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Musk Calls for NPR and PBS Defunding
- Thread starter sdwulfdawg
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If the area is "blood red," what's the size of NCPR's audience? If it went off the air how many people would care? Maybe a conservative would buy it and make it more popular. That's how the free market should work.
You are so locked into your reference frame of who you think a public radio audience is that you've managed to completely miss every point I'm trying to get through to you.
Congratulations, I guess?
The facts on the ground are these: even an area that collectively votes "blood red" does so by relatively small margins. Stefanik's best showing was about 58 percent of the electorate.
And if you assume "red" voters aren't listening to public radio, that's just a bad assumption. NCPR draws about $1.5 million annually in listener and underwriter support, which is pretty phenomenal for a sprawling region with only about half a million people in it, all spread out in towns and villages and very small cities. There's no single community anywhere in NCPR's listening area with more than 30,000 people in it. Not one.
There's only one TV newsroom based anywhere in the region, WWNY in Watertown, and it only reaches about half of NCPR's territory. The rest is usually not covered at all by TV news from Burlington (across the lake in another state) or Albany.
It takes 33 transmitters to provide usable NCPR service to the entire region, including a lot of areas no commercial broadcaster even tries to serve. I would bet that just the cost of keeping those transmitters maintained and updated and connected and powered comes pretty close to the amount of listener funding NCPR draws, before you spend a penny on programming and studios and everything else a radio station needs to pay for.
You look at that from where you sit and apparently conclude "either the free market supports it or it may as well die."
I look at it from where I sit and conclude "we live in a country where remote areas like this deserve to be connected to the rest of the country in a meaningful way that can't always be supported by a purely commercial broadcasting system."
And NCPR is just one of hundreds of operations like this that survive on a shoestring. If you're going to kill them off - and THIS, more than anything, was the point of my editorial a week ago - there are budgetary processes and laws that are supposed to be followed to reach some kind of democratic consensus on how these decisions are to be made.
That, to me, is an extremely small-c "conservative" stand. And it's exactly the opposite of the mad rush of the last three weeks in Washington to undo decades of laws and traditions with no checks or balances in effect.
I fully expect that will lead to an attempt in the next few weeks to cut off CPB funding, and the point you're missing with your blinkered view of public radio audiences is that a move like that will disproportionately affect rural audiences in a way that isn't being considered by the defunders.
North Country Public Radio is owned and operated by a private (not state supported) university. I haven't seen their books but given the size of their staff, they don't appear to be a "shoe string" approach like a station in the Alaskan bush that is sometimes mentioned here. People on the right often complain about welfare in urban areas but the biggest portion of federal transfer payments is to rural areas. That is because we are saddled with one federal legislative body the membership of which is not based on population (and this is the only clause in the constitution which may not be amended). Rural areas demand subsidized Internet access but they pay a lot less for car insurance. People who choose to live in cities give up somethings and get others. People who live in rural areas also give up somethings and get others. Canton, NY may not have a huge public library, an extensive art or history museum, a symphony orchestra, or major theater productions. Should we subsidize them so they'd have everything they could get in the city? WNYC was city owned. The city government at the time was facing financial issues and decided it couldn't afford to keep operating the station. WNYC is now a private NGO and appears to be very flush. The major public stations are supposedly non-profit but you can't tell by looking at them, or their acquisitions, or their facilities or the published salaries of senior management.
Rural areas all over the country don't deserve clean drinking water or electricity either. Get out of the sticks folks...😑
Well he did say he "loves the poorly educated." There's a lot of education on your local public radio and TV stations. My local PBS outlet has yoga classes in the early morning, a block of educational programs for kids, informative news programs, a talk show focused on state and local government, cooking shows, and an entire sub-channel dedicated to world events and documentaries. Both the local PBS station and the NPR affiliate are services of a state university and a local college, respectively.
If an educated electorate is a good thing, then public support for public broadcasting is worth the relatively small amount of money, but if you fear having an educated electorate, then of course public broadcasting as well as colleges and universities are a big threat to your power.
