Cpb Vital Link For Rural America
Three days after Christmas, in a small shack atop the highest peak in this remote Adirondack town, I helped an engineer bend conduit and run wiring to a jury-rigged, secondhand transmitter.
When I descended the mountain that day and turned the dial on my radio to 89.9 FM, the world came beaming in via National Public Radio.
It wasn’t the first time I’d heard NPR; I’ve been a faithful listener for years to the scratchy signal that leaks across Lake Champlain from Vermont. But now we heard not only music in stereo, but also the news of our own region, broadcast from the northern New York city of Canton across nine small transmitters.
We were finally connected to the other hamlets of these mountains, which share no newspaper or TV channel or commercial radio signal. The NPR station, though, provides services like a book group of the air where everyone reads the same volume and then talks about it over the radio with the author. And lost-cat announcements. And school closings on snowy days.
Imagine our sadness, and our anger, when one of the first stories that came booming over “All Things Considered” concerned the plans of Speaker Newt Gingrich to “zero out” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the federal budget, jeopardizing the future of NPR and its member stations.
His argument, apparently, is that the radio service is a toy of rich and liberal elitists who could perfectly well purchase their classical music on CD; that with 500 channels of TV and CD-ROM computers and all the other wonders of the modern age, it is selfish to demand that taxpayers foot the bill for someone else’s entertainment.
But who is he talking about? There had never been a radio station of any kind in our town before, or even in our half of the county; with a huge antenna you can get, maybe, one channel of television, and even for those who could afford it, there’s no cable.
The private sector doesn’t serve us, because there’s no money in it - too few of us, and as a community, we’re too poor. The library is 40 miles away; the bookstore’s in another county.
CPB statistics show that there are people like us across the nation. Forty-eight percent of NPR listeners are in households with combined income of $40,000 or less a year; less than a third have a college degree. As for the charge that it’s a plaything for liberals, the same survey showed that 33 percent of listeners called themselves conservatives, 26 percent moderates and 26 percent liberals.
Every week, when Noah Adams or Bob Edwards reads mail from listeners, there are blasts from equally outraged left-wingers and rightists, each convinced the news is biased.
Public radio costs each American 29 cents a year. But if the CPB funding disappears especially if it disappears over the course of just a couple of years - then our station will disappear too, or in the words of its station manager, will be reduced to “playing scratchy records” instead of offering the wide range of programs it buys from NPR and other sources.
The station gets $135,000 of its funding from Washington - 25 percent of its total budget, money that it spends buying programming. Increased contributions won’t make up that gap, certainly not so quickly.
So maybe no more Garrison Keillor as we wash dishes on Saturday night; no more “Rabbit Ears Radio” providing short stories for our daughter; no more 20-minute reports from Rwanda. Our family doesn’t get crop subsidies or entitlement checks. We benefit from the military and the national parks and many other parts of the government, of course, but NPR is the only tangible service Washington sends this house each year, and if it’s selfish to want it, then so be it. I don’t know what we’d do without it.
I can’t write with equal authority about public television; its signal doesn’t reach this far, and we don’t have a TV anyway. But if public radio disappears, it will be more than a personal or local sadness.
Along with a handful of great newspapers, NPR’s news programs keep alive the best traditions of journalism: on-the-scene reporting from correspondents spread around the world, plenty of time and space for reflection, an emphasis on the important instead of the sensational.
There is none of the pointless yelling that passes for political exchange on television, none of the nastiness that marks talk radio. It is calm, not combative - which may well make it worrisome to politicians who have prospered by bellowing.
And when the talking is over for the evening, there are the symphonies that have lasted centuries, the jazz that is nowhere else to be found, even the grand archaism of the Saturday-afternoon broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera.
If Speaker Gingrich gets his wish and NPR begins to dwindle away, I hope that the men and women who have fashioned it over the years know how much it has meant to its listeners, especially those of us in rural and passed-by places. Thanks to them, and for 29 cents a year apiece, we live in the golden age of radio.
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