Sometimes, I really hate WBUR

[snarkyman]

I just emailed the following to WBUR:

I've always found the mother's day pledge drive annoying.
This time, coming so close as it does to the last fundraiser
(3 weeks ago - I pledged $120), I find it even more annoying.

Let me put it this way - borrowing a phrase from slashdot.org:

"MY MOTHER'S DEAD, YOU INSENSITIVE CLOD!"*

Please stop doing this.

Thank you
Bruce Davis
Medford, MA

*Mary L. Davis, Age 46, died 1 July 1993, E. Hartland, CT

Comments

[its-just-me.livejournal.com]

I have to admit that the mother's day bits they put up from, Psycho, Throw Momma From the Train and such in poor taste.

Oh, yah..

[sapphorlando.livejournal.com]

Just out of curiosity, I went to their site, and bang, there's a Mother's Day begathon popup, right up in mah grille. Egads. I'm trying to figure out, first, the defensible connection between Mother's Day and radio pledge drives (what's next? Groundhog Day?), and, second, how this could possibly be done more tastelessly. Or, in fact, if it can be done tastefully at all. I tend to think not.

My more pertinent question, though, is why do people who care about alternative community radio want to give money to NPR?

Re: Oh, yah..

[jducoeur]

My more pertinent question, though, is why do people who care about alternative community radio want to give money to NPR?

Far as I'm concerned, it's simply payment for goods received. I go through phases of being very into All Things Considered; when that's the case, I consider it appropriate to make a reasonable donation to support the show.

Essentially, I consider NPR to be shareware. If I'm using it, I pay for it. If not, not...

Re: Oh, yah..

[snarkyman.livejournal.com]

I agree with this. I like enough of the programming (Wait Wait don't Tell Me, Car Talk , This American Life, ATC and Morning Edition, etc) and I stream it during work hours ... I believe that supporting NPR is only the right thing to do.

As you said, I use it, I should pay something for it...

What I object to are these non-stop fund raisers, especially this one, dealing with Mother's Day.

I'm very sorry to inform you..

[sapphorlando.livejournal.com]

..but you have been brainwashed. Wait, wait, hear me out. This is not fully complete, but I've been quietly researching it for several years, and here's just some of what you need to know:

NPR is much like the the US Postal Service. A partly autonomous, partly government-run civil service that actually manages to pay for itself. What is different, however, is how the money works, at all levels.

Individual NPR stations provide programming, much of which (in some cases, most or all of which) is syndicated from another NPR source. A few programmes (NPR News, for example) are nationally syndicated distribution programmes. Ostensibly, individual stations pay to subscribe to these programmes, and ostensibly, listeners like you help to pay for these subscriptions.

But it's not that simple, and when you do the math, you'll see that it's not actually true. The secret is in the magic phrase, "operating expenses", which is what your contributions supposedly pay for. Well, yes and no. Mostly no.

About 4% of NPR's total budget comes from taxes. Yes, just 4%. The annual dog and pony show over federal funding of NPR amounts to very little, actually, and NPR could get by quite well without it. Not the least because they already get about three and a half times the money that they really need to deliver the product that you hear right now.

NPR programmes are paid for not by listeners like you, but by massive corporate underwriting and sponsorship. In some cases, entire programmes are literally made possible exclusively by individual corporate expenditures. Who supports NPR programmes? Exemplary corporations like GTE and ADM, among others, trying to clean up their tarnished public records by being seen side by side with beloved figures like Garrison Keillor.

But wait, you say, corporate underwriting only pays for so much, not everything. That's right, not everything. They don't pay station salaries. That would be illegal, a form of insidious investiture that the FCC calls "attributable interest". Who pays those staffers? Listeners like you? Well, no and yes. They are not paid out of station budget, meaning that you don't pay for them. Not directly, anyway. Rather, they are paid directly from the CPB. NPR, by the way, likes to repeat the mantra that all of their "member" stations are independent "affiliates". But how independent can a a station be, if all its staff is paid from a central coffer? NPR station licences are held by different entities, of course, but most are contracted to the local "independent" NPR-run management group.

But doesn't as much as 60% of operations come from listener donations? It depends on what you mean by those numbers, what you mean by 'operations', and what you mean by 'listeners'. The numbers refer to the entire non-federal portion of the station budget. That means the part not including the CPB-paid staff, mostly, and the 4% government subsidy towards programming and operations--none of which reaches the local level, by the way, because it's used to support the national office.

