Some Things Considered
Duggan, Joseph P.
Joseph P. Duggan Some Things Considered Does "public radio "--financed by the taxpayers-represent the citizenry's views? "If they [National Public Radio] existed only for 'All...
...legislators to include radio within the scope of establish the Corporation for Public BroadAlthough CPB is chartered as a private, nonprofit corporation, its directors are nominated by the President and confirmed by the United States Senate...
...The chief priest of"community access" radio is Lorenzo Milam...
...Pacifica's licensees have been known for their close indentification with radical causes, especially the antiwar movement of the '60s, and over the years'fliey have ducked in and out of the FCC's doghouse for alleged violations of standards of "decent" language...
...An investigation of ATC's newsgathering techniques, however, reveals that much of its "investigative reporting" derives from interviews not with newsmaking sources--that is, the figures directly involved in the newsworthy event--but from beat reporters for other news agencies...
...this is public radio--unruly ward of the taxpayers...
...stations primarily engaged with in-school or in-house instructional programming are disqualified...
...And a small, wheezing fellow named Charles Christopher Mark presents a daily "Report on the "When I asked UPI's editor-in-chief, H.L...
...When I asked how UPI arrived at its rates for NPR (wire services measure rates for commercial broadcasting stations by scientifically gathered audience ratings, but public radio has conducted no comparably accurate audience surveys), Stevenson replied, "That's a good question...
...Since the early '60s, Milam has travelled the country establishing" community access" stations, setting up their studios in ramshackle houses, giving them eccentric call letters such as KRAB, KBOO, KCHU, KTAO, and KDNA...
...Though NPR member stations can be found in the top five major radio market areas, their greatest preponderance seems to be in Midwestern college towns--this because noncommercial stations developed early and often strongly as classroom "radio labs" at the land-grant colleges...
...Community stations cannot depend for their support on institutional bases such as universities and school boards, but they welcome direct federal support when offered...
...But should they risk their agency's hard-earned reputation for "utter impartiality" by submitting to a line of questioning that mixes fact and opinion...
...On the same broadcast, legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg began her report on the Supreme Court's decision against mandatory pregnancy pay with the shopworn feminist refrain: "Women lost another round with the Supreme Court today...
...All Thing Considered," or ATC to initiates, is the 90-minute daily "newsmagazine" broadcast, produced and distributed by National Public Radio (NPR), America's only federally-funded radio network...
...Crowned with wild and curly hair, Milam wears a necktie and a button-down collar--only he invariably leaves the collar unbuttoned and flapped up to embrace the higher reaches of his neck...
...Louis by the "Double Helix Corporation," which in turn was owned by an entity called "The Parent Corporation...
...Robert Krulwich, NPR's news editor, caught the Woodstein bug in '74 when he took time off from law school to cover the Washington beat for New York's radical WBAI-FM and found himself cast in the spotlight of the impeachment hearings...
...There is a decided pop-leftist tilt to ATC's coverage, and a tone that curiously blends countercultural cheekiness and liberal piety --both engendered, I believe, by ATC's heroic self-image as the noncommercial David armed with spunk and a prayer against a mighty detachment of commercial media Goliaths, Titans, and Cyclopes...
...In a public-relations manifesto, NPR sets forth its goals thus: "...to contribute to people's better understanding of themselves, their fellow human beings, and the world about them, to heighten understanding and the quality of human life...
...but just this February, perhaps in reaction to suggestions of left-wing bias, ATC has added former Conservative-Republican SenaorJames Buckley of New York to its list of regular commentators...
...Milam is also associated with something called the Jack Straw Memorial Foundation, and there is a new broadcasting organization in Tampa, Florida--the Nathan B. Stubblefield Foundation--whose name suggests the Milam touch...
...Over the New Year's weekend, for instance, NPF devoted two hours to an original musical composition by Ma~ Neuhaus called "Radio Net...
...Scientific listener surveys are for determining commercial stations' rate schedules, they say, and besides, they're too expensive...
...Besides "All Things Considered," NPR offers a number of other informational programs, including morning and midday news reports, live coverage of major Congressional hearings, broadcasts of addresses before the National Press Club, and a series of documentaries and interviews called" Options...
...According to figures published by CPB for fiscal 1974, the public radio system's total income was $31~232,226...
...Well, yes, certain communities--usually those in dowdy, once-fashionable parts of town, fringed by ghettos, peopled by burnedout, balding '60s Aquarians...
...Community stations don't serve ethnic neighborhoods unless they happen to be certifiably downtrodden and politically chic...
...Will its legallyappointed guardians, the directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the members of Congress ? That I doubt, unless the citizenry give them a prod...
