I grew up, figuratively and literally, working i radio - starting at a small-town AM station when I was 15, all the way through college, and then accidentally for several more years after that; I relapsed again in 2004, when I started hosting a talk show with Ed, John Hinderaker, Scott Johnson and others.
In that time, I've known people who've worked at a lot of stations, commercial and public.
And I've been a conservative pundit at one level or another for a good chunk of that time.
And I used to notice something; if you suggested to a public radio employee or booster that NPR was "government radio", they'd promptly assure you that public radio "only" got about 2% of its funding from the feds (which was true, mostly; that was the rough percentage of direct subsidy. It didn't count grants to local stations from groups like the National Endowment for the Humanities, or from states, cities, and public institutions and universities, both direct financial support and free/cut-rate studio space and labor, of course. Details. Provided you left all that out, government support to public radio was paltry.
But then if you suggested that, since the sum was so infinitesimally miserly, the employee/booster would recoil in horror; "what, you want to kill Elmo? You want the world to do without Garrison Keillor?", before you could even suggest that maybe public radio supporters could pick up some of the slack - not to mention that some of the incredibly generous salaries that NPR execs, and leadership at some of the more well-heeled regional affiliates like Minnesota Public Radio, get.
The Trump administration made the point moot earlier this year, gutting public funding to NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
And since then, almost as if they're aware that the stereotype about the NPR/CPB audience - upper middle class upper middle age, urban/suburban, white, public/academic/non-profit/tech members of the Laptop Class - is sandbagging them with much of the voting public, public broadcasting changed its marketing focus, from the post-hipster "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me" crowd, suddenly the new "Elmo" whose life was at stake became the rural public radio station.
This has led to a procession of NPR reporters venturing out into Red America to find these little outposts of inside-K-street life. NPR's Frank Langfitt visited and reported from a small tribal station on a Ute reservation in rural Colorado, which does a diligent job of covering tribal news:
LANGFITT: KSUT was busy serving its distinctive mission when it was swept up in national politics this year. Tami Graham has run KSUT for the past decade.
TAMI GRAHAM, BYLINE: This has been the most unreal roller coaster ride that I've been on in my career. Off the charts highs and lows.
LANGFITT: The lows began in February. That's when the Trump administration froze a grant for more than half a million dollars to replace the station's aging radio transmitters. Next, Congress voted to kill funding for public media. Graham says KSUT is losing 20% of its approximately $1.5 million annual budget.
Which is, by the way, about how a lot of commerical radio stations are doing these days. Advertising is going online, and small commercial stations like the one I've been broadcasting on for the past couple of decades are adapting as fast as they can.
But - since I did mention public radio supporters maybe stepping up...:
LANGFITT: Then things began to turn around. In response to the funding cuts, listeners opened their wallets, as Chris Aaland, KSUT's development director, explained in a recent staff meeting.
CHRIS AALAND, BYLINE: We eclipsed $500,000 in fundraising for the first time ever on general membership.
LANGFITT: And in a one-time deal, the Bureau of Indian Affairs is restoring the federal money lost this year to support emergency alerts. Graham is using this breathing space to begin to build a $6 million endowment, which she says would generate more than $200,000 annually.
So - not that it's been easy but...we were right?
