I was at the Public Radio Programming Conference in Denver recently. I was catching up with an old friend who directs news at an NPR member station. And he tells me, in confidence, about a coordinated campaign by the staff and fans of Amy Goodman's program, Democracy Now, to bully him into carrying the show. I can't divulge the particulars of the situation (other than to say the pressure tactics, such as antagonizing guests at station functions, have poisoned all possibility of a reasonable dialogue on the matter). Still, I think there's an issue here that exposes a basic flaw in the media system that CPB built.

Venus and Mars

CPB is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. It channels taxpayer dollars -- a measly amount to be sure -- into public radio and television stations. It has built the system on a local control model, establishing extremely basic qualification thresholds, and incentivizing growth and development toward free access for all, minority and rural service especially. What has emerged is a two-tiered radio system. (Forget TV for the moment. Even though TV automatically receives 75% of the CPB service grants, it is largely a PBS distribution system, not a local service platform. And to simplify this even further, I'm only concerned with radio stations who do news and public affairs programming, which is the vast majority.) The radio stations tend to be either NPR stations or community stations. NPR stations are from Venus... and the others are from Mars. The NPR stations generally abide by a set of professional programming standards that assure high-quality, politically-neutral, fact-based information. They pay dues to NPR, identify themselves as "Your NPR Station," and do their best to provide a local news department that aspires to the same level of journalistic excellence as NPR, the network. The non-NPR stations tend to be licensed to community groups with lots of volunteers, more random/eclectic content and often an unapologetic identity that eschews the mainstream, professional polish of NPR. These "community stations" join the National Federation of Community Broadcasters (NFCB) and believe fervently in their inclusiveness and authentic community roots. In some cases, you get a hybrid mix of NPR programming and NFCB-type programming. For example, a few NPR stations do carry Democracy Now, but most of them don't. And the reason is simple: programmers and news directors at NPR stations think Democracy Now is a soapbox for left-facing causes, and it fails to adhere to NPR standards of journalism. It also sounds like it is produced on the fly with very poor production values.

Left, Right and Center

I asked many experienced programmers at the conference whether Democracy Now had a place on NPR stations. The general consensus was not just "no," but "hell no!" This certainly speaks to an ethical diligence on the part of local news managers at NPR stations. If they are part of the vast left wing conspiracy that Newt Gingrich and Eric Cantor keep asserting about public broadcasting, they certainly aren't doing their part. To the extent public broadcasting as a whole embraces the community station model -- with its funky counter-culture ways and volunteer-driven programming -- is the degree to which Newt and gang are absolutely correct about liberal bias in the system. In deed, it would seem to be the diametric opposite of the right wing rantings heard up and down the commercial radio dial (except to balance those scales we'd need lots more lefties, paid big salaries, and for many more hours on many more signals). The point is that we may look like a big public media system but we have significant differences within.

Diverging Paths

The gap between community broadcasters and NPR broadcasters has been widening for years. I'd peg the big split to the 1980s when Reagan-era politics compelled NPR stations toward listener-sensitive funding, thus triggering professionalization and monetization trends that built up the NPR news franchise and moved all adherents toward a mainstream service model. The community stations largely eschewed those trends and chose to remain truer to their roots. Where NPR stations spent years adopting best practices for programming and fundraising, NFCB members kept an emphasis on community empowerment, minority access, native american service, and the like. These options kept most community stations on a path of low-budget and low-listening levels, while their NPR cousins were growing comparatively large budgets and large audiences. All this would seem to be a natural evolutionary occurence and good for communities to have both tiers of stations as options. However, the cultural context is changing and so is the future of all media. One could say we are at a time when the very survival of the CPB-built system is in question, yet it doesn't appear that we'd be able to band together for the sake of survival. In the case of the republican attacks on NPR, CPB and the whole public broadcasting system, there are two main arguments for pulling the plug on public funding: 1) the services are purveyors of liberal bias, and 2) the services are doing well attracting money on their own. The irony is that the admittedly liberally-biased community stations are NOT doing well attracting money on their own. Yet these stations fulfill many of the system's aspirations to serve diverse communities with highly localized content. On the other hand, NPR stations are doing quite well drawing subscribers and other donors to their service -- largely because they DON'T take ideological stances on issues but insist on strong, fact-based news coverage. Yet, NPR stations are notorious for serving up white, educated, affluent communities. Untangling these differences certainly doesn't serve the political imperatives of the critics. But neither does the system show any signs of reconciling these differences. The two tier system has been operating along diverging paths for years and the trend lines aren't changing. So... here you have hundreds of CPB-fostered stations... some NPR members, some NFCB members... with many shared goals of local service... with shared roots, shared people and shared communities. We even share the same end of the FM band. One would like to think they may even share a common future, but I don't see how. Knight Fellow Mike Marcotte, mmarcotte@stanford.edu, is a public radio trainer and consultant and a former news director. He is developing a "playbook" to help NPR news stations adapt to changes in the network-local station model and relationship. His personal blog is here. Follow him on Twitter, @michvinmar.

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