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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
A veteran of community broadcasting blasts public stations for selling their souls to the highest bidders.
Jul 2, 2001 | We're told we should be celebrating the 30th anniversary of National Public Radio this month, but for many of us who love radio, and what it can do, and what it can be, I suspect it won't be much of a celebration. It'll probably be more like a wake.
National Public Radio was set up in 1972 as a national, noncommercial radio network that would, in the words of its founding charter, "serve groups whose voices would otherwise go unheard."
And for its first few years, it did exactly that. I remember lying in bed, listening to a talk on NPR one afternoon, sometime in 1979 or 1980. It was one of those programs that move the heart, that make chills go up and down one's spine -- doing exactly what radio does best. It was the rebroadcast of a speech that Joan Baez gave to the Washington Press Club, which told of her visit to a children's ward in a hospital in Hanoi. It was a gentle, poignant description of what our bombs had done to the young and the helpless and the innocent of Vietnam.
I recall thinking to myself that at last we had a national network that would give us something besides pop music, five-minute newscasts and ads. I also remember thinking that the work that many of us did in setting up alternative radio stations in the 1960s and 1970s had finally been vindicated, and that a new form of lively, involved radio would soon be commonplace.
It came and went so quickly -- that promise. If you listen to the programs on NPR, Public Radio International or any of the 605 public stations in this country, you might wonder what all the excitement was about. For sure, you can forget all that stuff about "voices [that] would otherwise go unheard." In the place of programs for the wondering and the curious (not to say the poor and the needy), we have those endless, mindless jazz programs, quiz games on the order of "Says You!" and "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" and the daily advertisement for the wonders of corporate socialism called "Marketplace," all brought to you by Archer Daniels Midland and General Electric and Exxon and Texaco and New York Life. Oh yes, there's also the insulting patter of a couple of guys who think my car is so important that I want to hear about it for two hours every Saturday.
And if you ask whatever happened to those wonderful programs from before, the ones that could change us and move us, the response concerns money: "We've got to pay the bills. You don't know how expensive it is to do radio." People always say that.
Actually, I do know how expensive it is to do radio. My first station, a public station in Seattle -- put on the air long before NPR and PRI -- had an annual operating budget of $25,000. Admittedly, that was in 1965 dollars. Admittedly, we had two paid employees and a huge volunteer staff. But with that $25,000 we did some astounding programming -- stuff that would turn your head around: live drama, live chamber music, music from all over the world, wonderful and diverse commentary. And those were the years of the civil rights struggle. We had tapes from Jackson and Birmingham and Selma, soul-wrenching tapes about what was going on in the streets, put together (and paid for) by volunteers who not only were talented but cared about radio and cared, deeply, about what we put on the air.
"We have the listeners now." People always tell us that, too. "In the past decade," NPR says, "we've doubled our listenership." But 22,000,000 listeners is not the point. It only confirms Milam's first law of broadcasting: Double the income, double the listenership and the programming gets more stupid.
Poor NPR. Emasculated, lost its nuts, and at such a young age. They say it happened sometime in the '90s, when Congress insisted that NPR become self-supporting. But that's not it. The balls of great American radio were not stolen by Newt Gingrich but disappeared in the early days when it was decided that public broadcasting would be built on the commercial model. Instead of looking to the wondrous, shit-kicking experimental radio coming out of England (BBC), Canada (CBC), France (RDF) and Japan (NHK), it was decided that NPR would be a gussied-up version of NBC, CBS and ABC. And soon enough, NPR began to follow their rules: Don't rock the boat, don't get the natives up in arms, don't question the system and, most of all, don't mess with the sponsors.
