Radio Silence

On a couch next to the Dolphin Room, Dave Glerum sat talking about classical music and public radio. Glerum is a friendly and thoughtful man, bearded and roundish, who serves as the music director of WMFE, the public radio station in Orlando. He’s been coming to the AMPPR conference for 25 years.

“Believe it,” he said. “This was once like a major trade show. You had 30 record labels here, giving records away, all kinds of free stuff. Artists would perform during the day, every night, promoting their records. There were throngs of people all weekend long. By Sunday, when you left, you still wouldn’t have met 80 percent of the attendees. That’s how many people there were. And now it’s . . . well . . .” He waved his hand toward the conference-goers who drifted from room to room, singly or in groups of twos and threes.

Glerum has been working at WMFE since 1990. He was hired away from WXXI in Rochester, New York, where he’d worked for more than 10 years. In retrospect, those years now look like the tail end of the glory days of classical programming on the nation’s public radio stations, when a large majority of them devoted a large majority of their airtime to music.

“When I came to WMFE, we had three full-time on-air announcers and two part-time announcers,” he said. “Now we have no part-time announcers and one full-time announcer.” He tapped his chest. “Me.”

Like most public radio stations, WMFE was conceived as a “fine arts” station, broadcasting classical music and other arts programs around the clock. Today it carries only three hours a day of its own classical programming. The rest is talk–call-in shows, BBC news, interview shows, as well as the flagship newsmagazines from National Public Radio, All Things Considered and Morning Edition–plus several hours, most of them overnight, of a syndicated classical music service, called Classical 24, that originates from a studio in Minnesota but is designed to sound like local programming wherever it’s played. Listeners in Orlando worry that much of even this canned music will soon be replaced by more talk shows. And they’re right to worry.

“You do get the feeling a little of being an anachronism,” Glerum said. “There’s no question that there’s less and less classical music on the radio now, and more and more programming that’s produced somewhere else. The trend seems kind of overwhelming at times, like something you can’t overcome.

“But do I think classical music will disappear from public radio altogether? No. I can’t think that. Its power to enrich our lives and our communities is just too great. Its flame will never be extinguished. Maybe that sounds hokey. But I believe it. You sort of have to.”

THINGS ARE ROUGH ALL OVER, if you like to listen to classical music on the radio–and even rougher if, like the members of AMPPR, you try to make a living putting it on the air. What listeners in Orlando have seen happen at Glerum’s station is a slow-motion version of what has happened to public radio across the country. Music–not merely classical but also jazz, folk, blues, and bluegrass, once staples of public radio programming–is slowly being withdrawn from the public airwaves. According to data from the trade group M Street Group, the number of noncommercial stations identified as “classical” has been cut in half since 1993, while the number of noncommercial news-talk stations has tripled. Data from the Public Radio Tracking Study, commissioned by public radio stations, tell the same story. From 1995 to 2002, the number of locally generated classical music hours on public radio declined roughly 10 percent, even as the number of public radio stations greatly increased; meanwhile, over the same period, the number of news-talk hours rose by more than 150 percent. As the tracking study researchers wrote in their report, with unseemly enthusiasm: “Local classical music just sits there, while NPR news-talk races ahead.”

The change hasn’t gone unnoticed, of course. Major newspapers run stories about it every once in a while, especially when a large market, such as Boston or San Francisco or St. Louis, suddenly finds itself, for the first time in 50 years, without a public radio station that plays classical music. But how the change has come about has never been adequately explained. That’s too bad, because this reinvention of the nation’s public airwaves is a signal episode in the ongoing story of the upper-class Baby Boomers–“Liberal Affluent Boomers,” as the public radio research puts it, or LABs, as we’ll call them for short–who have remade American culture in their image.

And yet–so what? A reader with small-government, libertarian-conservative sympathies will raise the inevitable question: Why should government-supported radio exist at all? For those who look to public radio for classical music (or for any of the other traditional, minority tastes that are being purged from its airwaves), the principled small-government man will ask, Scrooge-like: Are there no CDs? Is there not satellite radio? Aren’t there many other private means by which such eccentrics may satisfy their craving? Likewise for those who want news and talk from their public station: Is there no Limbaugh for right-wingers? Does not the left-wing Radio America exist, at least for the next couple weeks? Does not every medium-sized city on up have an all-news AM station to fill your appetite for up-to-the-minute reports from everywhere all the time? Why should the taxpayers pay for what you can provide for yourself?

