Aid to MPR in referendum package rankles struggling Star Tribune

Published in Current, Jan. 25, 2010
By Karen Everhart

With proceeds from a sales tax hike approved by Minnesota voters in 2008, public broadcast outlets throughout the state are to receive a total of $11.6 million for arts coverage over the next two years. Pubcasters from Bemidji to Rochester plan to use the funds for new arts and historical programs, performance specials and Minnesota Public Radio’s planned statewide news aggregation website, Minnesota Today.

It’s not a public investment welcomed by the state’s largest newspaper. The Minneapolis Star Tribune is escalating a public spat with MPR, which it views as its biggest competitor in coming years.

“What we’re looking at in the news world is the most robust competition we’ve ever faced,” said Strib Chairman Mike Sweeney during an MPR-hosted conference on the future of news in November (Current, Nov. 23, 2009). “There’s no good reason for the government to take money away from health care to compete with for-profit businesses that are fully functioning and serving the community well.”

Since the Minneapolis newspaper emerged from bankruptcy last fall, its reporters and editorial writers have repeatedly raised questions about state support for the big public radio operation.

Star Tribune editorials have seen a conflict of interest in the presence of two pubcasters and representatives of other arts groups on an advisory panel for the state Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund (ACHF) that was created under the 2008 referendum.

That panel recommended guidelines for distributing monies from the sales tax hike, but it was the state legislature that earlier determined the recipients and amounts of ACHF grants.

What’s ‘construed as art’ gets state aid

The Star Tribune’s most recent salvo was a Jan. 17 editorial questioning whether members of the ACHF planning committee “set up the rules to steer money to their own organizations.” The newspaper also asked whether funds were being spent for their intended purpose of supporting arts organizations.

“[I]t’s a safe bet that voters didn’t tax themselves to support civics education or MPR’s regional news service (a Star Tribune competitor),” the newspaper editorialized. “The floodgates are now open for almost anything to be construed as art, diverting money from the groups that make Minnesota a cultural mecca.”

The view of newspaper executives whose company spent most of last year in bankruptcy is predictably different from that of journalism advocates who — under auspices such as the Knight Foundation and the Columbia j-school — urged pubcasters to pick up functions long performed by daily newspapers.

MPR is a particularly formidable potential competitor, with the resources and ambition to push forward into local newsgathering most aggressively where newspapers are pulling back. Ad-supported local news media aren’t necessarily willing to cede this ground to public broadcasters.

The debate over taxpayer subsidies for noncommercial news isn’t unique to Minnesota, and there’s always going to be some push-back over the government’s role, said Jeff Nelson, MPR managing director of public strategy, who served on the ACHF committee. “The government has been subsidizing the news in this country for a long, long time, and when it comes to CPB and public broadcasting, there has been public support for our news services.”

Nevertheless, the financial struggles of the Star Tribune and for-profit news companies in general give new context for the debate among Minnesotans, said Tim Roesler, MPR senior v.p. To a certain degree, he said, news organizations that shed some of their debts under bankruptcy protection are also getting a valuable benefit from the government. “That’s the irony from my standpoint.”

David Brauer, media critic for the online news competitor MinnPost, has taken some relish in chronicling the Star Tribune’s “war” on MPR. “I like newspaper crusades,” he commented about the Strib’s watchdogging of the ACHF panel. “While this one is not of optimal magnitude, the paper did highlight bad governance and the ‘mission creep’ that defines MPR News subsidies as preserving ‘Minnesota’s history and cultural heritage.’”

The Minnesota dispute centers on a constitutional amendment approved by voters in November 2008. In a rare case of citizens upping their own taxes, Minnesotans agreed to raise the state sales tax three-eighths of 1 percent for 25 years and put the proceeds into several separate funds in the state treasury. The amendment stipulated that most of the money, 80.25 percent, goes toward funds devoted to natural resource conservation and outdoor recreation. The rest, 19.75 percent is “only for arts, arts education, and arts access and to preserve Minnesota’s history and cultural heritage.”

The tax went into effect on July 1, 2009. Over the next two years, the arts fund is projected to exceed $93.2 million — some $44.5 million this year and $48.7 million in 2011 — according to state budget documents.

The legislature directed about 12 percent of the arts fund to public broadcasters — $11.6 million across two years, including $2.6 million for community radio stations, $2.6 million for MPR and $6.3 million for public TV.