And who operates a lot of those universities? Such as the Ohio State University? The states. So once again, they're cutting federal aid to the states.
Not exactly true. WNYC was once city owned. Then it became a city owned station that was operated by a non-profit foundation. Then Mayor Rudy Guiliani sold it to the foundation. It was a long process. What these people want to do is cut the cord next month. No transition. No real time for them to adjust. Why? Because their real goal is to shut it down.
Why do they get federal funding? Because they qualify, based on the law congress wrote. Congress didn't want these radio stations to get welfare. They wanted these stations to earn the federal funding. That's what stations like WNYC do. They raise local money, and that qualifies them for federal community service grants. Now the same party that set up this system wants to pull the plug on it based on the assumption that NPR is far left propaganda.
Jean Luc, I'd suggest you test your "appears to be very flush" statement about WNYC against all the recent news stories about the significant cutbacks the organization has been making to stabilize its budget.
Do the people of Canton have the same cultural offerings as, say, the upper west side of Manhattan? Of course not. That's why lawmakers *of both parties* saw a need for public broadcasting in the 1960s, as a way to bring at least some of that culture and education and information to Americans no matter where they lived. There's certainly room to discuss how those needs have shifted in 60 years, but within the checks and balances of a stable political system, not in a rush-to-the-exits tearing down of dozens of institutions at once, as we're experiencing right now. Or so says the small-c conservative in this corner.
And I believe you'll find that St. Lawrence University, while it hosts NCPR and holds its licenses, contributes little to the organization other than providing its studio space and some administrative services.
Do the people of Canton have the same cultural offerings as, say, the upper west side of Manhattan? Of course not. That's why lawmakers *of both parties* saw a need for public broadcasting in the 1960s, as a way to bring at least some of that culture and education and information to Americans no matter where they lived. There's certainly room to discuss how those needs have shifted in 60 years, but within the checks and balances of a stable political system, not in a rush-to-the-exits tearing down of dozens of institutions at once, as we're experiencing right now. Or so says the small-c conservative in this corner.
And I believe you'll find that St. Lawrence University, while it hosts NCPR and holds its licenses, contributes little to the organization other than providing its studio space and some administrative services.
Two things:
1) I defy anyone to walk into a Public Radio or TV station and find one openly conservative person working there. Just one! If there are any, they keep it to themselves, and the programming reflects that.
2) I live in a very blue area so I have many liberal friends. We seldom talk about politics, which is a shame because I like debating real issues as opposed to being told that "Trump is a Nazi," etc. One referred to the rural parts of the country you're discussing as, "Flyover Country." Talk about a "blinkered view!"
I agree with the poster who suggested that the spigot shouldn't be slammed shut. Defunding could be done over a period of years which would give the stations a chance to adjust. Maybe reduce staff a bit, maybe turn off some transmitters while first encouraging listeners/viewers to stream, perhaps with a pledge-drive-free streaming subscription, or maybe go non-public and openly take advertising. I'm not sure if all that is practical but there's never a one-size-fits-all answer.
This seems to be a very emotional subject. Personally I don't think we'll see the total collapse of Public Broadcasting anytime soon.
That's not the point. People don't get hired based on their politics. Cumulus syndicated some of the most MAGA talk shows in the country, and the CEO of the company is not conservative. How do you judge if someone is conservative? I'm very conservative when it comes to money. So do I qualify?
The people in congress aren't asking if the stations have any conservative staff. Just shut them down. They don't care if their own state governors are in charge of those stations, and one of his appointees is running the public radio authority. It's all knee-jerk conservativism.
The people in congress pushing to defund don't care about giving stations a chance to adjust. They want to shut it down now. They believe the talking points they're given, and they repeat them every chance they get. They're not interested in fixing things or changing things. Just blow it up. You can't do that with people's lives.
