Unlike most media, on-line or traditional, National Public Radio is thriving. It may be the most popular and trusted news source in the country.
As Bill McKibben reports:
Public radio claims at least 5 percent of the radio market. National Public Radio’s flagship news programs, Morning Edition and All Things Considered, featuring news and commentary alongside in-depth reports and stories that can stretch over twenty minutes—are the second- and third-most-popular radio programs in the country, each drawing about 13 million unique listeners in the course of the week. These NPR shows have far larger audiences than the news on cable television; indeed, all four television broadcast networks combined only draw twice as large an audience for their evening newscasts. Morning Edition and All Things Considered are supplemented by well-regarded programs like The World, a BBC coproduction with Boston’s WGBH, and the business broadcast Marketplace—programming produced outside of NPR itself but within the larger world of public radio. In polls, public radio is rated as the most trusted source of news in the nation. The audience for most of its programs dwarfs the number of subscribers to the The New York Times or The New Yorker, or the number of people who read even the biggest best sellers.
In fact, the burgeoning success of NPR seems to be driving the right in this country a little crazy.
Today Republicans in the House tried to eliminate the money the Federal government gives indirectly to NPR, without success. (Even if they succeed in cutting its stipend totally, they likely won't kill it off: The government only contributes about 15% of its budget.)
And Roger Ailes, the mastermind behind FOX News, called the people who work at National Public Radio "Nazis."
“They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don’t want any other point of view. They don’t even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive.”
Howard Kurtz, who recently left the Washington Post for the Daily Beast, got this quote.
Impressive.
Ailes took it back later — sort of.
To hear the FOX News honcho compare the famously modulated NPR voices to perhaps the worst villains in the history of the world?
It's a bit surreal — and very schoolyard. One wants to pull out the old "I'm rubber and you're glue" witticism from the sixth grade.
Kit Stolz 