...In late January, NPR sent a five-man crew fot two weeks to Lagos, Nigeria, to report daily on "Festac '77," the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture...
...As a gesture in service to the brotherhood of man, NPR now provides programs free of charge to more than 200 member stations...
...qualifications for membership in NPR are the same as those for eligibility for grants from CPB...
...It was not until the hearings before the Senate Commerce Committee on S.1160, the "Public Television Act of 1967," that a witness for an educational broadcasters associa...
...Furthermore the political majorities of America are represented on public radio as the most miniscule minorities-if they are represented at all...
...the other recording a judge's ruling in Boston that cocaine constitutes "an acceptable recreational drug...
...Pacifica now also operates stations in Los Angeles, New York, Houston, and Washington, D.C...
...Now while a dialogue with Mr...
...This is public radio--the knock-kneed, headstrong IVunderkind of the high-minds at the big foundations and in the Capitol (and sibling to the hefty public television system, whose story will be told another day...
...To provide additional assistance to noncommercial stations, CPB in 1969 established--and continues to finance--National Public Radio, which produces and distributes programs for member stations from its headquarters in Washington, D.C...
...Since the early days of broadcasting, the Federal Radio Commission and its successor, the Federal Communications Commission, had been persuaded to reserve a percentage of radio frequencies for noncommercial, "educational" purposes...
...During a sojourn in Dallas I often visited KCHU and saw first-hand the good-natured--though often chaotic-ease and openness with which the studio operated...
...By 1967 a Carnegie Commission report was to prompt the drafting of legislation that would establish a "Corporation for Public Television," a nominally private entity, to be funded mostly by Congressional appropriations, to aid local noncommercial television stations in distribution of programs and with direct financial support...
...ATC also invites its listeners to express their opinions, and some do--via a weekly "listener commentary" spot...
...the network bears all expenses for production and distribution, including the costly fees for transmissions over AT&T Long Lines...
...All Things Considered" features fourteen regular commentators, each with a different area of special interest...
...He added that UPI's special arrangement with NPR would come under review when its contract expired...
...By a special contract clause NPR is entitled to interview UPI correspondents over telephone, at no extra charge from UPI, for amplified coverage of events reported on the wire (sometimes NPR pays honoraria to the individual reporters, but not to UPI...
...Stevenson, of his agency's arrangement with NPR, he reported that NPR, under contract with UPI, pays for wire service and packaged audio reports...
...and to provide enlightenment by bringing listeners the sounds, ideas, and the hopes of humanity...
...Recent cultural "specials" on NPR have shown a penchant foJ the avant-garde...
...Ottenad might indeed be informative, I should hardly call it "investigative reporting" on ATC's part...
...Poles and Italians don't...
...Is there not an implication in this, after all, that the roles are interchangeable...
...When New Times and other media trendies whiffed a bigbusiness conspiracy in the 1975 death of plutonium worker Karen Silkwood, ATC's Barbara Newman took after the story as a kind of Holy Grail, ardently filing dispatch after dispatch in her relentless but largely fruitless investigation...
...Almost to the day they went on the air with 'All Things Considered,' they didn't know what they were going to do," continued the professor...
...14 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 CPB awards direct financial support to qualified stations at a ratio of one federal dollar to every two-and-a-half a station can raise from other sources...
...Each week the network carries highlights of folk music festivals, programs of recorded jazz and ragtime, and a large package of live and recorded classical performances...
...Radio Net" cost taxpayer...
...Only 6.1 percent of public radio's income came from listener-subscribers...
...The promotional literature from NPR and CPB points proudly to the growing number of people public radio can reach...
...In the citation for the latter award, ATC was praised for "a unique and analytical examination of the day's news and important issues through exhaustive investigative reporting...
...Lorenzo Milam's "community access" microphones are indeed accessible --literally to the bloke who walks in unannounced off the street...
...Do community stations serve communities...
...Many of these style themselves "community stations" or "community access stations" and are self-consciously mavericks in broadcasting...
...to contribute to solving problems...
...If they [National Public Radio] existed only for 'All Things Considered,' that would justify their existence," declared a former educational broadcaster who now teaches at a Midwestern state university...
...They offer fine selections of classical music--certainly an admirable repertoire, but hardly the stuff of populism...
...Prominent among them are Nicholas Johnson, media commentator, a former member of the Federal Communications Commission and present head of the National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, an anti-commercial broadcasting lobby...
...Louis PostDispatch...
...Discovering an already existing field of nearly 700 noncommercial radio licensees--including many 10-watt high school and college stations--administrators at CPB established minimum criteria for individual stations' eligibility for federal support...
