SAFETY IN NUMBERS

posted by James Reel

    Phil Rosenthal has a nice column in the Chicago Tribune about the success of National Public Radio in a difficult time for broadcast media. Rosenthal points out that NPR is bulking up its news divisions, and it has doubled its weekly audience, from 13 million to 26 million, in a little more than six years.
    This is all well and good, but two things disturb me about today’s NPR.
    First, the $15 million, three-year expansion of the news department (made possible more by inheriting a huge chunk of the Ray Kroc fortune than by garnering listener support or government funding) comes at the expense of NPR’s cultural programming. Music shows have been withering away over the past few years, ever since NPR execs put their trust in an evil Rasputin audience-research expert who, admitting that he dislikes music, phrases his findings in a way that belittles music lovers and portrays them as the death of public radio. Well, who needs cultural programming from NPR anyway? KUAT-FM has gotten along just fine without it for a good 20 years, drawing on other sources like Minnesota Public Radio/American Public Media and Chicago commercial station WFMT.
    Second, Rosenthal and NPR are measuring success by body count. The assumption: The audience has doubled in six years, so NPR must be doing something right. Well, public broadcasting’s historic mission has not been to attract the largest possible audience; that’s what commercial broadcasters are for. NPR and PBS are here to serve unserved audiences with valuable information, entertainment and educational programming on which commercial broadcasters could not make a profit.
    If NPR’s success is to be measured by audience size rather than quality of content, we might as well give up on it now and throw our allegiance to all those exciting new reality shows on TV.