Public Radio

Back in the early nineties, when I was trying to resuscitate my moribund radio career, I worked as a volunteer in the news department at KFAI Radio. "Fresh Air" is an eclectic community-supported station serving Minneapolis, mainly the West Bank, the funky freakshow of a neighborhood around Cedar and Riverside in Minneapolis.

Of course, at KFAI you could encounter any type of politics you wanted, as long as it was rabidly left. I made a religious point of never talking politics, although that didn't protect me from emnity; there was an all "feminist" show that regarded the presence of males in the building as a borderline sex crime. One of the news reporters, at my "orientation", said "I make sure I put in a healthy dose of my own liberal politics. Just because I can," she said with a knowing wink, the kind you give when you think you're talking to a wholly sympathetic audience.

But it was a fun stint, and I think everyone benefitted; I met some interesting people and got to do some interesting news reporting; they got a guy who could read and chew gum at the same time. There were times, before I got hooked up with the NARN, that I actually missed working there enough to call to enquire about volunteering to do news again (although time never permitted me to follow through).

Now, Minnesota Public Radio wasn't precisely "the enemy" at KFAI, but they weren't friends, either. Bill Kling pretty clearly sought control of all public radio in Minnesota; he clearly regarded every dollar the state or the public spent on KFAI as money that should have gone to him and MPR.

And yet...

KFAI was interesting radio. The quality, even listenability, varied widely. The political agenda of many of the people involved was stultifying. But it actually served a discrete, discernable community, albeit a community that is a bit of a caricature, and they served it well.

I'm a conservative. I oppose most government subsidies - we shouldn't be subsidizing corporations, non-profits or poverty.

But if we leave the right and wrong of subsidizing millionaire "non-profit" executives and their empires out of the question, I have this question: If the state is going to spend money on public broadcasting, which is the better investment: A huge, elaborate, oppressive empire devoted to two streams of programming - mushy-left talk and homogenized classical music - or many smaller stations that directly serve smaller communities? I vote the latter.

This thread, by the way, marks an odd confluence - some agreement with Mark Gisleson of Norwegianity, a blog with whom I've mixed it up in the past, and will in the future.

Although Gisleson says:

Unlike conservative talk shows, Lanpher was a master at letting her guests present and defend their agendas. That’s good radio. And, like any good liberal, Lanpher had on guests from across the political spectrum. I miss her show and Berg’s dislike of Lanpher just makes me miss her more, even though I wish her and Al well over at Air America.

Several replies:

• Many conservative hosts - Medved, Prager, Hewitt, and I'll add the NARN - are better than Lanpher ever was at allowing guests state their case.
• Lanpher was perfectly fine with guests that she agreed with. With overtly conservative guests, she was famously curt and perfunctory.
• In terms of the pure art of speaking and communicating on the air, Lanpher was a joke. She sounded befuddled by all the flashing lights; she was the worst call-handler in the history of talk radio; and despite having the largest staff of any local talk show, she constantly sounded like she was winging it, and winging it badly.

The fact that she was brought in to backstop Franken with some "professionalism" is side-splittingly ironic.

Gisleson also says "Berg, of course, blames liberals" - which seems reasonable, since conservatives have little to like about MPR (although I listen to Keillor and MPR news regularly), and MPR was caught giving mailing lists to Paul Wellstone.

Which prompts an observation. Before I make it, let me make this clear; liberal does not equal bad, and conservative doesn't equal good (for purposes of this statement, anyway).

Why do conservatives dominate the blogosphere, while liberals roam free in the more structured worlds of public radio and institutions like E-Democracy and other moderated discussion facilities? Why do conservatives (at least, fiscal conservatives) dominate among entrepreneurs and small businesses, while liberals dominate big, unionized industries and lament the loss of huge, smokestack enterprises? Why does the left carp about politicians academic credentials ("Reagan only had a BA from an undistinguished college", or as I heard on FrankenNet the other day, "Bush only went to business school when he failed to get into law school", or, on the Garawfulo show, "Condi Rice only graduated from the U of Denver!")?

The same reason "community" is such a buzzword on the left; they seem to feel more comfortable in groups - especially groups that have defined, almost ritualistic boundaries and hierarchies; leaders with bigger, better credentials than you; information from sources that have been vetted and found acceptable (by people with bigger, better credentials than you); politicial discussion in carefully-moderated (some might say politically-sanitized) groups like E-Democracy and highly-overproduced shows like Lanpher's old "Midmorning" and FrankenNet; in the world of blogs, why they tend to write elaborate comments on megablogs like Kos and Atrios rather than start their own blogs; why they prefer work environments with carefully-defined contributions and rewards and hierarchies. As Robert Nozick said in an article I wrote about last year:

chools became the major institution outside of the family to shape the attitudes of young people, and almost all those who later became intellectuals went through schools. There they were successful. They were judged against others and deemed superior. They were praised and rewarded, the teacher's favorites. How could they fail to see themselves as superior? Daily, they experienced differences in facility with ideas, in quick-wittedness. The schools told them, and showed them, they were better...

...The wider market society, however, taught a different lesson. There the greatest rewards did not go to the verbally brightest. There the intellectual skills were not most highly valued. Schooled in the lesson that they were most valuable, the most deserving of reward, the most entitled to reward, how could the intellectuals, by and large, fail to resent the capitalist society which deprived them of the just deserts to which their superiority "entitled" them? Is it surprising that what the schooled intellectuals felt for capitalist society was a deep and sullen animus that, although clothed with various publicly appropriate reasons, continued even when those particular reasons were shown to be inadequate?

People who tend to the ight are comfortable with the seeming anarchy of the market, the do-it-yourself world of rejecting newspapers for blogs, the roughhouse of talk radio as opposed to the homogenated, phony veneer of intelligence of public radio (which covers no less intellectual dishonesty than Sean Hannity exhibits).

Nothing wrong with that, again - differences aren't bad, they're just differences.

But it does explain, I think, why the public radio audience, and constituency, trends left,.socially and politically. It's just safer.

Posted by Mitch at August 19, 2004 07:38 AM | TrackBack