Dysfunctional

One of the more controversial stances I’ve taken on this blog is “MInnesota Public Radio News sucks less than most local news organizations”.

It’s not an unblemished statement, of course. With some of their staffers, their eliminationist leftism slips out (or comes gushing out in a tsunami of foul, scabrous rotting bile). And you don’t have to scratch the surface too hard to find MPR doing its best to uphold Big Left’s narrative.

So yes – they suck less. It’s a low bar, and they barely get over it, but there you have it.

But the product has been slipping in recent years. MPR’s newsroom has been shrinking – by a little over half in the past 5-6 years. Their on-air programming has gotten more and more perfunctory; ; less local production, (except for their local talk shows, which don’t take nearly as much overhead and effort as doing news – especially given how over-staffed as MPR historically has tended to be).

All is not well.

Jay Boller at Racket has a long, well-reported and, I need to add, utterly stereotype-affirming report on the recent decline of MPR News.

Long story short: As executive salaries soar, less and less of that taxpayer and donor money is going to news and programming.

But naturally, to those remaining, the problem is, notwithstanding the fact that the organization has unionized and pushed itself to the bleeding edge of the social justice fashion curve, MPR News just isn’t progressive enough:

The employee-led Transform group re-stated its lists of demands around anti-racism and gender equality last fall after Taylor assumed her role, concluding, “We remain tired, perhaps more tired than ever before. But we will not stop trying to force this company to change. It is simply too important.” 

This comes at a time when some – few, but some – in the “progressive” non-profit industrial complex are starting to ask some of the same questions about their business and political models (about which more, likely, next week), after noticing that all that money seems to be buying less results and more internal, woker-than-thou discord. The parallels are worth discussing.

I’d love to ask someone from MPR to come on the show to discuss this – but they’ve long since circled up their wagons and stopped talking with anyone outside the Circle of Trust.

8 thoughts on “Dysfunctional

  1. I miss the sensibility of the MPR editorial board from the era of Gary Eichten. IMO — more analytical and both sides of the issues were highlighted and the listener was left to decide for themselves.

  2. Libturd modus operandi – not just bite the hand that feeds them, but rip it out of the socket and go for the throat, lest the host survive the amputation.

  3. Minnesota Public Radio has always been elitist.

    They started as a college radio station in Central Minnesota to bring ‘good music’ to the proles in farmland. They solicit public funding so they can play classical music to uplift the masses.

    It never occurs to them that if the masses were willing to pay for that music, the masses would subscribe to Sirius XM Channel 76 instead of laundering the money through taxes where grant administrators take their cut.

    I can get a Liberal slant on the Associated Press news feed anywhere. I don’t need to subsidize public radio to hear it from them in cultured voices.

  4. Given where the stock market is these days, it’s quite likely that MPR income will be dropping significantly near term. Say what you will about tighter economic times, it does highlight crappy “investments” and non-essential expenses.

    The prospect of the woke proletariat inside MPR casting off the chains of their merely leftist overlords and engaging in a direct, public battle of communists vs woketards is amusing to me. I’ll have to stock up on popcorn — oh wait, in Joe Biden’s America there’s a shortage of that, too!

  5. I would love to be a fly on the wall in one of their management meetings.

  6. Years ago I read an interesting article on the politicization of public radio and television. Apparently it started in the late seventies and early eighties. Before that, public radio had been all classical, all of the time. As MBerg mentions, public radio had begun as a New Dealesque program to introduce rural America to culture.
    That ended when public radio (NPR + local affiliates) applied more capitalist (or neo liberal) incentives to its management. They were rewarded by being better fundraisers, so public radio began to cut back on its classical music programming and increase news & commentary aimed at its audience, who tended to be college graduates and political liberals.
    Public radio was, I think, an early example of an effect that Bari Weiss has noted in newspapers. They don’t make much money, anymore, from advertisers who do not want to appear political. Their money comes from subscriptions, and subscribers want their biases and prejudices reinforced.

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