Friday, August 19, 2016

Reflections of a Radio Talk Show Host (of AM1300 KAZN) -- Part VII

This is the seventh and last part of the memoir of my four-year tour of duty as a radio talk show host for AM1300 (KAZN).

If we take a look at the bigger picture of the Chinese community (and maybe, to some extent, the American society as a whole), my experience with AM 1300 (KAZN) is indicative.

First, people are weak, especially those working in the media. They are well-educated, i.e., highly degreed by the educational system, and think that they are supposed to be the winner in the world, making top dollars. The fact that they are actually making bottom dollars (for those working for KAZN, they make less than those working in the fast food chains) makes them think that the society is unfair. Their political ideology is for the government to set up laws and regulations to force employers to pay them "fairly." In the meantime, they would not take the trouble to fight for better treatment, as they would neither make any requests to the management, nor form unions, nor stand up to the station's abuses.

In time, the overwhelming majority of the employees are those who could sustain the station’s abuse. I found out that these are a special type of people. They are smart people. Once upon their lives, they had dreams. However, they are too weak, or too devious, to take any action to make the station a habitable place.

In the meantime, the community at large understands better the difference between being smart and getting paid for it, i.e., the value of risk-taking. Inside an organization, when you fight for the fair treatment, it is risk taking, as you may lose your job. Of course, forming ones' own company is another type of risk-taking. Risk taking typically brings higher remuneration is just a showing of reasonable market, which award improvements, or services to the consumers by doing things in a better way. At a foundamental level, rewarding risk-taking is simply a part of market mechanism to reward those who provide more services to others (customers), as reasonable market set people's earning by the market value that he or she could produce. For market, providing unneeded services (by highly degreed people) and getting paid are contradictions.

As I found out, those who stays in the station long term do not recognize that fact. They are too quick to admit that the ration is their only job possibility. When their English are sufficient to communicate, they almost uniformly admit that their English would allow them to find a job elsewhere. Since the station is the only choice for them, they don’t want to do anything themselves to risk that job. The problem is that they are all smart people. They know that they are being short-changed, but they want someone else to change that situation for them. That someone else inevitably becomes the government, as today’s politicians peddle the classical Marxist class-struggle theories to them to great effect. The result is layers after layers of revengeful regulations burdening the corporations, reducing opportunities to all except those who are a part of the burdening effort. Just like drug addicts, when things are going worse and worse to them, they want politicians to be more revengeful and lay on more regulations to the evil corporations.

In our age, these are the people who inform us what happened in the world. I live in Los Angeles, and have been interviewed by The Los Angeles Times about SCA-5 (the law intended to change the California Constitution so the universities could discriminate the Chinese, among others), but when the article came out, my side of views was not presented. The paper made an appearance of reporting different sides of views, but in fact, at least to me, it reported the same side, the side that supports the discrimination. After I was fired by the station, I wrote down the event and send the article to The Los Angeles Times reporter, who did not even bother to acknowledge my email.

Once, when I was still working in New York, I talked to the managing editor of The New York Times. He said that the paper only hired reporters with more than five years' experience with a comparible newspaper, because the paper relied on the reporters for the selection of the topics to write about. Then, the problem of the bias, for The New York Times, AM 1300, and the like, comes from the fact that the hiring managers typically choose those similarly minded. Those who write positive stories about the market rewarding mechanism of risk-taking probably would offend these people, or to be more precisely, runs afoul with their denial of the benefit of risk-taking and their lack of strength to take risks.

For people outside these so-called intellectual cocoons, such as newspapers and universities, America is a great country because it permits the entrepreneurial spirit, not because the big government forces employers to pay people by their status (college degrees or whatever else) other than the contribution to the business (for the uninitiated, that means services that the customers would pay for). If the employer refuses to pay its employee his market, the employee could simply find a different employer or establish his own company to compete with his former ineffective employer.

For the smart people who refuse to take any risks, the question is why should the society reward them with higher pay, as the duty of the management is to maximize the profitability for the owners. Of course, the employees have their entire denial mechanism to deny any possibility for them to confront that question. Once the denial mechanism is up and running, they use the same mechanism to handle all contradictions in their lives.

For those who work for The New York Times, at least, they have more opportunities open for them. For those working in the Chinese language media, the vast English language businesses are not available to them. So the media outlets could build an isolated island of low pay. One of the first thing I learned after working for the Chinese-language media is that all media outlets treat the employees the same way. Worse, the Chinese-language media live in an environment that many eye balls are taken away by government propaganda (either the Chinese government in their grand overseas propaganda effort or the U.S. government in the Voice of America). Also, the most popular newspaper and radio station are linked to Taiwan. The situation is so bad that I once heard that the Voice of America commented that all Chinese-language media in the U.S. belong to the Chinese government’s overseas propaganda machine. Although that comment is extreme, there is no denial that the Chinese government is putting in a lot of dollars to make sure that the Chinese-language media here do not become the originator of negative content against the Chinese government, as AM 1300 has many joint project with China with questionable financial deals. In this confused environment, it is almost impossible for anyone to launch an independent media operation without serious financial backers (although the market itself, being a wasteland with high-income consumers, is a lucrative one).

Under this type of environment, the Chinese immigrants are separated into two groups. Those who understand English well consume little Chinese media, like me before and after the period when I hosted the program. There is no cultural preservation effort here at all. For those who rely on the Chinese-language media, they are poorly served. The result is that 80% of the Chinese voted for Obama in 2012, making the Chinese community irrelevant to American's political process as the Republicans see no hope of getting any vote from the Chinese, and the Democrats don't see why they should mess with something this good.

I have been critical of the Chinese government. The station stood up to the pressure to fire me, although it might have come close at one point. What became totally unexpected by me was that, after I arranged an interview with Jack Orswell, who was running against Judy Chu for representing the California 27th district, the station first published a notice banning any type of interview to any political candidate, and then fired me after I refused to cancel the interview. Is informing voters that evil?

I live in a place where people work hard and are comparitively wealthy. It is clearly evident to those who care to take a random drive through the Chinese communities east of the downtown Los Angles, where the nicest buildings are occupied by small businesses, rather than large corporations and government offices, like many other areas of the country. Yet, the political system, the media, and the educational system, betray these hard-working people, for their own vested interests.

After working for the radio station for four years, I picked up a strong sense of wasteland. Only for me, May is the cruellest month.

Hearing that I was fired, one listener commented that he has expected this to come for some time now, as he did not think that people like me have a chance to last long.

In any case, I think that I've had a good run. The four-year radio career gave me a clear sense of the community that I live in. For that, I am grateful.

Also, someone said that life is about putting out a record. With some 200 programs, all available at YouTube, I have expressed my thought about the U.S., China, and the world.

Now, after the career of talk show host, I finally have the opportunity to pick up painting.

Old soldiers never die. They just fade away.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who have read this far.


(End of the series)

First published on August 19, 2016

Contact information:
Past AM1300 (KAZN) programs in Chinese: http://www.youtube.com/user/pujiezheng


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