Current (https://current.org/2011/03/page/3/)
Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there….
The Capitol Hill hearing on alternative means to fund public broadcasting, which had been announced for April 6, has been canceled due to scheduling issues, House Appropriations Committee spokesperson Jennifer Hing tells Current.
After last week’s House vote on federal funding for public radio, the debate continued to rage on op-ed pages and blogs. Here’s a sampling from pubcasting veterans and other observers with special insights:William Drummond, a founding editor of Morning Edition who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley’s J-School, remakes his case for policymakers to forcibly “wean public broadcasting off the federal dole.” [Drummond mentions his 1993 commentary in Current.]Fox News pundit and former NPR news analyst Juan Williams agrees that pubcasting should lose its federal aid, but for different reasons. In today’s edition of The Hill he writes of “the culture of elitism that has corroded NPR’s leadership.”Native Public Media’s Loris Ann Taylor outlines what federal funding means to the 39 Native-owned stations broadcasting to “vast stretches of tribal lands” unserved by any other media. “Politicians are quick and generous when it comes to paying platitudes to rural America,” Taylor writes on the New America Foundation’s blog.
“New Public Media Networks: What’s Becoming and What Might Be” is a new animated video from American University’s Center for Social Media that touts the importance of public broadcasting by focusing on one household. In it, members of the Cardozo family — Jenna and Jose, their 10-year-old daughter Liv and twins Max and Carla, 17 — each use pubmedia in very different but beneficial ways, from having fun on PBS Kids to addressing community issues through involvement in the “Not in Our Town” outreach. Max even creates an app that spreads worldwide via his local pubcasting station. The eight-minute film was created by Jessica Clark, director of the Future of Public Media Project at the center, and Ellen Goodman, law professor and co-director of the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and Law.
After a nearly two-hour battle pitting fiscal conservatism against the value of publicly funded media, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill forbidding stations to use CPB funds to acquire NPR programming or pay network dues.
Neither Ron Schiller nor Betsy Liley had eaten before at Café Milano, the upscale see-and-be-seen restaurant in Georgetown, before Feb. 22, when they stepped into an elaborate trap that had been set for them there. The two NPR fundraisers didn’t get the $5 million donation that was discussed by their lunch partners, and the president of NPR didn’t pose for a photo accepting a phony check, but those were the better results of the lunch meeting. They couldn’t have expected that a hidden-camera recording of their talk with two prospective donors would cost Schiller his next job, put Liley on administrative leave, trigger the ouster of NPR’s president and severely undercut support for federal aid to public broadcasting. Two weeks later, March 8, the consequences began tumbling into sight as right-wing activist James O’Keefe’s video of their lunch meeting spread virally on the Web.
WNET/Thirteen in New York City is launching a local news show, MetroFocus, on Memorial Day, the New York Times is reporting. “One of the futures of public television is making local connections,” station President Neal Shapiro told the paper. “We’ve done a great job of being a national producer; we can do a much better job of being a local producer.” It’ll launch as a website, then a 30-minute monthly or weekly show, then a mobile app.
Did Garrison Keillor, that red-sneakered, 68-year-old host of A Prairie Home Companion, really announce his retirement plans in an interview published last week? You decide. Here are your clues:
On March 16, AARP issued a press release, “Public Radio Legend Garrison Keillor Announces Retirement in AARP Bulletin Exclusive Interview.”
In the question-and-answer dialogue on AARP’s website, Keillor said, “I am planning to retire in the spring of 2013, but first I have to find my replacement.”
Soon after AARP’s piece appeared online, his longtime broadcaster and distributor, Bill Kling, president of American Public Media, told an MPR blogger that “Garrison has been talking about things like this for the last couple of years and when Garrison says it, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than that morning’s musings.”
Later that same day, an APM memo to client stations tried to reassure them: “Garrison has been open in talking about his own future and in working out ways for A Prairie Home Companion to continue for many years to come. . .
NPR is facing the most serious political crisis in its history with no chief executive to speak for it, no chief fundraiser to make sure its new building can be finished, and no chief journalist to rebuff or heed criticism of its newsroom. “People feel that they’ve been let down, and there’s this vacuum at NPR, and what’s next?” said Dave Edwards, chair of the NPR Board. “Those emotions are felt by people in NPR’s building, at stations and by board members. The board has an obligation to stabilize things. That’s what we’re working on.”
Joyce Slocum, general counsel and senior v.p. of legal affairs, was named interim c.e.o. after the departure of Vivian Schiller March 9, but she has asked the NPR Board to recruit another exec to serve as the public face of NPR, speaking for it in Congress and to the press, she told Current.
How much progress has public radio made toward its goal of growing its audience by 50 percent by 2020? There are bright spots in the first follow-up to Station Resource Group’s 2010 report that laid out aspirational goals and tactics for increasing the use, reach and diversity of public radio listenership, but also some set-backs.”In 2010 more people tuned in a public radio station in a typical week and more people used public media’s online services than ever before,” write Terry Clifford and Tom Thomas, SRG co-directors and co-authors of the CPB-backed research project. “But the amount of listening – the average audience at any one time – declined significantly, principally due to changes in measurement methodology. Compared to 2008, the percentage of Black listeners in the average audience declined and the percentage of Hispanic listeners grew.” Download their first progress report here.The switch to Arbitron’s portable people meters make apples-to-apples ratings comparisons difficult, but in the top 30 metro markets where radio listening was measured by PPM in both fall 2009 and fall 2010, the average audience grew 5.2 percent to 559,100, a gain that exceeds the annual growth rate needed to meet the 10-year goal.
