OPEN UNIVERSITY FEBRUARY 9, 2007
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by Geoffrey Nunberg
You can think of this as special pleading, but with all respect to
Eric and David, I don't think American public radio needs
a whole lot of defending. On the whole, it does a terrific job of bringing news,
analysis, and cultural commentary to a large and appreciative public. It has developed
new formats of personal journalism--I'm thinking of "This American Life" and
"Soundprint," for example--that have few European equivalents. And while I have a
huge respect for the BBC, for whom I've done some features, I think any American
who regards the beeb with unmixed admiration should be required to spend a month
of mornings listening to "Wake Up to Wogan."
I'll grant you there are plenty of things I wish we did more of here, especially radio
drama and literary readings. True, there are people producing this stuff domestically
(see the
links at the site for the Third Coast audio festival that's done out of
Chicago
Public Radio), but not much of it gets national distribution. Drama doesn't seem to
work well in the American broadcasting context, where the presumptive listenership
consists of people who are sitting in their cars (which is why they call them "driveway
moments") and where broadcasters can't take advantage of an unbroken tradition of
home listening that antedates the advent of television. So most of
our public radio programming has to be morselized in a way that
allows you to consume it in snatches--variety shows like "Prairie
Home Companion," magazine shows like "All Things Considered," or
inteview and talk shows. And you could never expect American
audiences to tune in regularly to hear a show that was delivered in
installments, like the BBC's "The Archers," or "Book at Bedtime."
As for the absence of more "intellectual" programming, I agree
with Eric that this isn't a question of American academics being less
skilled than their British counterparts in speaking to a broader
audience. In our classroom lecture styles, at least, we Americans are
probably more at ease than the Europeans when it comes to striking a
folksy or demotic note, and there's certainly no shortage of American
academics who have been very successful at writing for a general
audience, among them a number of the people who blog right here. But
there are other cultural differences: The fact is that we don't
invest intellectual life with the same national significance it has
had in Europe, and probably for that reason don't make media stars of
our public intellectuals. (The difference between American and
European philosophers, a French friend of mine once observed, is that
"les intéllos français se font baiser.") For better or
worse--I know where my vote goes--we haven't produced many
media figures with the Q-ratings of Bernard-Henri Lévy, Umberto
Eco, or the Clive James types that "Monty Python" used to delight in
sending up. (Well, unless you want to count, like, Carl Sagan.)
But I also agree with David that there are economic and
institutional reasons for the dearth of intellectual programming. As
it happens, my sense is that there's actually something of a glut of
intellectually challenging content available, a lot of it subsidized
by universities and other institutions, but it's hard for it to get
wide exposure. To take one example, the Stanford philosophers John
Perry and Ken Taylor do a very engaging program called "Philosophy
Talk" that runs at
10 a.m. Sunday on KALW in San Francisco. Each
week's broadcast is consecrated to a topic--"mental imagery," "dreaming," "legal
ethics," "philosophy of music," and so on--that Perry and Taylor
cover in "Car Talk"-style banter, interviews and phone-ins, along
with a taped segment called "The 60-Second Philosopher" from Ian
Schoales (Merle Kessler) of "Duck's Breath Mystery Theater" fame.
"Philosophy Talk" has been picked up by a few smaller stations in
California and by Oregon Public Radio, but it would be a tall order
for it to reach anything like broad national distribution. There's
simply too much competition for the time slots on most NPR
affiliates, particularly since most of them are obliged to devote a
large slice of their daily programming to multiple rebroadcasts of
the major news and interview programs and to crowd-pleasers like "Car
Talk," "Prairie Home Companion," and "The Thistle & Shamrock,"
in order to hang onto the kind of audiences that ensure the pledges
will keep rolling in.
The institutional roots of these national differences run very
deep, as Paul Starr has shown in The
Creation of the Media. But I like to think that as the
proportion of people listening to radio via the Internet and podcasts
grows, it will be easier to aggregate respectable national audiences
for serious intellectual discussion, even if few local stations will
want to broadcast it. Radio plays and the like will be a harder row
to hoe, given the relatively high production costs, but maybe the NEA
or someone will decide to take a stab at supporting this some day. In
the meantime, people desperate for their daily fix of "The
Archers," "Dante Vagante" or France Culture can score it
online.