They're going to hold hearings on NPR, but they're not interested in hearing anything. The entire day will be MTG yelling at the NPR's CEO about her personal Twitter posts five years ago and about the Uri Berliner article. That's it. They don't care about facts or truth. Just shut it all down.
i think so..... if it gets to that ppoint, we'll review what we can/cant do/can/cant say
No time like the present
Complete BS. What are your thoughts on Fox News? Nevermind. We get it. You don't like NPR, but your opinion on staffers and the programming are delusional...
I don't know the specifics in Ohio, but in Michigan the universities get only a minuscule portion of the revenues from the state government For the and are governed by independent boards which for the major universities are independently elected. For the record, I am opposed to any transfer payments: Federal to state, federal to local, state to local. We pay taxes to all levels of government but transfer payments allow state and local governments to get more tax money without appearing to raise taxes and for the federal government to exert control over government functions which the constitution reserves to the states (or local agencies which are creations of states).
The point is that federal funding for public broadcasting goes to the stations. If that money goes away, it has to be made up somewhere. So either the university has to replace it or the state has to replace it. Or lots of local people get fired. What politicians may not know is that people who work for non-profits still pay taxes. The station may be exempt, but the employees aren't. They pay the same taxes as if they worked at a for-profit. So unemployed public radio people are the same as any unemployed people.
The other part of it is that if the local stations have to fire people, that makes the stations more dependent on national programming from places like NPR. So all they're doing by cutting the federal money is helping to replace local people and programming.
That's an interesting observation. The way the public broadcasting money is disbursed is that the federal government is not involved. The federal money is given to CPB, an independent non-government agency, that disburses the federal funds to stations with no controls. However, there's a law in congress right now that would forbid stations from using federal money to buy programming from NPR. So in that way, they're using the power of the federal government to force the states or local stations into doing something they don't want to do. Exactly the situation you're talking about.
This is one of the cases where one ideology (anti-NPR) is conflicting with their other ideology (federalism.)
The problem with this test is what is the definition of “conservative” these days? Is a person who is liberal/moderate socially (eg government should stay out of people’s personal lives) and conservative fiscally a conservative? Is someone who believes in separation of powers and upholding the constitution conservative? Or are you only conservative if you bow and agree with every action of the current President?
I realize much of the debate this issue comes from whether one agrees or disagrees with public radio presentation. But I say it should be about how should our tax dollars be spent? The people who run public radio at any level or public television at any level keep telling us they don't get that much money from governments but they turn around and act they really gotta have it.
Even with government funding, over the last 54 years, public stations and NPR News have gone through cycles of cutting staff and hiring staff. Nothing new with public broadcasting people being laid off.
I wonder how this issue would play out if back before Rupert Murdoch landed somebody had launched a right-wing public radio outlet alongside NPR, American Public Media, PRX and Pacifica and like them, was supported, directly or indirectly, by tax money?
Do you watch the news? That's not how these decisions are being made. It's all about ideology. The FCC is basing its investigations on ideology. It's feeding the congressional perception, which is based on ideology, and the taxpayers are not being consulted at all.
Public radio isn't for profit. The money that comes in has to be spent by law. So there's no profit margin. If government funding goes away, that's money for local staff, not profit that goes to investors. So yes, they need every dollar to meet their budget. That's how non-profits work.
Sure, but that's based on the marketplace and rising costs, not ideology. The audience for public broadcasting has been growing. The issue moving forward will be transitioning listeners into members. NPR as a company is prevented by its own charter from fundraising from its listeners. All the membership money is raised by the local stations and the local stations pay for NPR.
Once again, you're basing this on the idea that public radio is left wing. Not everything in this world is about politics. What's happening is people are confusing intellectual with radical left. They're not the same thing. These stations are educational in nature. That's because they're in the non-commercial educational part of the spectrum. They're intended to be educational. That leads to an image of stuffiness or elitism, which is under fire by the party in power. There is no law preventing any non-com from being started to be right wing. However, EMF and K-Love might be close.
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