Just a Minute...

An NPR staffer wrote to take issue with my portrayal of Keillor's funding stream. I said in my ;original screed that Keillor got where he is today using tax dollars.

Apparently, it's a little murkier than that - the end-result being that Keillor, Minnesota Public Radio and National Public Radio are not "tax-funded" in the classic, BBC or Deutsche Welle sense of the term. The correspondent wrote:

"National Public Radio" is a bit of a misnomer: since a major financial restructuring in the early 1980s, NPR (as well as PBS) no longer receives any direct public subsidy. Instead, the relatively small amount of taxpayer money appropriated for public broadcasting goes to the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which makes one-time grants, based on their judgement of independent applications. Some of this money goes to projects on NPR. Some of it goes to PBS. Some of it goes to independent stations, or producers, or individuals. On any given year, it makes up a tiny fraction of NPR's income.

So where does the money actually come from? Mainly, listener donations, as filtered through stations and sent to NPR as fees for programming. Also, corporate underwriting, paid to stations or directly to NPR, in return for on-air mentions.

So Keillor is not (at least since the '80's, anyway) on any sort of direct public payroll. Sources of mine within MPR also have told me that the endowment set up with the profits from "Lake Wobegone Days" is big enough to float Prairie Home Companion for quite some time, and MPR to boot (although this may have changed over the years), and so it's possible that Prairie Home Companion receives no direct funding itself (I'll have to check that).

Fair enough. Let's take M/NPR's funding stream off the table, and I'll leave it at this - however Keillor is paid, his views of his fellow citizens - the ones that pledge to his station, buy his books, attend his performances, live on his street, and see the world and their politics differently - are noxious in and of themselves.

Posted by Mitch at November 14, 2002 06:58 PM