15 comments
most of them are obliged to devote a large slice of their daily programming to multiple rebroadcasts of the major news and interview programs and to crowd-pleasers like "Car Talk," "Prairie Home Companion," and "The Thistle & Shamrock," in order to hang onto the kind of audiences that ensure the pledges will keep rolling in How big are the audiences for Car Talk, PHC etc? Are they really anywhere near the order of magnitude of Limbaugh's audience (s.t. like 20 million IIUC)? Or for that matter the weekly unique visitors to Limbaugh's equivalents on the web, such as Kos (around 4 million per week)? Keillor isn't exactly a household namel PHC's not a national brand. Surely it must be possible to find enough cultural talent in a nation with dozens of world-class universities to fill the programming schedule with stuff that's more scintillating than shite like Prairie Home or the Cah Tawk yuksters.
- teplukhin
February 10, 2007 at 1:08am
According to the trade mag Talkers , Limbaugh and Hannity have weekly cumes (total listenerships) of around 13 million, but they're outliers. Laura Schlesinger has an 8 million cume, and shows like Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, Bill Bennett, Bill O'Reilly (radio), and Don Imus have cumes in the 2-5 million range. By contrast, "Fresh Air" has a cume of around 4.5 million, and "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" have cumes in the 9+ million range (I don't know the cume for "Car Talk," but it's up there). Public radio as a whole has a cume of between 26 and 30 million. Note that cume is limited by the number of stations carrying the show and their signal strength, and that these numbers are subject to various complexities and controversies, but it's clear that the top public radio programming is competitive with most of the top AM talk programs in audience, though the demographics of the audiences are obviously very different. Geoff Nunberg
- nunbergg
February 10, 2007 at 4:00am
I drive a truck day job, have the Sirius radio. Probably 80% of the time on NPR. If that sounds odd for a Republican State Rules Committeeman, note where I am now. Only problem is Sirius equipment is so tuned to vehicles you might have to get an inverter for home use. The NPR idea of "balance" is sometimes amusing, but providing balance is my job, and I pick up a lot of obscure hard news along the way. One suggestion for NPR, shouldn't Diane Reahm have retired like about the time Marconi invented radio? Cannot abide the woman, accounts for most of the 20% of other listening.
- barkeep
February 10, 2007 at 8:12am
Thanks, Geoff. Where are the entrepreneurs who will recognize the obvious commercial potential of the highbrow cultural market and bring a subscription-based NPR equivalent to the culture-starved masses? Why does this have to be supported by Congress + idiotic pledge drives?
- teplukhin
February 10, 2007 at 12:43pm
Last summer, I sat in a packed Hollywood Bowl for a live PHC show. When it came to the Lake Woebegone narrative, it was only one tiny Keillor on a stage far away, but he held thousands of people enthralled. You could hear a pin drop.
- ironyroad
February 10, 2007 at 1:34pm
Try KCRW, Santa Monica. Maybe the best radio station in America. Best DJ (Nic Harcourt), best moderator (Warren Olney), and of course all the NPR feeds.
Tep, remember, he said NPR has a car audience. That constrains what you can do. I don't care for Cah Tawk, but despite the movie, PHC certainly isn't shite. Maybe too whimsical for you, but that's just you.
- jm_rice
February 10, 2007 at 2:09pm
Yeah, that's just me. Never could stand Keillor. As to Cah Tawk, the commercial potential is obvious. GEICO would probably underwrite it. If it were paired with a web offering they could probably enable buying and selling of cars online-- that's a multi-billion $ market they'd be tapping into. Could easily be profitable, hugely so.
- teplukhin
February 10, 2007 at 7:44pm
I know that this seems to be, somehow, an almost heretical comment, but perhaps the Car Talk guys don't want to be on mainstream commercial radio, where the editorial freedom and professional autonomy is minimal to non-existent, and shows are battered and broken by advert blocks every 8 minutes. People all over the country shell out their own bucks for local public broadcasting stations, precisely because they broadcast stuff that commercial radio has long since jettisoned. It could indeed work as a completely commercial proposition -- but why should it have to?
- ironyroad
February 10, 2007 at 8:22pm
where freedom and autonomy are minimal . . .
