing nationally prominent guests,
fighting the good fight. He had a show on KZYX, but he was kicked
out and banned. When he was treasurer, on the board of MCPB, the
other boardmembers colluded with the manager to keep important
corporate financial information secret from him. Everything that was
complained about to the FCC and CPB, and more, was deserving of
complaint. There are plenty of management problems deserving of
complaint now. You don't like him for the board, fine, vote how you
feel like voting, but he does good radio, better than many of you,
and his show should be on KZYX, and there isn't a chance of that
happening, either, because KZYX isn't at all a meritocracy; it's way
more like a feudal state, which was the point I was trying to make
in my last letter.<br>
<br>
p.s. I wanted to call Sean Donovan /vile and venal/, but I wasn't
sure venal was the right word, so I went to <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://thesaurus.com">http://thesaurus.com</a> for
the first time in a long while and I'm so glad I did. When you give
it a word to find synonyms for, now there are slider bars to tweak
the organization of the results. There's a slider for complexity,
and one for word length. And you can choose whether the results show
up in alphabetical order or in order of relevance. What a useful
tool! Venal is pretty close to the right word. But vile works fine
by itself.<br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
Marco McClean<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:memo@mcn.org">memo@mcn.org</a><br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com">http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com</a><br>
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