> Yeah and how "learning based" is the Satellite Fed NPR
> Stations that litter the 88.1-91.9 specturm (some full
> powered just rebroadcasting another station) that are
> nothing but automated programming fed from NR in DC that
> students of those universities cant even intern at! One
> could say those univeristies just own those FM's for another
> source of $$$$$ in their pockets, since most are run mostly
> automated.
>
> You can say the "Religious radio" folks are bad, but
> unforutally the college and univeristy owned FM stations
> that are non-com are doing the same stuff those relgious
> broadcasters are doing just preaching to a different chior.
>
> I have nothing against NPR satellators but their techincally
> on the same ground as the Christian Owned broadcaters.
> Every station has its purpose, even if it's not in your
> personal tastes.
I beg to differ - and yes, I'm biased, since I work part-time for our local NPR affiliate here in Rochester, N.Y. (And my wife worked for WBNI in Fort Wayne many years ago, so there's the Hoosier connection.)
Historically, the "educational" in "non-commercial educational" referred to the programming on the station, not to whatever learning process was or was not going on behind the scenes. Colleges and universities have been broadcast licensees since the very beginning of the medium (indeed, WHA at the University of Wisconsin in Madison has a very valid claim to being one of the very first radio stations in America), and their motives for owning stations have always extended beyond merely offering educational programs for their students. Many of the land-grant public universities in the Midwest were pioneers, decades before NPR, in using their radio stations as extension tools to bring informational talks and even live classroom broadcasts to outlying communities. WBAA at Purdue has a long, proud history in this respect, as does WILL at the University of Illinois.
In most cases, the university-owned stations these days are most emphatically NOT profit centers for the schools that own them. WILL, for instance, receives just 21% of its funding from the university, primarily in the form of physical facilities, with listeners, underwriters and CPB support making up the bulk of its budget. And as nonprofit entities, they don't return anything to the university coffers. The movement in recent years has been for stations to become separate nonprofit entities from their university licensees.
There is, to my mind, a very real difference between most public radio stations and most of the big national religious broadcasters. At WXXI, our AM station carries lots of NPR programming, to be sure, but with a very strong local component. About a third of the airtime in "Morning Edition" is local, for instance, with local news at the top and bottom of each hour and extended cutaways for longer reports from our local reporters and from our state capital reporter in Albany. We have a two-hour local talk show weekdays at noon, and we provide live coverage of local events. We have one of only two radio newsrooms in the market, and we're often the only radio station in town covering local political news. Our FM station is classical 24 hours a day, with live local announcers from 6 AM until 8 PM. While some of our listeners' donations pay for the national programming, the majority of it pays for our local operations. Those dollars stay in town and are spent right here in the community. (And we do have an active internship program that brings students into our facilities to assist in all aspects of our operations, even though we're not a university licensee.)
By contrast, we have full-power stations in town licensed to Family Stations, EMF ("K-Love") and to Jimmy Swaggart's Family Worship Center. There is literally zero local programming on any of those three stations, save for a few community calendar announcements on K-Love. Everything else comes from Oakland, Sacramento or Baton Rouge. The K-Love station has one local staffer whose primary duty is promotion. I don't believe there's anyone local at all at the Swaggart or Family stations. I don't see how these stations can be considered even remotely similar to what we do at WXXI. (There is also, in fairness, a chain of religious stations based about 50 miles from here, with a dozen or so signals spread across western and central New York and northern Pennsylvania, which provides a reasonable amount of local and regional programming.)
There's also, I think, a difference in attitude between what we do and what the religious broadcasters do. While we may not always live up to the ideal, our goal is and has always been to serve everyone in our community, without promoting any specific ideology or belief. That, obviously, is not and cannot be the purpose of a religious broadcaster. By definition, their broadcasts exclude a certain portion of the community. But the FCC says they qualify to be noncommercial educational licensees, too, and it allows them to program stations from the other side of the country with essentially no local involvement. I think that's a mistake, but the die was cast long ago in that fight.<P ID="signature">______________
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