I have been a long-time fan of NPR. A long time fan of radio too. I remember mucking about with the radio receiver we had at home in Bahrain and picking up on Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts on shortwave from some place in Europe, destined no doubt to save the ‘godless souls’ in Communist Russia or even enjoying the english broadcast of Radio Tehran. People who live in major metropolitan areas don’t really know much about shortwave and most people born in the late 80’s onward never cared because almost anything they wanted to hear now broadcasts over the internet or via satellite radio. But there is still something to be said about listening to a show on the radio. Maybe that’s why, one day, on my many back and forth trips between Austin and Houston, I stumbled on The Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor and have been hooked on public radio ever since.
Now unlike my Brit friends across the pond, who are ‘forced’ to pay for that spectacular media machine that is the BBC through the infamous TV and Radio License ( and live gloriously ad free as a result!) we in these United States aren’t forced to pay for anything. What a wonderful American notion. Here public radio stations are entirely funded through a mix of federal funding, corporate grants and listener support. While this is may seem all very charming unfortunately it also means that the poor chappies at the local NPR affiliate are forced to come a-begging every 6 months of so to keep going. This bi-annual event is sweetly referred to as the bi-annual pledge drive. My NPR affiliate is KUHF, which is based out of that bastion of educational excellence-the University of Houston, does a good job with its pledge drive and usually does a good job of being the least annoying it possibly can.
So why you ask, did I say I was affected so much by NPR? Here’s the rest of the story as Paul Harvey might say….
This morning I was listening to one of my favourite shows on NPR: This American Life with Ira Glass from Chicago Public Radio. Now if you’ve never listened to this fantastic show, I can best describe it as being granola-crunchy liberal meets Euro-Indie film-maker in Paris for coffee to talk about life & death. It is fascinatingly poignant and one of the best showcases of answers to the question ‘Why?’. But I digress…..so here we are in the middle of the bi-annual pledge drive and NPR solicits the help of Ira and his short audio stories to solicit listener donations. So Ira decides to showcase a story broadcast a few months ago from an episode called ‘Shouting across the divide’. Ira says, it was stories like this that would never be heard if it wasn’t for listener support. And the story in question was Act I from that episode called ‘Which one of them is not like the other’.
If you really want to understand this post you need to go listen to that episode so get to it: ‘Shouting across the divide’
So now I’m assuming you listened to the show and listened to Act I. In my prior post today I wrote about something that I said I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to laugh or cry about. Listening to Act I certainly didn’t make me want to laugh. It is stories like that, that keep me coming back to NPR, This America Life and KUHF. I mean here they are on the radio saying, if you don’t support public radio, voices like Serry’s from Act I won’t get heard. How do you say no to something like that. So, of course, I forked over some change to KUHF and hopefully my two cents went into helping a voice be heard. I hope.
