Comment Re:Their fundraising must not be very effective (Score 1) 272
> Unfortunately, NPR's gov't funding has been on a steady decline
> since the 1970s, when most of their funding came from our tax
> dollars.
Perhaps that's not too unfortunate. I'm a big-government liberal and I'd love for my tax dollars to go to funding public broadcasting, but compared to PBS, NPR has been largely unbothered by conservative executive appointees at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB gives NPR much less funding than it gives PBS, and so it has been unable to influence NPR to the same degree. Partly, this is because radio is much cheaper to produce than television. But anyway, the more NPR has come to rely on individual and corporate sponsors (my station is funded 60% by individuals, 35% by corporate sponsors, and 5% by state, local, and federal government sources), the more independant it has been able to be, since individual and corporate sponsors are more diversified, and less able to exert power to the same degree.
> since the 1970s, when most of their funding came from our tax
> dollars.
Perhaps that's not too unfortunate. I'm a big-government liberal and I'd love for my tax dollars to go to funding public broadcasting, but compared to PBS, NPR has been largely unbothered by conservative executive appointees at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB gives NPR much less funding than it gives PBS, and so it has been unable to influence NPR to the same degree. Partly, this is because radio is much cheaper to produce than television. But anyway, the more NPR has come to rely on individual and corporate sponsors (my station is funded 60% by individuals, 35% by corporate sponsors, and 5% by state, local, and federal government sources), the more independant it has been able to be, since individual and corporate sponsors are more diversified, and less able to exert power to the same degree.
