In the real world, you don’t pay for what you don’t watch or listen to. For example, I don’t pay for a magazine subscription I don’t want to read. They used to call that the free market, or simple economics. It looks like NPR is having a rough time understanding the simple stuff though.
This is from Professor Turley:
Now that NPR is off the public dole, it will have to compete fairly with other radio outlets for audiences and revenue. It is free to alienate most listeners who have center-right viewpoints, but it will have to sustain itself on a smaller share of the market.
Other outlets are facing the same dire choice. Recently, the Post encouraged writers and editors to leave if they were unwilling to get on board with a new direction at the newspaper.
Previously, Washington Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis had told his writers that the newspaper was experiencing massive losses in readers and revenues because ‘no one is reading your stuff.’
NPR’s problem is that the audience, as the Professor points out, is “overwhelmingly white, affluent, and liberal.” It lacks diversity as the other side has been preaching for years. It may be the only time that liberals have no problem with having an overwhelming white audience.
Maybe you remember a different NPR because I do. Back in the 1980s, I worked in Mexico City and listened to “Morning Edition” on short wave radio. It was a fair program and I really loved that Friday segment with the late Red Barber, the voice of the legendary Brooklyn Dodgers. Red related baseball and gardening stories, and it was something worth waiting for. They also had more debates or conservative voices to balance the left.
Like so much of the media, it went crazy with President Trump. It lost all of its common sense and devoted itself to attacking everything about him. They even went as far as refusing to report on the Hunter Biden laptop.
So here we are. NPR is on its own like everybody else. It will survive or not survive like the rest of us. At least, the people not listening won’t have to pay for it.
P.S. Check out my blog for posts, podcasts, and videos.
Image: NPR logo.