- ironyroad
February 10, 2007 at 8:23pm
Irony - there'd be zero interference with their content; they're not Bobby and Huey, they're just knuckleheads joking about cahs. As to commercials, they don't even need to air ads on the radio. They could collect transaction fees from teh website, which could also offer delayed chat sessions/Q&A, interactive one-to-many or one-to-one discussions by the Cah Talk "community", links to third-party marketplcaes like autonation.com, CPC and bounty fees from dealers, and on and on. The old media revenue models are blowing up. New and highly lucrative ones that allow viewers/readers/listeners/surfers to be in charge are springing up left right and center. Why should the public be subsidizing content that, given even minimally content marketing expertise, should be hugely remunerative on its own?
- teplukhin
February 11, 2007 at 2:27am
In response to your last question, I guess because the public is ok with paying for (subsidizing if you like) broadcasting content that is not structured around marketing for profit. And why? Because marketing isn't always a guarantor of either the existence of a service or its quality. NPR and public broadcasting in general are a fairly high up the list of bodies that people don't mind spending money on, including in conservative states like Alaska that depend on NPR for basic public service on the airwaves, especially in remoter, sparsely populated areas that are totally uninteresting for the commercials.
- ironyroad
February 11, 2007 at 3:25am
What evidence is there that Car Talk to be commercially successful would have to be "structured around marketing for profit"? What does that mean, anyway? Their format works for their audience and wouldn't have to be changed in the slightest were the show to go commercial. You're behind the curve: media content is changing rapidly but not to suit the marketing people. In fact, it's now the marketing people who are trying to catch up and structure their business models around successful content, a perfect example being the efforts of teh Murdoch people to build a business around MySpace. Which took them a bout three months; they've already attained about a 100% ROI, and they haven't crimped MySpace's freewheeling user experience in the slightest. As I say, wrong decade, hell, wrong century, mate. It's not 1980 anymore.
- teplukhin
February 11, 2007 at 5:33am
Much as I enjoy NPR, I am pretty sure I recall a well worn stat its people use every budget debate, that "only 5% of NPR/PBS funding comes from publc (taxpayer) money." Was I dreaming or did the Widow Kroc not drop a $200 million endowment on them? My libertarian soul rebels at the thought that after the jump start given these networks already they simply cannot stand on their own. Also, if you think NPR is ad free, you haven't listened to a terrestrial feed lately. The ads are toned down and discreet, none of the hollering idiots trying to sell me a "get rich working from home" deal, but ads for everything from restaurants to law firms. Ironyroad, as to sparse markets, I fall back to sattelite access, provided, I would add, by competing nets on their own nickel.
- barkeep
February 11, 2007 at 11:01am
I think Widow Croc dropped the bucks on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, that funds special projects and programs, rather than on NPR directly. And none of it went to local stations, to the best of my knowledge. In any case, what on earth is wrong with public support of broadcasting? That's what I can't figure out among your (barkeep's and tep's) many gripes and fistfuls of alternatives. The bottom line is, don't get carried away by new technology -- it isn't always the quick fix. You still can't force commercial companies to serve unprofitable markets at reasonable prices. Generally, of all the things that one could spend taxpayers' money on, high-quality public radio (rather than tv, imo) seems like a reasonable recipient. And, given the listenership for NPR's major news shows, the poll results over the years, and the readiness to pledge, millions of people seem to think so too. Incidentally, comparisons of numbers with Limbaugh's etc are meaningless, as even Limbaugh himself doesn't claim to be doing journalism. Apples and pears.
- ironyroad
February 11, 2007 at 1:33pm
Most of what draws large audiences to NPR isn't journalism either. Prairie Homey Corn etc. Let's not draw arbitrary lines between culture and entertainment. High culture and good journalism give pleasure, they're entertaining. Limbaugh's an ass but he plays a significant political role and bears listening to or maybe monitoring by the political and journalistic elites. My point is that this country is broad enough and culturally deep enough to sustain robust and commercially-viable cultural offerings on the radio. The challenge has to do with the intersection of technology and marketing savvy, not witht he content per se. Someone will figure it out, and make millions while doing the nation a great service.
- teplukhin
February 12, 2007 at 1:54pm