Let Sun Set on ‘Amateur’ Radio
Civic-minded public radio stations like Santa Monica’s KCRW and Pasadena’s KPCC have become increasingly important to Southern California as forums for politics, cultural affairs and other serious topics that commercial broadcasters will not touch. That’s why the Pasadena City College trustees who oversee KPCC should applaud a plan to dramatically expand KPCC, turning the understaffed station into a potential Pacific Rim alternative to National Public Radio.
Instead, the trustees are frustrating efforts by station program manager Larry Mantle to implement the plan, to the point that last week the 16-year KPCC broadcaster and his staff threatened to quit. The plan would transfer oversight of the station from the trustees to a new operating entity called Southern California Public Radio. An advisory board appointed by the college and a new, well-heeled partner, Minnesota Public Radio, would oversee the nonprofit corporation.
The producer of popular public radio programs like Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” Minnesota Public Radio views KPCC as a perfect vehicle to realize its ambition of challenging the public radio dominance of East Coast-based NPR by tapping Hollywood’s creative talent.
The Minnesota network has promised to create a local news staff of at least 10 full-time reporters and editors and to substantially increase the station’s $1.1-million annual operating budget.
The Pasadena trustees worry that the deal would cede too much authority over a home-town station to an out-of-state entity. But Mantle points out that the contract could be worded to ensure that control of the station reverts to the college if Minnesota Public Radio deviates in any way from its stated intent to project a genuinely regional voice.
What’s really in conflict are two different notions of what public radio should be. The trustees believe they are upholding public radio’s historical role as a microphone for amateurs in local communities. That’s why they have barred cancellation of KPCC’s least popular shows, oddities like “Tibor Paul’s European Sunday Concert,” a weekly four-hour program entirely in German. Such shows belong on the thousands of new, low-wattage FM stations the Federal Communications Commission began issuing licenses for last year.
It’s a changing radio world. Public stations are expected to manage their finances as efficiently as commercial broadcasters. Beginning in October, for instance, NPR plans to dramatically hike the rates it charges stations for broadcasting shows like “Morning Edition,” ending what essentially has been a federal subsidy to local broadcasters.
In the increasingly competitive landscape of public radio, Mantle’s market-savvy plan is far more sustainable than the trustees’ outmoded vision.
