8 New Years Resolution Ideas for NPR |
The reasons Congress created NPR, or National Public Radio, under the Nixon administration were to fill the yawning gaps of commercial radio in local, national, and international news coverage and to give voice to the people without the censorship that comes from advertisers. It was to be publicly funded by taxpayers. Almost 55 years later, NPR is now funded heavily by large corporations. NPR’s local affiliates solicit local business advertisements and grants from local corporations. President Donald Trump has cut out NPR ’s small federal subsidy, further increasing its dependence on commercial funding.
Resolution One: Apart from excellent features around the country and the world, NPR should give voice to what civic groups are doing to improve our country locally and nationally. NPR is heavy on entertainment and coverage of entertainers. It needs to fill some of its airtime with news about the bedrock civic community in America. The imbalance is serious from the national to the local. NPR anchors regularly ignore calls by civic leaders requesting discussions about this exclusion.
Resolution Two: NPR has featured many reports and interviews on race but needs far more focus on class. Class exploitation of the poor and working class by the rich and powerful corporate supremacists feeds racial discrimination. The euphemism used is “inequality,” but corporate-bred crime, fraud, and abuse affect all people indiscriminately, which often disproportionately harms minorities. A result of the gross imbalance of time devoted to race and not to class is that indiscriminate injustice is mostly ignored.
Over 60 million poor whites in our country, if they even bothered to listen to NPR, might ask, “What About Us?”
NPR often focuses on racial plights without going to the sources of race- (and class-) based harms from commercial greed. Redlining, exploitation of tenants, lower pay (average hourly wages for Black and Hispanic men are substantially lower than those of white men), substandard healthcare, rampant overcharging of the poor (recall the book The Poor Pay More: Consumer Practices of Low-Income Families by David Caplovitz), greater difficulty getting loans, and discrimination against upward mobility to corporate executive ranks are some examples of systemic commercialism fueling systemic racism.
NPR’s collateral benefit from this inattention is that business advertisers large and small love NPR and its affiliates. This is especially the case for corporations with bad records, which crave NPR’s asserted prestige. NPR should reject ads from disreputable or criminal corporations.
Resolution Three: Stop mimicking commercial radio. NPR’s three-minute news segments on the hour often don’t even match the mediocre quality of CBS Radio’s choice of topics. For example, why, in 2023, were tennis star Novak Djokovic’s visa problems in Australia at the top of NPR news day after day? As for commercials, NPR stretches the envelope, airing, with its affiliates, as many as 30 ads per hour! Imagine the audience irritation. How many times do we have to hear each hour, “NPR is supported by XYZ corporation”? NPR gives abundant repetitive ad time to the same few advertisers that one wonders whether they are assured of exclusivity vis-a-vis competitors. Moreover, NPR starts the evening program "Marketplace" with ads, which even the commercial networks do not do.
Your listeners want you to decongest your programming from ads. And some may want to know why you haven’t, given the decades you have largely given up on reversing the relative decline of congressional appropriations. You give ample time to loud right-wingers and right-wing causes. Why aren’t you gaining bipartisan support for more congressional funding?
Resolution Four: Compress the weather forecasts. Back in 1970-1971, Congress knew that commercial radio stations gave plenty of time to weather, traffic, sports, and music. That is still true. So........