Why public radio isn't - and what you can do about it

Whole Earth Review, Winter, 1992 by Rachel Anne Goodman

If you live in rural Maine, what's wrong with having some guy from St. Paul, Minnesota giving you the day's news and music? The answers cut to the heart of what's bothering many folks today. We may be a highly mobile society, but we still want to know where we live, and to feel connected to our neighbors. When there are no local people doing shows of local or regional interest, the community is not represented to itself over the airwaves. During the L.A. riots, some citizens who turned to public radio for information heard news feeds from CNN being reported from Atlanta.

One public station I worked for told me I couldn't read a lost-dog announcement that was called in because it made us sound too "provincial." Soon after, they dropped the bluegrass programming because the rural audience it attracted "wasn't educated and upscale enough" and didn't "fit our mission statement." This station serves a largely rural audience. Public-radio program directors have misread their core audience in much the same way presidential candidates have alienated voters. As with election speeches, during fundraisers they claim to give listeners a voice in programming decisions which does not actually exist. As in our two-party system, listeners must choose from a tiny menu of programs when they vote with their pledge dollars. More "audience research" is being done these days to determine the needs of listeners. However, the Arbitron rating service used by many stations measures the average number of people who listen to existing programs, not audience needs.

Over the Rainbow

The face of America is changing; unless public radio changes with it, it will continue to suffer from an elitist image and, eventually, diminishing resources. On a national level, there are encouraging signs. Peter Pennekamp, NPR's v.p. for cultural programming, says his department has just received a $400,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to explore and develop programming for multicultural audiences. Lynn Chadwick, president of the National Federation of Community Broadcasters, is pushing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to increase its service grants from $2 million to $5 million. While opposing the plan to bring networks into rural areas, she is lobbying for support of local programming. Responding to ethnic and regional needs, networks like "Radio Bilinque" in California, "The Native American Broadcasting Consortium," and "The Southern Regional Network" are filling the gap. Still, when it comes to local control, in 1992 there are only 39 noncommercial stations owned by African Americans, and 13 owned by Hispanic groups.

Listeners Want to Be Heard

A quiet battle is being waged by several citizens' groups across the country to gain some voice in their public stations' programming. At the heart of the fight is not which format will prevail, but who decides and who is responsible. One morning last year, the people of Grand Junction, Colorado woke up to find that their local public radio station, KPRN, had been taken over by its urban cousin, KCFR from Denver, which. beamed its signal into town via satellite. KPRN's board of directors, acting independently of the community advisory board, simply gave the station's license away to a new entity created to oversee both stations. The community advisory board and other disgruntled citizens are now involved in litigation that they hope will return local control of the station.