These are good questions, I suppose, but the argument they are meant to provoke ended long ago. Government radio is here to stay. If the budget pinchers under Ronald Reagan couldn’t privatize public radio, and the ideologues of the Gingrich Revolution couldn’t do it a decade later, we ought to get used to it, and perhaps survey the larger spectacle of its astonishing growth from a remote outpost in radio Siberia to a colossus of the nation’s media landscape. From its 3 million listeners in the early 1970s to the 29 million it claims today, public radio has come to be, as its own promotional materials immodestly say, “a dominant intellectual force in American life.” The interesting questions nowadays are, What does public radio, in its present incarnation, say about the public it appeals to? What does it tell us about the cultural elite whose instrument it has become? If public radio is here to stay, what kind of radio will it be?

Over the past ten years, the LABs who run the country’s cultural institutions have given their answer: Cut the boring music. Let’s talk.

PUBLIC RADIO has always been a creature of its time. An interesting academic paper about the evolution of public radio, “Guys in Suits with Charts,” by a historian named Alan G. Stavitsky, describes “the transformation of public radio from its educational, service-based origins to an audience-driven orientation.” But public radio has always been audience-driven–though people didn’t use terms like that back in the 1920s, when the audience was quite different. That was when an archipelago of “educational radio” stations popped up across the country, manned by do-gooders and borne across low-output FM frequencies. These were usually jerry-rigged, community-run operations, broadcasting weather reports and household hints about carpentry and dress-making, cooking techniques and engine repair, with special attention to the daily demands of the farming life. (Broadcast is a term borrowed from farmers, describing what they do with seeds across a field.) Many of the stations were soon scooped up by local school boards or colleges as an aid to education. After the Second World War, the FCC made the arrangements official by allocating the left end of the FM dial exclusively to educational radio.

Educational radio stations through the fifties and sixties resembled cable TV public-access channels today–a parade of amateurish enthusiasts ventilating their micro-obsessions. Cooking class would be followed by poetry hour, after which a tape would play of the opening of the German parliament, followed by a soundtrack of Lithuanian clogdancers. As part of the Great Society, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was chartered in 1967 to consolidate the educational stations (and television stations, too, of course) into a national network. Educational radio was now called public radio, and together the scattered stations formed National Public Radio in 1970.

By then the stations’ dominant format was serious music, jazz in some places but mostly classical performances and recordings. The mission of public broadcasting, according to its founders, was “public service”: more particularly, to provide cultural programming that commercial broadcasters, under pressure to acquire the maximum number of listeners in order to make the maximum amount of money, could not. It’s an odd task public broadcasting was given, needless to say–offering a service precisely because it’s not terribly popular. But for more than a decade it seemed to suit the programmers of public radio just fine. And classical music fit the bill: a public service everyone knew to be elevated and worthy, an art form that was good for the polity and good for the soul.

Public radio was thus a creature of what we have come to know, since its demise, as middlebrow culture. From the Book of the Month Club to television shows like Omnibus and Playhouse 90, the middlebrow bridged high culture to low and tried self-consciously to make the best of artistic achievement accessible to the general population of the great commercial Republic. It was earnest and self-improving and unashamedly hierarchical, summoning everyone who showed a glimmer of interest to the ideals of beauty and excellence. It was elitist and populist all at once.

“For those first generations of public broadcasters, it was simply understood that certain kinds of programming had to be perpetuated,” says Bob Goldfarb, a former public radio consultant who is now program director at KING, a commercial classical station in Seattle. “Arts programming, classical music, and the like–these were public goods, ipso facto, that had to be preserved for the cultural health of the community, the way a national park is a good in itself and must be preserved. And public radio was one way to preserve them.”

From the start National Public Radio was a network like no other. In the typical commercial arrangement, networks own their affiliates. NPR is owned by its member stations, who pay fees for the programming it generates; otherwise each public radio station is independently operated, and each, in the first decades, generated the bulk of its own programming. The first nationally distributed NPR program was the newsmagazine show All Things Considered, which nowadays runs on most public radio stations every weekday afternoon.

“It’s a sign of how haphazard things were back then that ATC was the first major programming NPR attempted,” says Peter Dominowski, a veteran public radio programmer and now an independent consultant. “Think about it. Most radio listening, especially for news, occurs in the morning, between six and nine. So when do we put on All Things Considered? In the afternoon. We didn’t even know enough to put on a program at the time most people would want to listen to it.

“Of course, there’s another reason NPR didn’t go with a morning show right at first: Nobody wanted to wake up that early. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not.”

The morning show eventually went on the air in 1979. Ten years later Morning Edition officially overtook All Things Considered as the most-listened-to NPR program, and today the two rank as the second- and third-highest rated nationally broadcast shows on the radio, behind Rush Limbaugh.

The success of NPR’s newsmagazine shows symbolizes the transformation of public radio from a funky, ragtag collection of stations in the 1970s and early ’80s, catering to minority tastes and other rejects of the marketplace, to the sleek and highly professional media conglomerate it is today. The transformation, says Dominowski, is the consequence of a slow, painful, system-wide “raising of awareness.” A series of events shook the mission of NPR, and ultimately led to its remaking. The most influential of these was the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Indeed, it is a delightful irony–one that would appall Reaganites no less than the sophisticated LABs who run NPR–that the new, transformed public radio is itself a product of Reaganism.

