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Pensacola/Fort Walton Will WUWF be the next station to drop NPR?

ted chittenden said:
I think that supporters of the conservative talk station are a trifle jealous. Their hope is that if WUWF-FM is removed from the community, NPR listeners will seek out more conservative alternatives. That hasn't happened in other markets and I don't think it will happen here.

One comment on NPR's journalistic standards. While the network relys heavily on those standards, it should be pointed out that its opponents, starting with the current U.S. president, view those standards as supporting "fake news." In other words, if you have a debate between NPR supporters and opponents, you will get a lot of people talking in languages (even though they're all using English) that the other side completely fails to understand.
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NPR leans to the left if you look at their guests and just the way they frame issues. They aren't communist or far-left, but they lean left. This was true prior to Trump when "good" Republicans like McCain and Romney were the leaders of the party. But they have definitely led the charge on being more political since the Trump era. But they also have a good product that people like, so more power to them.

But the downfall of WSRE and potentially WUWF has nothing to do with jealous conservative listeners. Conservative listeners probably don't even know these stations exist for the most part. You think as a listener, you hope a rival station goes away so more people will listen to the station you like? No one not in radio thinks like that. It's the board members of their college and university, respectively, that didn't want to carry the PBS programming and MIGHT not want to carry the NPR programming. I don't think David Brinkley leaving is 100% an indication that WUWF is dropping NPR. There have been several GMs in Florida at public stations that have chosen to retire recently. (WJCT, WFSU, WUSF). It's true they have decent ratings in a conservative area. WQCS on the Treasure Coast does too. They've been the #1 overall station in their pretty conservative area as recently as last Spring, and #2 in the Fall. There are few markets nationally where the NPR station is #1 overall, and the fact that Indian River/St Lucie/Martin Counties is one of them means QCS is doing something well. So is WUWF. Hopefully they'll get a new GM and keep it going.
 
Yes, WHIL has an adequate signal in Pensacola. WHIL is programmed by the University of Alabama, perhaps the most conservative college in the country. I wouldn’t be surprised to see WHIL drop NPR too.

If WUWF drops NPR, Pensacola listeners aren’t going to switch to WHIL, they’ll just quit listening to terrestrial radio.
 
Sammi Brie said:
There is no market in the nation that is so over-indexed for full-service religious TV licenses. It does not help that two of them were planned commercial stations in the 1980s that failed to go anywhere. (Providence Journal owned the CP for WMPV, and an outfit named Harbour Broadcasting owned the CP for WHBR.) They probably saw what that market looked like with one indie (WPMI) and noped out. WMPV tried the CBN "family indie" route and evidently failed at it.
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Besides WMPV and WHBR, WFBD is/was a commercial license. WDPM was originally a CP for a Pax TV (iON) affiliate. WFGX and WPAN were both previously religions stations.
I can’t imagine any martket having more religious TV stations than Mobile-Pensacola.
 
WFBD was actually the latest to switch to religious broadcasting as Flinn Broadcasting sold it directly to TCT, who installed their own programming and kicked Blab TV off the air.

When WPAN was resurrected (no pun intended) on DTV 21 on their new tower, Blab TV had a new home and the owner was open to other brokering opportunities including a repeater of WFBD 48.1 on 53.2, and even a full market signal for WBQP on 53.4 for a short while.

Technically, WFBD now has a DRT Tower in Baldwin County that relays its programming to the western part of the market now, and at some point they may pull their lease off of WPAN 53.2.

Enter a new PBS organization to set up shop on WPAN.... All they have to do is produce a broadcast-ready signal and WPAN should be able to take care of the rest, and bonus points if the new organization handles all of the FCC "work" while WPAN just gives them a slot to broadcast from.

Back to NPR, WHIL should provide an adequate signal to Pensacola since their transmitter is actually located on WKRG's tower in Spanish Fort. Since it's no longer owned by Spring Hill College and is part of Alabama Public Radio (which is not a part of APT), most of the NPR schedule should be available if it's not all carried already.
 


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