perfidy

I think we need something _like_ Air America; I'm not sure if these are the right people to be doing it. Right Wing Radio has had a decade to polish its schtick, and they're pretty good at it.

What they need is a truly polished, professional radio personality who can guide a group of serious Ds through the issue landscape.

On the other hand, it's their first day. Give'em a year and maybe it'll improve. They have a long way to go before they can displace NPR.

It's funny that I a somewhat more sensitive to the occasional _truly_ left wing bias exhibited on NPR. Most RWR operates at about 95% partisan, 5% information. NPR runs about 20% left wing, 80% information.

We shall see how the socialists do in the marketplace of ideas. If they succeed, more power to them. Without government subsidy, I think their prospects are not as good as NPR.

Out of curiosity (spelling :), how much of NPR's funding do you think comes from subsidies?

According to its website, .2% comes from the gubmint. However, it says that government grants are used for specific programs. The website is not very informative, and I got the feeling that they are being sneaky with the data they present.

Continuing my search, I found an article that said that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting funnels federal tax dollars to the local affiliates, which then pay NPR. About half of NPR's budget comes from the affiliates. (CPB is a non-profit corporation created by the gov't in 1967 to give money to create and maintain a public broadcasting system.)

On the CPB website, it says that 15% of public broadcasting funding comes from it, and another 15% from state governments. I imagine that those are overall figures.

I would guess that somewhere around 20% of total NPR funding comes from the Fed either directly or (mostly) indirectly, counting grants to individual programs, etc. Certainly more than a third, if you count all government funding.

And here's the informative CPB table of [url=http://www.cpb.org/pubcast/#who_pays]money[/url]

Hmm. Well, CPB is TV and radio. We're just talking about NPR here. Their figures are 1-2% from fed grant programs; I don't see any reason to doubt this.

They also receive about $48 million in programming fees from their member stations, which represents about 43% of total revenue.

Member stations receive, on average, about 14% of their revenue from federal sources (CPB). At this point you can pick the transformation that helps your political cause to determine CPB contribution to NPR programming fees. If I want to say that they don't receive any CPB support, I can say the programming fees come from the OTHER 86%. I I want to show that NPR is highly dependent on the Fed, I say that the entire purpose of that 14% is to go to NPR.

It makes sense to use a proportional method of allocation; in that case, we can say that 14% of individual station CPB contributions go to NPR. That gives us roughly $12 million of the CPB local radio station cash going to NPR. Note that we KNOW that only part of the CPB cash goes to NPR...how do we know this? Because the stations receive about $86 million from CPB, and remit only about $48 million to NPR.

Added up, that gives us total direct and indirect support of NPR by the fed of about $14 million, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 12.5% of their budget. In exchange for the expenditure, the government gets a well-maintained (due to listenership), pervasive radio network that can be used for many purposes.

Keep this in mind: NPR listeners are an advertiser's DREAM. If NPR took on some percentage of "real" advertising, rather than the tiny spots they run now, they would WIPE THE FLOOR with the competition. NPR _chooses_ to stay a bit poor and take some federal cash. It doesn't have to.

One of the main reasons that NPR still gets federal funding from a hostile GOP congress is that they KNOW that if NPR enters the commercial market, Right Wing Radio is going to get messed up bad by the competition NPR will create, when it doesn't have federal dollars. NPR will take a serious bite out of the advertising dollars as advertisers flock to one of the most coveted audiences there is...