The Reagan years rebuilt public radio in two important ways. First came a fiscal panic. When it created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and later NPR, Congress declined to create an endowment for public broadcasting. Programmers were forced to return year after year for new funding. In this way the politicians hoped to keep the public broadcasting eggheads in line. When the Reagan administration, in one of its irregular spasms of fiscal austerity, threatened to cut public broadcasting budgets, public radio executives were frightened into reexamining their reliance on government funding, tenuous as it suddenly seemed. Around the same time, in 1983, a bookkeeping scandal revealed a gigantic deficit in NPR’s budget. Together these forced National Public Radio and many of its member stations to an appreciation of the Reaganite ideal: Everything, it turned out, could be marketized–that is, turned into a commodity and subjected to the rigors of the marketplace, with all its fancy methodologies and desperate strategies for survival. Scrambling, they discovered new ways to sell public broadcasting.

And what do you know? In a happy coincidence, again thanks to Reaganism, these new ways of making money no longer seemed so vulgar–or, for that matter, illegal. Public broadcasting had always operated under severe constraints intended to keep it unsullied by commercialism. Under Reagan, however, the FCC got itself into a deregulating mood. It relaxed the “underwriting” rules that had prohibited public radio from carrying advertising. Under the new regulations, advertisers could be called “underwriters,” and underwriters could give a station money in return for brief promotional spots that were not, under any circumstances, to be called advertising. Programmers meanwhile stepped up their solicitation of funds from corporations and foundations, and they began studying ways to produce programs that would draw in more of a better class of listener–the kind who could be relied upon to donate money to public radio, and who would, just as important, create a desirable target audience for underwriters.

If all this old history seems odd and incongruous, it should. Alert readers will notice that public radio’s methods of getting money–soliciting ads, designing programs to appeal to more listeners, and jollying up big corporations–are conspicuously similar to the methods used by commercial stations in their quest to survive and dominate in the marketplace. Yet it’s a funny thing about LABs: Methods that might have seemed crass and excessive when pursued by earlier generations are, in their hands, transformed into something noble. This has proved true in fields ranging from sex to real estate–why not public broadcasting? Thus the techniques of commercialization, reviled when used by commercial radio, were suddenly seen as indispensable tools in advancing public radio’s essential mission of “public service.”

First, however, that troublesome term public service would have to be redefined.

“I’VE SEEN THE CHANGE HAPPEN,” David Giovannoni was saying a few weeks ago. “I’ve been honored to be a part of it. In the eighties, and then later, with Gingrich running the Congress, we lived in fear of losing our subsidy. We had to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, Where’s the money going to come from? We had to have more listeners, and we had to be more highly valued by those listeners.”

We were sitting in a diner in a strip mall along a dreary stretch of highway in the far northern suburbs of Washington, D.C. Giovannoni doesn’t much like to be interviewed, and I was interviewed myself, extensively, by one of his business partners before he would agree to have a talk. Now semiretired, Giovannoni is a large figure in the history of public radio, and a controversial one–which is to say, the small remnant of classical music programmers view him, with varying degrees of personal distaste, as the enemy. “Dr. Joe Baloney,” they call him.

“If anyone is symbolic of the transformation of public radio, it’s Giovannoni,” KING’s Goldfarb told me. A few years ago the New York Times published a long profile of him, under the headline: “Public Radio’s Private Guru.” “Is this the most powerful man in public radio?” the story asked, and the answer was: You bet.

Giovannoni is a radio consultant, one of a handful who, starting in the late 1970s, brought the techniques of modern research to the slapdash, Rube Goldberg world of public radio. The knowledge he gained from those techniques–the exhaustive data he gleaned from the industry bible, the Arbitron listener ratings–pointed to one message above all: For most stations in most markets, news and talk programming, rather than music programming, would bring in the most listeners and ensure the survival, and eventually the flourishing, of public radio.

In his personal tastes, he readily admits, he’s not much of a music buff.

“I listen to classical once in a while,” he said, stirring his coffee. “But I mostly listen to rock–fifties and sixties rock’n’roll, the music I grew up with. And I have a thing for dance music of the 1920s.”

“David likes the equipment you play music on,” an old acquaintance told me. “He likes to collect records. He doesn’t much care about the music that’s in the records.”

I noticed that Giovannoni’s office, in a nearby townhouse, was filled with antique phonographs and radio equipment, and indeed it turns out that his interest in technology is what launched his career.

