What NPR isn’t

The House voted to defund NPR – Woohoo!

Which means absolutely nothing in the real world.  To understand why this will have zero effect on anything, it’s important to know what NPR is and what it isn’t – and why the defunding bill is nothing but another worthless bone being thrown at the Tea Party.

NPR does not own radio stations.   NPR does not run Public Radio stations.   NPR creates and sells syndicated programming to Public Radio Stations.   It is similar to Westwood One, Dial Global, Talk Radio Network (TRN), IRN/USA or Fox News on the Commercial Radio side.

While NPR is the dominant provider of programming, NPR has competitors – PRI from England, American Public Media (affiliated with Minnesota Public Broadcasting) and some local public radio stations syndicate their own programming to other Public Radio Stations.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is the conduit for passing out all that free Federal money to Public Radio stations (and PBS, the TV network equivalent to NPR).  It’s the gravy train maybe you think the House Bill will cut off.   By law, CPB is required to distribute at least 2/3 of the money it gets directly to the local radio and TV stations.   It does also provide money for the production of programming, but NPR gets most of its funding indirectly –   CPB -> Local Station -> NPR 

NPR and the local stations already have a contentious relationship – NPR has been promoting direct podcasting and streaming of NPR’s programming, bypassing the local stations, which has caused local Public Stations to see a big drop in the effectiveness of their begathons as people started downloading NPR’s programs right to their iPods and listen to them when they wanted.  Over the past few years, stations have already been moving away from NPR’s programs other than the bookends – Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

All the bill says is it would prohibit Federal funds channeled through CPB to local stations from being used to buy programming from NPR.   All this means is that the local stations / networks will have to shuffle money from one account to another.   They’ll use the CPB money instead to pay the  very generous salaries of their managers, and use the money they already raise from the begathons, foundations and state funding to pay for the NPR programming instead.

The bill cuts no money from CPB.   Had it said something stronger like “Prohibits CPB from giving ANY money to public radio stations that buy ANY programming from NPR”, that would have killed the indirect funing of NPR and forced NPR to get all its funding directly from listeners, foundations and George Soros and/or give the programming to the local stations for free….   or change the name of NPR to NSR or set up a shell corporation to fund NPR without being NPR.   Ironically, effectively cutting funding from NPR would probably make it a much stronger organization without all the government strings.

The only effective way to disconnect NPR from the federal feeding trough is to kill CPB, or kill its ability to fund any public radio – which probably will not ever get through Congress.

Who creates which programming on Public Radio:

National Public Radio

• Morning Edition
• All Things Considered
• Fresh Air
• Diane Rehm
• On Point
• Talk of the Nation
• Tell me more
• Car Talk with Click and Clack
• Wait Wait… don’t tell me
• Thistle & Shamrock
• World Cafe
• Being

PRI

• BBC World Service
• Tavis Smiley
• The World
• This American Life
• Here & Now
• Afropop
• Bob Edwards Weekend
• Living on Earth
• Studio 360
• To the Best of our Knowledge
• Whad’ya Know?

American Public Media

• A Prarie Home Companion
• Splendid Table
• Marketplace
• Pipe Dreams
• Performance Today
• American Routes