Targeting NPR (continued)

Andi Sporkin, NPR’s vice-president for communications, says her organization has done surveys of its own that show its audience is approximately one-third liberal, one-third conservative, and one-third middle-of-the-road. "They wouldn’t be tuning in if they felt NPR went one way or the other," she says of her conservative and centrist listeners. "You hear from listeners, you hear from elected officials, that they listen to NPR because it doesn’t offer a particular partisan stance. There’s a sense of having a place where different voices are sought, diversity of opinion is sought, and issues are covered in depth."

Then again, to my ears, at least, the diversity covers only a certain narrow range. At NPR, the conversation includes moderate liberals, moderate conservatives, and centrists, all engaging in the polite talk that marks sophisticated people who are agreeable about their disagreements. There are almost never any true ideologues of either the left or the right on NPR. From a practical point of view, the exclusion of left-wing voices may not be particularly meaningful, since the left has been thoroughly shut out of power in this country; NPR officials probably don’t lie awake at night worrying about pressure from left-wing activist groups. On the other hand, the right wing — that is, the home base of people who think NPR’s official conservative commentator, New York Times columnist David Brooks, is a liberal — is ascendant these days, and excluding its mouthpieces from public radio’s airwaves carries with it real consequences.

Indeed, the current struggle between Tomlinson and the public broadcasters is a good illustration of the power imbalance. The left has started — what else? — a petition drive to force Tomlinson to resign as chair of the CPB. There’s little doubt that he ought to go. A former editor of Reader’s Digest and former head of Voice of America, Tomlinson is a thoroughgoing conservative activist, right down to his conflict of interest: in addition to his CPB role, he runs the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the blanket agency that controls, among other things, Voice of America and Radio Sawa, the latter a government-funded Arabic-language service that broadcasts America-friendly information to the Middle East. (Information about the Tomlinson-must-go petition is online at FreePress.net, the Web site of the Northampton-based media-reform organization Free Press.)

The right, on the other hand, doesn’t need petitions. After all, it has Kenneth Tomlinson himself — not to mention his benefactor, George W. Bush, and more than half of Congress. Which is why public radio ought to think about getting out of its dysfunctional relationship with government once and for all.

TO LISTEN to Mark Fuerst tell it, public television had a chance to break out of its paradigm two decades ago — and blew it. Cable was in the early stages of transforming the way we consume electronic media. But PBS executives, not wishing to offend its member stations, failed to follow its viewers to the new world of cable. "It’s kind of reckless, in a way, to criticize people 25 years later," says Fuerst, whose Integrated Media Associates does consulting work for public radio stations. "But certainly we can say in hindsight that public broadcasting was not particularly far-sighted. The distribution capability was there, and there also was the opportunity to create national public channels."

Now technological advances may be on the verge of transforming radio in the same way that cable transformed television. Satellite radio, a subscription service, offers hundreds of specialized stations that can be heard from coast to coast. Podcasting — downloading MP3 files of radio programs so that you can listen to them on an iPod or other digital music player — is in its early stages, but with a few improvements it could prove as revolutionary as TiVo in terms of allowing consumers to listen at their convenience rather than on a radio station’s schedule. Even cell phones are starting to emerge as an important means by which to distribute audio (and video) programming.

All this could be good for NPR. But there’s no doubt it would be bad for the stations. And remember, the stations control NPR. For the moment, the relationship between public radio and satellite — the most viable of the new technologies — is arm’s-length. NPR programs are featured on two Sirius channels — but not the crown jewels, Morning Edition or All Things Considered. On XM, former Morning Edition host Bob Edwards anchors an interview program, and the service also features shows from WBUR, Public Radio International (PRI), and other services. A number of public-radio programs are available in MP3 format for a fee through Audible.com. And podcasting is just getting off the ground. NPR’s weekly On the Media program is available as a podcast, as is some content from WGBH Radio. The World, a joint venture involving ’GBH, PRI, and the BBC World Service, is trying a podcast-for-a-fee service. Christopher Lydon, the host of the new PRI program Open Source (heard locally on WGBH), has talked about podcasting as well — but not yet, apparently.

"All of those devices, if you ask me, look better from a producer point of view than from a station point of view," says Fuerst of satellite radio, podcasting, cell-phone distribution, and the like. The question is, will station managers allow NPR to move forward with technologies that could finally break the tie between public radio and government funding — but that could make the stations themselves obsolete?

The choice may not be quite as stark as all that. "Certainly the large public stations are as interested in new media as National Public Radio is," says Marita Rivero, the WGBH vice-president in charge of local television and radio operations. "We’re in a very competitive and interesting media environment right now," she adds, although she also notes that NPR has promised that it "will not become a rival to the stations in new media." Bob Lyons, who’s in charge of WGBH Radio’s new-media initiatives, says, "I’m of the view that analogue terrestrial radio is like the shark or the cockroach — it’s evolutionarily perfect. There’ll be something real similar to analogue terrestrial radio for quite a while."

NPR confirms that it’s not going to go into competition with its stations. "We don’t have any business model under consideration that does not include the member stations," says Jenny Lawhorn, a network spokeswoman. "Our organization is very dependent on the stations and based on a partnership. It’s more of an ecosystem. I don’t want to get too precious describing it, but it’s a two-way street."

And, of course, there’s much to recommend in the current model. Public radio is free and ubiquitous, as readily available to the immigrant cabdriver as it is to the BMW-driving lawyer heading into town from the suburbs. A headlong embrace of new media could change that, creating the same sort of cultural stratification that has emerged in television — that is, you can watch The L Word if you’re willing to pay $60 or more a month for cable and a subscription service, but if you can only afford rabbit ears you’re stuck with Survivor.

Kenneth Tomlinson can’t kill public radio, and he probably can’t even change its content in any significant way. But if he and his right-wing supporters apply enough pressure, they might be able to force public radio to pursue more aggressively the kind of well-heeled listeners who can afford satellite radio, or who have the time, patience, and technical expertise needed to subscribe to podcasts.

Public radio’s detractors sometime describe NPR and its ilk as elitist. It would be ironic if right-wing pressure forced public radio to embrace the very elitism that it has always eschewed.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.