Re: [IRCA] KOPT-1600 goes public

[Scott Fybush <scott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

David Faulkner wrote:
> I doubt that's much of a change, at least in political outlook.  NPR is the
> chief reason Air America is superfluous and will probably never fly very
> well.
>
> 73's
> David

At the risk of going slightly OT, and with an open admission of bias 
(one of my part-time employers is WXXI in Rochester, an NPR member station):

Anyone who would claim that NPR somehow makes Air America "superfluous," 
or vice versa, clearly hasn't spent much, if any, time listening to 
either recently.

There's surprisingly little overlap (and lots of research to back this 
up) between NPR listenership and commercial talk listenership of any 
stripe. What Air America programs is advocacy talk - their hosts are 
openly partisan (as well they should be).

Most of what NPR programs isn't even "talk radio" at all - it's news 
programming, and for every study one side offers showing that it's 
biased one way, there's another study showing that it's biased in the 
other direction. There is research (and again, lots of it) to show that 
listenership to NPR's news programming, which is growing steadily, cuts 
across ideological lines.

As for the talk programs NPR offers - primarily Diane Rehm and "Talk of 
the Nation" in middays - it bears almost no resemblance to commercial 
talk radio, Air America or otherwise, and it tends to bend over so far 
backwards to try to be politically neutral that it ends up annoying 
political partisans on both sides. There are certainly plenty of 
complaints on the lefty blogs about NPR being too far mainstream.

s
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