NPR Passes the Hat for Gulf News : Radio: San Diego’s KPBS is expecting to pay $10,000 to $20,000 of $750,000 total.

Reporting on the war in the Persian Gulf has so strapped the resources of National Public Radio that the network has threatened to cut back on coverage if its affiliates--many of which are tiny college radio stations--don’t contribute $750,000 by March 1.

NPR, which has greatly expanded its news programming in the wake of the crisis, must raise $1.4 million in order to keep its in-depth coverage on the air for three more months, said Bill Buzenberg, vice president for news and information.

“I wish CBS would be in this predicament occasionally,” lamented Mario Valdes, station manager at KRCC-FM in Colorado Springs, Colo., which has committed $10,000 to NPR. “It’s an amazing situation. National Public Radio is the only organization in the world right now that has to pass the hat to cover an international story.”

Besides the $750,000 from its affiliates, NPR is hoping to raise $250,000 from corporations and foundations. It also is getting $300,000 from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and approximately $100,000 from Santa Monica College station KCRW-FM (89.9) for Gulf coverage. KCRW’s pledge was made prior to NPR’s latest cry for help.

“Financially, it’s very tough,” Buzenberg said. NPR went over its budget by $200,000 to cover just the first two weeks of the war, he explained. If the conflict lasts for three more months, the network will be running 10% over its $14-million annual budget, he said.

To cover the Gulf, NPR has increased its Middle East staff from one to eight reporters, added an afternoon talk show and increased its hourly, 5-minute newscasts from 18 to 24 a day.

On Tuesday, NPR chairman Dale Ouzts sent a letter to public-radio stations across the country, asking the smallest to contribute at least $1,000, and the largest to kick in $26,000 or more apiece.

“The choice was, ‘Do we cut back the coverage or do we get more money?’ ” Buzenberg said.

Jim Holmes, station manager of WQCS-FM in Ft. Pierce, Fla., said that he would reach into his station’s emergency fund to come up with $3,000 for the network.

“It’s not like I have an extra $3,000--I don’t--but I would have been hopping mad if NPR hadn’t come through the way they did, and I just want to be able to keep it on the air,” said Holmes, whose classical music and news station reaches residents in rural St. Lucie county, in the center of Florida’s Indian River citrus growing area.

“We don’t have anything approaching an all-news station in our part of the world,” Holmes said. “We only have four radio stations, and most of them have eliminated even wire service news.”

Like other stations that have pledged to help out, Holmes said that he would make his contribution now, and then try to make up the $3,000 during a fund drive later this spring.

But not all public-radio stations have the resources to provide even a small amount to NPR.

At KPCC-FM (89.3) in Pasadena, station executives are scrambling to figure out if their tight budget can accommodate an extra contribution to NPR.

“We already pay $100,000 to NPR in dues every year,” said station manager Rod Foster. “And we’re just not set up for raising money. We’re so new on the scene that we don’t have the reserves and resources that the other stations have.”

Foster said that KPCC, which just two years ago beefed up its transmitter and began carrying more NPR programming, will attempt to make a contribution, but probably not as much as the network is asking for. “What we do will be token, but we want to show our support for NPR,” Foster said.

KPBS-FM (89.5) station manager Craig Dorval said the San Diego public broadcasting station will do “our fair share.”

Dorval isn’t sure how much his station would contribute, but he expects it to be between $10,000 and $20,000. He said KPBS would probably appeal to listeners for money, probably through a mail campaign, since there is no money in KPBS’ budget for such a contribution.

“I think it is perfectly fair” for NPR to go to the affiliates for money, Dorval said. “On a much smaller scale, it is the same situation as the Department of Defense. They didn’t budget for a war and neither did NPR.”

KCRW station manager Ruth Hirschman--who has pledged to give NPR about $100,000, or 10% of the station’s earnings from winter fund-raising activities--said that small community stations, which generally operate on extremely tight budgets, should not have to deplete their own resources to help the network.

Hirschman directed her criticism not at NPR, but at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the nonprofit organization that distributes federal funds to noncommercial radio and TV stations. On Tuesday, Hirschman sent a scathing letter to members of its board, castigating them for providing only $300,000 to help cover the war.

“Out of the $4.2 million that you have earmarked for national programming, you made an emergency grant to NPR of only $300,000,” Hirschman wrote. “That’s 7% of the money Congress gave you to support public radio’s programming mission.”

NPR spokeswoman Mary Morgan said that the network had asked the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for $1 million to cover the war. The appeal to the stations, she said, came after the organization made its grant of $300,000.

Richard Madden, director of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s radio programming fund, said that the $300,000 provided to NPR was originally meant to fund other programming, and that the organization simply changed the grant so that the money could be used for the Persian Gulf. He said that the $1 million that NPR had requested was actually in the form of grants for completely different programs, which simply had not been funded.

Madden said that it’s up to the stations--which in 1991 will receive $52 million from CPB for programming--to contribute to NPR if they want to support the network’s shows.

“If the stations decide to support National Public Radio, that’s a decision reflecting their priorities,” Madden said. “By the same token, if they decided they wanted to go out and invest in other programming, that would be reflective of their interests, too.”

For example, Madden said, stations might prefer to carry news from American Public Radio, which provides reports from the British and Canadian Broadcasting Systems, as well as Monitor Radio, the news service of the Christian Science Monitor.

William Drummond, a former NPR staffer and occasional contributor, who now teaches radio reporting at the University of California at Berkeley, said that the whole episode has a familiar ring.

“In 1983 almost exactly the same thing happened in the aftermath of the Beirut invasion,” Drummond said. “We went all out and spent all this money, and wound up with a $10-million budget deficit.”

And while NPR was not planning to go into debt this time, attempting instead to raise the money in advance, Drummond said, the end result is still the same. “The net effect is either put up or shut up for the stations,” he said.

Drummond said he doubted that NPR would really pull the plug on coverage if the stations don’t come through. For one thing, he said, the news out of the Gulf is slowing down, and reporting on events there is likely to dwindle naturally.

Nonetheless, station managers such as Holmes in Ft. Pierce say they’re not willing to take a chance on losing NPR’s thoughtful, analytical broadcasts.

Holmes said that he recently received a call from the leader of a crew of migrant, mostly minority, grapefruit pickers.

“He had to call from a pay phone,” Holmes said. “He said he doesn’t usually listen to that ‘long-hair (classical) music,’ but he had two sons over in the Gulf. He said that other people picking fruit have relatives over there, and they were very grateful to us for providing the information.”