After labour, we're down to about half the total station budget. Pretty much all of the programming cost, including subscriptions, is paid for by corporate underwriting. NPR stations enter into long-term deals with corporate underwriters, which provide long-term stable funding for the station and long-term stable tax writeoffs for the corporations, while providing them a very positive kind of exposure and promotion. Thanks to armies of very hardworking lawyers in the national office, underwriting announcements now fall just a hair's breadth short of actual paid advertising.

Next: What you're really paying for....

Listeners like you should have pretty carpets of your own.

[sapphorlando.livejournal.com]

Okay, so then, what am I really paying for?


To really understand this, you need to first take a tour of one or more big commercial radio stations and see how they allocate funds, particularly in the physical plant. After that, take a tour of one or more NPR stations, and you'll be shocked, I promise. NPR stations squander money in ways that would never be tolerated at the biggest and most successful commercial radio stations. Your listener contributions go to buy expensive crap that they don't need, such as exquisite carpeting, fine textured wallpaper, and pretty baubles and artsy stuff that listeners cannot enjoy. All the money that you will ever likely donate in your entire life will not pay for the unnecessary and ostentatious decorations and furnishings in a single NPR station.

Meanwhile, the national office has worked very hard for years to make sure that smaller radio competitors are locked out of the market, or at least kept down as much as possible. NPR, through dirty tricks and back-door politicking, won special legal dispensations in order to keep LPFM out of the lower bands, where most of their stations are, and to saddle tiny 100-Watt stations with much more severe technical restrictions than their own full-power stations. While publicly wringing its hands in humble anguish over the alleged threat of signal interference posed by LPFM, behind the scenes, NPR scrambled to cash in on favours to make sure that LPFM could not pose a content competition threat, rather than a technical threat.

Using bogus engineering data that investigators later determined to be mathematically impossible, NPR scared smaller NCE entities (such as reading services for the blind) into opposing LPFM even though they did not understand the issues and were not qualified to argue the technical case. (I personally got to hear a delicious telephone interview with the actual NPR engineer who spearheaded this effort, as he flailed spasmodically in an attempt to evade questions that he could not answer.) I got an opportunity myself, in front of members of the DC press, to confront NPR President Kevin Klose about these technical issues, since I am qualified to argue them, and he refused to answer my questions. Later, we intercepted an internal memo in which NPR national officers secretly gloated about their victory over us, a sickening display of disingenuity and self-serving dirty politics that I will one day be able to make public, I promise. Kevin Klose was named as having first realised the "threat" posed by LPFM. But the memo never once mentioned interference.

In the past, NPR went around and convinced colleges and universities to kick out student-run station groups and let them take over the stations. And never leave. Which is why so many NPR stations are based at formerly independent and locally-oriented college radio stations.

So again, the question remains: Why would anyone who cares about local, independent, community radio give money to NPR?

If you do donate to NPR, be sure to stop in sometime and see some of the fine crap you've paid for. In fact, I suggest you steal it back.

Re: Listeners like you should have pretty carpets of your own.

[snarkyman.livejournal.com]

Later, we intercepted an internal memo in which NPR national officers secretly gloated about their victory over us, a sickening display of disingenuity and self-serving dirty politics that I will one day be able to make public, I promise.

Please post that memo here.

Believe me, I wish that I could. But I can't.

[sapphorlando.livejournal.com]

The memo, if fully authenticated, may be something of a bombshell, because it would reveal a great deal of public disingenuity on the part of NPR in regards to its official line on LPFM. To those of us on the inside, it merely confirms what we already knew all along, but for people on the outside, it is the kind of evidence necessary to be able to make a public case of our arguments.

The memo was passed to us by a sister organisation based on the West Coast, and I honestly don't know how it came to them. Most likely, it was passed to them by an insider. It came to us at a time when a number of NPR affiliates were starting to express disagreement over the national office's official LPFM position, and it's very likely that a disgruntled NPR staffer passed it to someone they knew on the outside. (Note that at this same time, both NPR and NAB greatly reduced the transparency of their internal operations to outsiders, making them much more inscrutible.)

At this time, we cannot independently authenticate the memo or its origin. The tone, style, and other elements of the memo are consistent with other NPR memos that are authenticated, including those made available to the public by NPR itself. The persons named in the memo are the right people in the right positions to execute the roles described, which further reinforces its validity.

For various reasons, I obviously cannot put that in a public space right now and claim it as fact. Moreover, I don't personally "own" the document, and I don't necessarily have a right to do any such thing with it. What I will do, however, is try to obtain a copy and forward it to you, as I expect you will like to see the content of it.