...If you just listened to 'All Things Considered' for an hour every day, you wouldn't have to read anything...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 15...
...The latter station, now defunct, was operated in St...
...And would these The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 13 same correspondents render similar services to outlets other than NPR ?" For much of its foreign coverage, NPR relies on the British Broadcasting Company, with which it holds a contract for wideranging news services...
...their culture, by and large, is that of the intellectualoid, or as a disgruntled former NPR official put it, "the raised-pinky set...
...yet much of that air time is huffed away with amateurish drivel--and with a political slant confessedly leftliberal to radical...
...Among the Pacifica group, for instance, the stations in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Houston (a maverick within Pacifica's own fold, for this station actually is an NPR member), and New York received nearly $140,000 from CPB in grants for "general operating purposes" and for "providing training internships...
...And were it not for a legislative afterthought, a national, governmentsupported radio network might never have come to be...
...11,800--$9,000 from NPR and $2,800 from the National Endowment for the Arts...
...Stevenson acknowledged that this concession to NPR is "unique" and that other UPI clients would be required to pay extra fees to the agency for such services...
...tion convinced the the bill and thus casting (CPB...
...Each night ATC presents a summary of the day's news, then a pastiche of "in-depth" stories "behind the headlines," off-beat features, and commentaries...
...British comedy, which won so many devotees in the Public Broadcasting Service's telecasts of "Monty Python," also makes its appearance amid NPR's cultural programs...
...From NPR's highfalutin rhetoric, the network's programming would seem to be cerebral sort of Operation Bootstrap aimed at improving the intellectual lot of the average American...
...The music consisted of humar whistling, phoned in by listeners and blended simultaneously b) Neuhaus' electronic equipment...
...It was the most moving thing I've ever heard on radio...
...When Jimmy Carter announces three cabinet appointments, for example, ATC's Susan Stamberg seeks an interview not with one of the appointees, not with a member of Congress or a spokesman for Carter, but instead with Thomas Ottenad, White House correspondent for the St...
...Community radio began in the late '40s when a left-wing journalist named Lewis Hill established the Pacifica Foundation and its godchild, KPFA-FM, in Berkeley, California...
...And Susan Joseph P. Duggan, born in 1955, is assistant managing editor of The Alternative...
...Moreover I would question the clubbish elitism of Washington-establishment reporter-as-reporter interviewing Washington-establishment reporter-as-authoritative-source-and-celebrity...
...You could hear the dog breathing, and then there was silence...
...When Barbara Waiters became the first of the gentler sex to host a television network news broadcast, NPR served notification with full-page ads in the New York Times and Washington Post--at taxpayer expense-that Susan Stamberg had been the first female host for any network news program...
...Stamberg frequently carries on two-way dialogues with other UPI reporters--among them White House correspondent Helen Thomas--and the extent of Stamberg's investigative probing is usually to doubt the information related by a governmental or other "official" source and ask the reporter-interlocutor's opinion: "But what do you really think...
...But how representative of that democratic people is this "public" radio...
...The price tag for this project was estimated at $25,000...
...NPR does not provide enough programs to fill a broadcast day, and onthe average no more than 25 percent of a station's programming originates with the network...
...Noncommercial broadcasting stations are forbidden by law to air editorials expressing the opinions of a station's owners or managers, but they are permitted to broadcast the opinions of outside commentators...
...For reports from the United Nations, NPR employs Pauline Frederick, veteran of many years at the UN for NBC, and Olive Remington Goldman, a former American representative to the UN...
...According to present standards, a CPB-qualified station must employ a full-time licensed staff of at least five, broadcast at least 18 hours each day, and have a transmission power of no less than 250 watts...
...But when pressed, spokesmen for both organizations confess that they have no real idea of how many people actually listen to public radio...
...Chicanos have their share of community stations...
...The programs o/~ the "establishment" network, National Public Radio, waft in on I~reezes from Academe...
...He did a stint with the Washington bureau of Rolling Stone before finding his niche at NPR...
...Another provision of the law requires noncommercial stations to seek out a balance in the commentaries they carD...
...Arts," the pattern for which is that the state of the arts is thriving in Case X (or languishing, as it may happen, in the instance of Y) but in any case would be much better if boosted by greate~ government subsidy...
...Or when senior members of Indira Gandhi's party broke ranks in early February, Stamberg got on the horn to UPI's man in New Delhi...
...Rosenfeld or Mr...
