John Proffitt wrote: >NPR (National Public Radio) does NOT get government funding. Is not public radio tax exempt? Also, between one and two percent of their funding comes from federally funded organizations such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, NSF and NEA. >Pardon the lengthy rant. I needed to give another perspective to this >issue. I am obviously not a member of Karl's "choir"! I don't see you ranting...even if I do see it all from a very different perspective. My perspective looks what our local classical station used to cost... with a full time staff of three people: station manager, program director/announcer, secretary-fundraiser, plus two on-call engineers for transmitter maint. Most of the minor equipment repairs were done by the manager, who also helped with the transmitter maintenance...people gave freely of their time to host programs some of which drew from their own specialized collections. We also had some part time announcers. Now they have additional staff, full time announcers, a recording studio that rarely gets used, a fund raiser, accounting person, etc. Plus significantly higher salaries for the station manager and program director. For me, that is bad enough, but then I look at our local NPR station of 30 full time, 14 part time and 6 contract employees. Yes, I have read just about everything I can get my hands on, from the Knight Foundation study to the old Baumol and Bowen text. For me, it isn't that art music (not classical light) can't survive, I just see it being killed by marketing based on it having primarily entertainment value and management costs that have gotten out of hand. Can it survive totally on cost recovery...I rather doubt it, but then, neither does higher education. Am I happy with some professors spending most of their time researching and getting salaries of over $100,000...and football coaches getting higher salaries than the University President's and Governor's salaries combined...nope. I realize lots of these things are the "way of the world." As a friend of mine likes to point out, I have never gotten over the change from educational broadcasting to public broadcasting. "NPR is an internationally acclaimed producer and distributor of noncommercial news, talk, and entertainment programming." www.npr.org/about/ Take out the word "noncommercial" and what do you have...commercial radio...ok, so maybe commercial radio doesn't give you internationally acclaimed news, but...on the other hand, I wonder if the British listen to NPR news...I certainly listen to the news on the BBC. My frustration isn't just that some NPR stations avoid classical music. It is far deeper, when I hear a station dumbing down classical programming to increase the numbers...I find that to be a myopic perspective on the range of expression to be found in art music, and, in a sense, a misrepresentation of the possibilities to be found in art music. Karl (believe it or not, I cut this note in half before posting, and John thinks he might be ranting!)