Standing in my skis on top of Pajarito Mountain the other day I pointed to a radio tower perched nearby and told my friend that it belongs to the public radio station in Santa Fe. She replied she hadn’t listened to the radio in years. I told her I listen to public radio daily, sometimes for hours. I’ve been cocking my ear towards radios since my childhood when my bedside radio gave me a sense of the world outside my parent’s home in a small town.
Public radio gives me substantial information when I’m driving or cooking or when I can’t sleep in the small hours of the morning. Public radio is noncommercial, so I don’t have to wait out the blaring nonsense of advertisements for stores and products. I’ve developed a trust for public radio stations, decidedly community run nonprofit institutions that exist across the country.
I’ve worked at one of these stations in California (KUSP), and I’ve been interviewed on some of them over the years. Local people run these stations out of love for good music and news. They believe in long-form news, and they seek to bypass the commercial media with its deference to advertisers and corporate interests.
We can see the worst of the commercial news model on display with FOX “news” which continued to repeat Donald Trump’s self-serving lies after the 2020 election purely out of commercial interest. The company was so worried about losing its right-wing watchers to even more right-wing companies, they repeated Trump’s lies even though the FOX staff knew it was fiction and not news. This has been revealed in discovery by Dominion Voting Systems in their current defamation suit against FOX.
More mainstream news sources like CNN have more subtle commercial concerns with maintaining its audience.
Local radio stations funded by listener contributions form the backbone of public radio. Some of these are based in universities, some are purely independent nonprofit organizations such as KRZA in Alamos, Co. In turn these contribute a substantial amount of National Public Radio’s funding, which provides an international noncommercial news source for the local stations. Local stations often have their own local news organizations.
An example would be KSUT, a station based in Ignacio, Colorado that started out as a tribal radio station for the Southern Ute tribe. They maintain a tribal station but have developed a separate radio service for the wider public that covers much of southern Colorado. This is a local nonprofit organization that subscribes to National Public Radio and some other satellite based nonprofit news sources such as American Public Media the BBC. These stations have racks of electronics in their station that connect to a satellite and they pay a subscription to NPR and other public radio services for programming based on the size of the audience they serve.
Other public radio stations in northern New Mexico and nationally operate the same way. KANW in Albuquerque has transmitters all over central and northern New Mexico and is operated under the Albuquerque Public Schools. KUNM operates the same way out of UNM. KUER in Utah is based in the University of Utah and has transmitters all over Utah, reaching even the smallest towns in rural Utah as an education service. This station may have one of the largest geographic coverages of any public station in the West.
National Public Radio is the common denominator in the public radio world though some stations (like KSFR in Santa Fe) do not subscribe to its services. NPR serves 1000 radio stations nationally and was established by Congress under the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967. It gets grants from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and has corporate sponsors who are mentioned in “spots” during breaks in programming. It is also funded by the stations which are funded by individual’s donations.
NPR is having financial challenges these days along with many other news organizations. According to the Washington Post they recently cut their staff 7% due to a fall in revenue from corporate sponsors. The government funded Corporation for Public Broadcasting only gives NPR 2% of its budget. The rest comes from member stations and their members, grants and endowments.
The flagship news programs from NPR such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered used to be free of messages from corporate sponsors. These programs have more than 14 million listeners and over the last decade, as costs have risen and support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has likely declined, NPR has become more reliant on outside funding.
Today an hour of programming on the main news programs from NPR is interrupted 4 or 5 times for a 15 second stretches of sponsor “spots” or advertisements. Though regulated in their content, the companies that give to NPR can send out their message as “supporters.”
NPR finds other ways to put out additional corporate spots from its “supporters.” They can run a regular short feature such as “All Tech Considered” which has a corporate spot or two attached to it as supporters. Some of these spots mention foundations that support NPR and tout the interests of the foundations.
These are not commercials like you hear on commercial radio. But they are annoying nevertheless because of their frequency. I wish NPR could survive on CPB funding and public donations but we do not live in an ideal world.
A “spot” on public radio is a few second mention of a company that has given money to NPR. They are not allowed to say they are the best or the greatest, only a neutral mention of their services. There is no hype or background music.
By contrast, the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) is a purely government funded news service out of London that has a world-wide reach through its World Service. It has no sponsor “spots” of any kind, just news programming. But then again, the UK also has a public health care system, instead of the for-profit health care system the US struggles under.
“Spots” aside, public radio is an outstanding ray of sunshine in the overwhelmingly commercial, corporate world in the United States. Like public lands where we can enjoy land we own together, public radio is community driven. It works well and it is enlightening and refreshing and deeply educational.
Of course, some conservatives have different views of public radio and television. They don’t like them because they have a “liberal” bias. They tried during the Reagan and Bush years to close down the CPB, NPR and PBS. They failed due to public blowback. These conservatives also believe we should sell the public lands to corporations after passing them through the states or tribes.
Standing on Pajarito Mountain, looking across the Rio Grande Valley with the radio tower next to me, I feel some relief that the community is offering itself nonprofit news and music to itself through that tower. Though I doubt most people in this area know about KSFR, I would hope that if they did, they many might tune in and take a break from the constant barrage of selling and media tinged with commercial considerations.