Nearly half of the arts’ share of the tax proceeds was appropriated to the Minnesota State Arts Board, which will assist performances, arts projects and cultural heritage events throughout the state.

Public TV stations are mounting local and statewide productions with the arts funds. WDSE-TV in Duluth will spend its $680,000 to create a web-based local arts calendar, produce a high-def documentary on the historic Split Rock Lighthouse on Lake Superior, and provide expanded access for schoolchildren to the Duluth Symphony’s annual Young People’s Concert, according to Allen Harmon, g.m. Just last week, Harmon hired the station’s first-ever web developer to work on the new arts website, he said.

“This is a tremendous opportunity for us at a time when just about every other source of funding is contracting,” Harmon said. “We’re going to be able to offer new, exciting arts programs that people went to the polls and said, ‘This is what we want more of.’”

The $6.3 million for public TV, distributed among stations by formula, will also support a new half-hour arts series to be produced by Twin Cities Public Television in collaboration with five other stations, including North Dakota neighbor Prairie Public Television.

MPR is spending its $2.6 million in ACHF monies to broadcast performances by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra and other musical groups on its Classical MPR network, and to pilot new national programming. Lawmakers told MPR they “want more national programming created in Minnesota,” Nelson said. Other ACHF projects include expanding the reach of The Current, MPR’s contemporary music service, via an HD Radio multicast channel in St. Cloud, and working with the state historical society and other groups on audio preservation.

To the consternation of the Star Tribune, some of MPR’s share will help it launch a news aggregation website, Minnesota Today, featuring local and regional coverage from media partners around the state that have not yet been named. Arts coverage is to be part of the editorial mix. MPR planned to launch the site this month but now “hopes to have something to announce about it mid-March,” according to a spokeswoman.

Self-interest or vision for the arts?

The appropriations law that divvied up the first two-year pool of ACHF money last year also established the ACHF planning committee that the Strib and others have criticized. The committee’s charge was to advise the legislature by developing a long-term plan, including a vision statement, guidelines and goals, as a framework for deciding how funds should be distributed and evaluating grantees’ performance.

The law also specified which organizations should have seats on the committee — reps from public television and radio, the state historical society, the arts board, and children’s museums and libraries, among other entities.

The panel convened six public “listening sessions” and took an online survey as it shaped its recommendations. The report, delivered to the legislature Jan. 15, proposes broad principles such as access, collaboration, preservation, sustainability and diversity as a guiding framework for awarding funds to nonprofits. It calls for biennial evaluations of how ACHF programs meet standards for engagement, access, transparency and collaborations, among other goals, but does not set specific targets.

Paul Krinkie, president of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, which opposed passage of the Legacy Amendment, sees an inherent conflict in the ACHF committee. “In my view, to avoid a direct conflict of interest, the committee should be made up of organizations that don’t have a direct interest in dividing the funds. It’s like highway contractors divvying up who gets what highway funds.”

The Legacy Amendment was originally proposed as a means to support natural resource conservation and outdoor recreation, and it didn’t garner broad political support until its advocates added arts funding into the mix of activities, Krinkie said. Arts supporters campaigned very effectively to win passage of the amendment, and now this constituency is in charge of allocating the funds, he said.

“The job that public broadcasters do in Minnesota is outstanding,” Krinkie said. “I cannot claim that they did anything to influence the outcome of the vote, but now they have representatives on the committee, deciding on the distribution of funds, and I think that’s a conflict of interest.”

“This all comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of the panel,” MPR’s Nelson said. “It was not intended to make funding recommendations .... The committee was put together to make sure the organizations that had already been funded were investing the money wisely, in a strategic way.”

“The notion that this is a conflict of interest is kind of ludicrous,” Nelson said. Legislators were “holding our feet to the fire by asking us to create a plan to optimize the impact of this funding.”

“This committee had no jurisdiction over awarding funds,” said Sue Genz, executive director of the Minnesota State Arts Board, one of three organizations that coordinated the panel’s work. “The legislation was clear about what the committee’s task was — to develop a vision for what dollars will be allocated for Minnesota arts over the next 25 years and to set goals for the next 10 years so we can establish benchmarks.”

State Rep. Mary Murphy, a Democratic lawmaker who played a key role in shaping the legislation, defended the role that ACHF recipient groups played in developing a long-range plan. “I think it’s correct and proper that people with the proven record . . . develop the framework,” she told the Star Tribune. Murphy did not respond to Current’s request for an interview.