A friend of the blog emails regarding an email he got from Minnesota Public Radio regarding their recently-finished pledge drive:
Wait a minute. I thought that government subsidies was only a small portion of their funding.
So which it is?
Here was the email:
MPR’s Spring Member Drive ended last week, and we made great progress. But there is still a long way to go to meet our budget goals by June 30. I know the budget isn’t the most exciting thing to talk about, but the fact is that it powers everything we do – the programming you love, and the hosts, journalists and staff who create and share it.
To give you a status update, here what’s happening:
👉 Economic uncertainty continues to negatively impact our revenues
👉 Vocal attacks on public media continue, even resulting in calls to defund public media on the national stage
These headwinds materially affect MPR. We’re working hard to keep on track. It’s important that we do so that we can move forward in a position of stability and strength.
Look, MPR – public radio apologists keep saying NPR gets a tiny share of its funding from government. But if NPR says they’ll collapse without government funding, how are they not state media?
As Fluffy demonstrates with every comment made here, self-awareness is not really a strong suit of his nor of those like him.
Economic uncertainty continues to negatively impact our revenues
So, there was much less of this euphemistic “economic uncertainty” just a few years ago. Say, like November or December of 2020. Wouldn’t it be an interesting journalistic enterprise to investigate what changed since then? I mean, so as to explain what it is that continues to negatively impact their revenues. And how maybe doing everything possible as a media organization to change everything in November of 2020 was maybe really, really stupid.
The New Hotness seems to be “privacy laws.”
“We’d tell you how much federal funds we receive, but that would violate privacy laws.”
“We’d tell you the race of the career criminals we are arresting, but there are those dog-gone privacy laws.”
“We’d tell you that your sorority sister is a man, but we have to obey the privacy laws.”
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Just speculation, but does defunding NPR imply they lose tax exempt status? That would curtail a lot of woke corporate donations. Asking for a friend.
Golfdoc, I’m sure NPR could organize itself as a non-profit and donations could still be tax exempt. It’s been a long time since I’ve listened, so I don’t know if NPR hosts are as blatantly partisan enough to actually say on air, “We must all vote Democrat or the Earth will die!!” or if they merely insinuate it slightly less obviously. IIRC, partisan political groups that participate in electioneering don’t qualify for tax exempt donations. OTOH, you’d probably have to find someone at the IRS willing to document partisan activity and file a case, and we already know which direction the IRS enforces tax exempt rules.
As to the State Media status of NPR and it’s affiliates, Ben Shapiro has a great line I’ll paraphrase.
NPR isn’t State Media and it’s a good thing that NPR is State Media.