NPR's Andrea Seabrook fed up with all the lies quits

[salvorhardin]

75. Slight correction...

It was NPR's second president, Frank Mankiewicz, that cut that deal with the devil. From the very start, NRP pissed off Congress and Republicans by reporting from the left on Watergate and the Senate's hearings on Vietnam. However, they were tiny. But then Mankiewicz tried to aggressively grow NPR into an international news organization. He had good motivations, but he very nearly bankrupted NPR. So in 1983 there was a huge Congressional investigation, and in exchange for the CPB lending NPR enough money to keep it alive, Mankiewicz was forced to resign. NPR also lost direct funding, and the current f'd up arrangement where the money was given to member stations directly. The member stations would have to buy their programming from NPR.

Mankiewicz is a really interesting person. Here's a 1982 People profile of him. One thing not mentioned is that he hated the metric system and is one of the people who convinced Reagan to kill metrication efforts in the US.
http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20082222,00.html

Anyway, that's why I keep reminding people that their local public radio system is not NPR, no matter how much effort they put into blurring the distinction. Your local public radio station is an independent entity controlled by [em]you[/em]. If you don't like their programming, then get involved. It's an amazingly open process and most stations -- not all -- welcome volunteers.

IMHO, the biggest threat to public radio these days is consolidation and NPR itself. More and more independent stations are forced to sell out to larger regional networks like Minnesota Public Radio or Northeast Public Radio because they can't get enough monetary support from listeners. The result is that there's less diversity of programming. Don't get me wrong -- both MPR and Northeast Public Radio produce some fantastic programs. However, when the public radio for an entire state, or parts of several states, is conceived, produced, and distributed from a central location, it sort of defeats the whole idea of public radio in the first place.

Then there's NPR. NPR is dead set on becoming a multimedia company, and killing the radio part of their name. They give away their programming for free online, so why should people support their local stations to hear the NPR programming?