3 ms·

The rural focus seems weird, a mis-direction. Sure yes, they'll feel a lot of damage from this, stations will close, but there's so many people everywhere going

The rural focus seems weird, a mis-direction. Sure yes, they'll feel a lot of damage from this, stations will close, but there's so many people everywhere going to be impacted by this. What feels most notable to me is that there has been so much media consolidation already. David (son of Larry) Ellison's Skydance buying CBS removes on more not hard right/hard plutocrat aligned media empire. The ongoing Warner Brothers / Discovery mega-conglomrate (also encompassing HBO, DC, Turner) being run by plutocrat friendly David Zaslav. Rumbles of Bezos trying to buy Conde Master. LA Times, WaPo, NYT all having very plutocrat friendly operators now. Having the government paying kind of regular boring human people to go make programs and radio is a threat to the consolidated media, a threat to the large sweeping faction of very rich people who've been gobbling up the press. I care for sure about rural people & their access to media, their local stations. Local stations are amazing, local journalism is especially amazing & ghastly absent, super hard to fund today. The government de-participating in enriching democracy by supporting independent media, that's the incredibly woe begotten (for all) sadness I feel about this news.

hitekker 1y ago
Other stations can get funding through private donors; rural stations cannot and they may actually die out. I think the weirdness comes from NPR's previous PR strategy of denying they even needed government funding. At the time (2 years ago?) I recall NPR wanted to convey that defunding was useless, and that their (national) news was only state-affiliated or government funded by 1%. I think they also wanted to obscure how they use funding to influence ideological content on local public radio stations. I agree with you on the consolidation of media; we need less rich kingpins deciding what's newsworthy. But I disagree on the appeal of local stations. Except in times of local crisis, I've found their programming to be inferior to the national brands. Too many boring podcasts, LLM-like articles and lazy fact-checking.

hitekker 1y ago

Other stations can get funding through private donors; rural stations cannot and they may actually die out. I think the weirdness comes from NPR's previous PR strategy of denying they even needed government funding. At the time (2 years ago?) I recall NPR wanted to convey that defunding was useless, and that their (national) news was only state-affiliated or government funded by 1%. I think they also wanted to obscure how they use funding to influence ideological content on local public radio stations. I agree with you on the consolidation of media; we need less rich kingpins deciding what's newsworthy. But I disagree on the appeal of local stations. Except in times of local crisis, I've found their programming to be inferior to the national brands. Too many boring podcasts, LLM-like articles and lazy fact-checking.