...And how can fact and opinion be distinguished when a Thomas Ottenad or a Harry Ellis straddles one foot on his newspaper's pedestal of objectivity and the other on the soapbox of the opinionated pundit-as-newsmaker ? Take another instance of ATC's approach to "investigative" coverage: When the Chilean government announced in November a mass amnesty for political prisoners, ATC delved behind the headlines not by inquiries to the Chilean government or spokesmen for Chilean dissidents, or, say, a recognized monitoring body such as Freedom House or Amnesty International...
...The reporter went down to the animal shelter to be on hand when they put a dog to sleep...
...It's been a big week for dope fans," wisecracked co-host Bob Edwards one evening in December as he introduced a pair of reports on drug-related events--one covering the convention of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML), where "gonzo journalist" Hunter Thompson sang dithyrambs to the weed and Jimmy Carter's aide Peter Bourne predicted its swift decriminalization...
...Politically they are as left-wing as they can be while yet remaining bland...
...Educational TV stations were opened, on university campuses and in major cities, with strong support from the Ford Foundation and its philanthropic brethren...
...Again, no doubt that UPI's correspondents are acute and wellinformed observers...
...But as far as can be determined, the network draws mostly an elite, alreadyenlightened audience...
...Stamberg, the program's co-host, is styled by peers and self as a feminist champion, a lioness among men...
...Still other musical programs are provided free for promotional purposes by the state broadcasting authorities of foreign governments, including the RAI of Italy and the Japanese and South African networks...
...Of that amount 54.6 percent was provided by state and local government (including state schools), and 27.4 percent by the federal government, for a total of 82 percent from all government sources...
...Other regular commentators have included a folk singer, a natural foods buff, an historian, a "consumer activist," and a "conservative"--someone named Bob Roberts from Seattle...
...Or when defense policy makes the news, Stamberg may call upon Washington Post editorial writer Stephen Rosenfeld...
...Ellis or Mr...
...Instead Susan Stamberg placed a telephone call to the Santiago correspondent for United Press International...
...Stations operated under religious auspices and including religious programming may qualify for CPB support, but not if their "program schedule [is] designed to further the principles of a particular religious philosophy...
...A large man, he moves with great agility though hobbled by leg braces...
...Public monies levied in taxes from a democratic people now support a national radio network and a looser aggregation of stations in the name of "public broadcasting...
...or in domestic affairs, Harry Ellis of the Christian Science Monitor...
...ATC's commentators receive $50 per appearance...
...Will anyone take hold of the brat...
...Eighty-six percent of CPB's revenue comes from direct appropriation by Congress and the remainder from taxdeductible contributions by foundations and large corporations...
...Not all noncommercial radio stations qualify for NPR membership, of course, and some that do choose not to belong, preferring to carry only their own programming...
...Since its inception in 1971, ATC has gained such coveted prizes as the DuPont-Columbia University Award for Excellence in Journalism (1975) and the Peabody Radio and Television Award (1972...
...Stevenson admitted that such telephone interviews were not subject to editing by UPI supervisors, and he acknowledged that his office had received complaints charging bias in Miss Stamberg's conversation with UPI's Santiago correspondent...
...They were very exciting, very experimental...
...He explained what was about to take place and then turned the microphone over to the dog just before they gave him the injection...
...and Robert Lipsyte, sports commentator, former sportswriter for the New York Times, now an outspoken foe of competitive athletics who writes for such radical-left publications as Afother Jones...
...Morton Halperin, foreign affairs analyst, the former assistant to Henry Kissinger who now devotes most of his time to railing against American intelligence activities (Halperin gained attention recently by' winning a damage suit against Richard Nixon and others because of wiretaps placed on his telephone...
...Television then burst intQ prominence, arousing the enthusiasm of the rising educational/planning elite, to the neglect of radio...
...Noncommercial radio has developed in fits and starts over the years as its sturdy commercial sister has prospered...
...Community" radio stations are operated by energetic, well-meaning folks and are marked by a refreshing vers libre on the air...
...Grants from the Ford Foundation, Atlantic Richfield, and Exxon accounted for nearly 80 percent of CPB's non-federal income in fiscal 1975...
...Programs of recorded music usually originate from the local stations, and some stations carry the Texaco-Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and the Chicago and Cleveland symphony orchestra concerts live by private subscription...
...Most noncommercial stations to arise were modest, low-wattage operations sponsored by colleges or school boards as broadcasting "labs" or by religious bodies for devotional and homiletic programming...
...For the most part, these sources are other levels of government...
...I remember one piece they did in those early days on animal overpopulation...
...And for coverage of events across the United States, NPR draws heavily on the news bureaus of its member stations...
Vol. 10 • March 1977 • No. 6
