Re: [Leica] Radio (was News Groups) & NPR

[Carl Pultz <cpultz@earthlink.net>]

Barney,

I don't think either Mark or I said anything negative about NPR. If you 
made such a contribution, I owe you, along with the other NPR pioneers, a 
great debt of gratitude. (I'd like to know more about what you did there.) 
It was the excitement, range, boldness and passion of NPR that inspired me 
to go into the business. A group of visionaries were given (barely) enough 
money and an enlightened mandate, and they made a brilliant contribution to 
the nation. I still have tapes of programs from that era - amazing stuff.

It is not really like that now! Not that it's bad, not at all. It's just 
not as deep or as wide or as smart or as fun. It's dangerously careful, 
humongously narrow. On the local level, it ranges from better to far worse. 
In general, between the eyes on the bottom line and the looks over the 
shoulder at the political interests that keep stations and networks in deep 
self-censorship, many voices and ideas and much music that was available 30 
years ago are unthinkable now.

Marc,

I went round and round in my own head regarding elitism and being on a 
dole. I was in the business, at a local station, at that time, those 
halcyon days of the great "zero out." I was sadly aware of the lack of 
professionalism behind the scenes of the organization I was in. It was a 
'service' run like a charity, with most of the energy focused on fund 
raising rather than on broadcasting. (Corporate life wasn't much different, 
as I found out later.) It had always been on a shoestring, even in the good 
days. The struggle for survival made things worse. Some mythical market 
discipline did not make for a better service - how could it? We lost our 
best people, spent our best energy in desperation.

Eventually, after being away from that world for a while, I've come to 
this: the tax support to public broadcasting, even at it's height, was 
peanuts and insufficient to create a consistent product nationwide. If the 
richest nation can't see the value in properly supporting a good, 
*independent*, elite educational service of the sort every other civilized 
nation (more or less) does - then we don't deserve one. That "elitist" 
argument is just another part of the good old American selfishness and 
anti-intellectualism that will be our liberty's downfall.

Anyway, no offense was (is) meant to anyone, just a little idle exchange 
between Mark and me, and 1000 subscribers eavesdropped. I'd rather we 
didn't discuss this on the list - it's way off topic.

If you like NPR, and your local programming, fantastic - support it and the 
people who bring it to you. We'd be poorer without them. You could help to 
turn a decline into a renaissance with support at the ballot box. It could 
be so much more than it is, but so could all broadcasting in the US. It was 
all pretty much doomed to mediocrity early on.

For further info, get these out of the library: Sex and Broadcasting by 
Lorenzo Milam, and History of Broadcasting in the US  Vol. 1 by Erik Barnouw.

Carl

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