Mykalai Kontilai, whose controversial past stoked headlines when he bought Nightly Business Report last August, has hired Paramount Media Advisors to explore options “from selling a minority stake up to selling the entire company,” the New York Times is reporting. Sources familiar with the situation says Kontilai’s company, NBR Worldwide, is exploring a strategic alliance with a bigger partner through a minority investment, although a sale of Nightly Business Report “would also be considered.”
Is NPR’s “complete lack of a strategy to save itself” in the current crisis what’s actually doing the most damage to the network? Media analyst Howard Kurtz explores that possibility for Newsweek today (Sunday March 20). He said that NPR staffers flown in for a recent meeting in Washington “groaned when executives said it would be too risky for them to aggressively defend NPR, and that perhaps they should get media training for Joyce Slocum, who took over on an interim basis after the firing of CEO Vivian Schiller” (Current, March 9).This American Life host Ira Glass also criticized NPR’s reaction — or, rather, the lack of it. “Public radio is being hit with a barrage of criticism that it’s left-wing media — biased, reprehensible — and we’re doing nothing to stand up for our brand,” he said. “They’re not responding like a multimedia organization that’s actually growing and superpopular.”One bit of good news from Patrick Butler, head of the Association of Public Television Stations and its new offshoot partnership with NPR, the Public Media Association. Butler said he is “encouraged by the fact that our friends are still our friends” in Congress, adding, “people are not deserting me in droves as I might have feared.”
Bob Davis, editor of the Anniston (Ala.) Star, undertook an experiment to determine if the “enlightened” broadcasting content that President Lyndon Johnson envisioned when he signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 is being provided by commercial radio, thus eliminating the need for NPR. “Friday morning, I probed this idea by randomly scanning the radio dial, something my family can attest is a specialty of mine,” Davis said. What he found may not be surprising, but it is amusing.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s decision last week to replace the entire seven-member Educational Television Commission has pubcasting supporters worried, reports The State newspaper. “What worries me is if people go in there thinking they know what ETV means, thinking it’s just Masterpiece Theater, and they make decisions without being educated,” Caroline Whitson, president of Columbia College and the fundraising ETV Endowment Board, told the paper. “They could make decisions that long-term have very detrimental effects on this state without realizing what they’ve done.” ETV, created in 1960, operates a statewide network of 11 television stations, eight radio stations and a closed-circuit telecommunications system used by schools, government agencies and businesses, the paper said.
A stream on NPR Music “carries as much cultural weight as an appearance on Saturday Night Live or the cover of Rolling Stone,” according to today’s (March 18) Washington Post. Bertis Downs, manager of R.E.M., told the paper, “When we sit around thinking, ‘How do we get attention?’ — they’re at the top of the list.” Downs recently helped the legendary alt-rockers get their new album streamed on the site. “We know that’s where the audience is,” he said. Traffic on NPR Music has quadrupled since it launched in 2007, the Post notes, and it currently accounts for about 14 percent of the eyeballs visiting NPR.org.
March Madness? Bah. Here’s Masterpiece Madness, in honor of the PBS icon’s 40th anniversary. Yes, brackets pitting popular characters against one another. New matches will appear daily for three weeks, voting lasts 24 hours per match.
Nova and Channel 4 in the U.K. are commissioning London’s Pioneer Productions to produce “Japan’s Killer Quake,” an original one-hour documentary on the ongoing disaster Japan, to air at 9 p.m. Eastern on March 30. The production company also produced “Emergency Mine Rescue,” another quick turnaround project, on last year’s Chilean mine disaster. Nigel Henbest will produce the film. Howard Swartz, Nova executive producer, will oversee the project for WGBH/Nova; commissioning editor for Channel 4 is David Glover.
In addition to banning use of federal funding for NPR programming, H.R. 1076, which passed the House Thursday (March 17), also prohibits stations from using that money to purchase shows from other distributors, including Public Radio International and American Public Media. Here are their statements in reaction to the bill’s passage.From Public Radio International Public Radio International is appalled by the passage of H.R. 1076. Not only will this bill inhibit stations’ ability to serve local audiences and stifle producers’ development of new content, it will also limit public access to global news and information that US citizens demand. By being prohibited from using federal funds to purchase content from PRI, millions of listeners will no longer have access to BBC World Service, PRI’s The World, Studio 360, This American Life and dozens of other programs that offer a diversity of perspectives on and insights into our increasingly connected global society.”From American Public MediaWe believe that American Public Media would indeed be affected by H.R.1076, most directly via the stipulation barring stations from using federal funds to acquire any public radio program content. The bill would affect the entire public radio system, and not just NPR as it is being presented.
Len Downie Jr. and Robert Kaiser “are concerned that, in the heat of the debate, members of Congress may not realize the changing role that public radio stations, working with NPR, play in informing citizens in their communities,” the two write in today’s (March 18) Washington Post. Downie, a former Post editor, and Kaiser, an associate editor at the paper, are also co-authors of The News About The News: American Journalism in Peril. The two detail the growing importance of the pubcasting system in reporting local news, citing CPB’s local journalism centers (Current, April 5, 2010). “The public broadcasting community has appeared flustered by the ferocity of its critics’ attacks,” they write, “some of which are ideologically motivated. But most members of Congress are sent to Washington by communities with NPR member stations, which could do a better job of selling their increasingly vital role in news reporting.”
The House bill approved Thursday (March 17) to keep pubradio stations from spending federal money for NPR dues and programming are “unlikely” to go anywhere in the Senate, the National Journal reports. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the White House are both opposed.”I listen to NPR every day,” Reid said in a statement National Journal Daily. “Like many Americans, my children and I have benefited from the educational and news programs public radio provides every day of the year. Public radio and the top-notch journalists it employs are valuable resources to people of all ages across the country and I can’t understand why Republicans would want to take that away from them.”