In the mid-1970s, Giovannoni was a graduate student in “Communications Arts” at the University of Wisconsin, working as a teacher’s assistant to a professor who specialized in analyzing the reams of radio ratings generated by Arbitron.

“I originally started running numbers because I was so bored with graduate school,” he says. “I hated graduate school. And there I am sitting in a cinder block room with piles of public radio ratings. My roommate had one of the first programmable HP calculators. And here’s this fascinating data set, so I started writing programs for the data. I was interested in the numbers and the applications–that’s what it was about for me. I like math, and I’m good at it.”

What Giovannoni found was to guide thinking about public radio for the next two decades, and does still. The conventional view had been that while public radio had a small audience, it was nevertheless intensely loyal.

“Small but loyal, that’s what everybody said,” Giovannoni told me. “And our line was, Well, you’re half-right. It’s a small audience, but it’s not loyal. Public radio was literally driving people away. And anyone who listened could tell you why. It was so bad–‘University of the Air,’ where they’d put up a microphone in front of the professor and you could hear the chalk scratching across the chalkboard. The Radio Reader–‘Chapter a Day.’ Terrible, terrible stuff. Incredibly boring.”

Among the boring stuff was classical music. By the early 1980s, after Giovannoni had joined NPR and helped found its Department of Research, he and other number-crunchers had discovered the “tent poles”–a legendary image in public radio lore. Charted on an x-y axis, ratings for a typical public radio station would spike up in the morning, fall into a trough midday, then spike again in late afternoon, before falling as the evening wore on. As it happens, on many stations, these tent poles, showing a surge in listenership, exactly corresponded to the morning and afternoon newsmagazines, Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The troughs occurred when the format switched to music.

“The question we wanted to ask was, How do we raise that huge section between the tent poles?” Giovannoni said. It was a question he began asking throughout the system as public radio worked through the fiscal panic of the 1980s.

“You can’t imagine the effect David would have on people in public radio in those days,” says Murray Horwitz, who used to direct arts programming for NPR. “Here’s this funky group of people, they’re passionate but amateurs really, and this guy walks in with piles of numbers and spreadsheets, and he’s carrying Objectivity! Truth! Data! He’d say, in effect, ‘I’m just like real radio, professional radio–not this pretend radio you guys are doing.’ And his advice was always the same. They’d ask, ‘How do we get more people to listen to our classical music station?’ And the answer would come back, ‘Stop playing classical music.'”

Giovannoni’s main point, he says now, was a simple one–that public radio wasn’t performing a public service unless people were listening to it. This notion quickly underscored the frantic quest for more and more listeners. But of course people were already listening to public radio; they just didn’t represent the right kind of listeners in sufficient quantity. One finding of Giovannoni’s research is that a classical audience is roughly 10 years older, on average, than a news-talk audience. And adver…I mean underwriters preferred to have their products peddled to younger listeners, just as they do on commercial stations. NPR became a brand, and a highly desirable one, and the image had to be maintained.

“Public service became a euphemism for ratings,” Goldfarb says. In one recent presentation to program directors, for example, Giovannoni congratulated those who had contributed to the growth in public radio’s nationwide ratings. “Five years ago, you generated 57 percent of all public service; today you generate 68 percent.” Indeed, in many of Giovannoni’s public radio reports, the words ratings, listenership, and public service are used interchangeably.

The new emphasis on ratings struck some broadcasters as unseemly. “Some protested that in the nonprofit world, it’s never the point to max out the number of people you reach,” Goldfarb says. “That’s what for-profit broadcasters do.”

The pressure on local program directors–or PDs–to conform to this new commercial sensibility became intense. Horwitz recalls one weekend retreat for public radio personnel in the early ’90s, held at a conference center in rural Virginia.

“They were from a mix of stations, big and little, different formats, mostly classical, some jazz,” Horwitz says. “The idea was to help the stations learn to make money–increase revenue, excuse me. So all day Saturday the consultants get up and present this huge amount of research and data, showing, or at least claiming to show, that when you got rid of music and arts and programmed news and talk instead, you spiked your numbers. Ratings go up. Donations go up. Underwriting goes up.

“Then it’s late afternoon, and the consultants say, ‘Okay, you’ve seen the data. Now you’ve got the night off. We want you all to go away for some downtime. And when you come back tomorrow, tell us how you’re going to fix your station.’

“Sunday morning–it was just sad, pathetic. It was like an AA meeting. It was like total defeat. You had these PDs getting up, hanging their heads, and they’re saying, ‘Hi, my name’s Bill, and I . . . I . . . I’ve been programming opera!”

CLASSICAL MUSIC PROGRAMMERS claim that much of the research from Giovannoni and his colleagues–proving that the music and arts format is an inefficient way to build audiences and perform public service–is weak at best, tendentious at worst. It’s hard to disagree. Reading the research, and especially the little interpretive essays the researchers write to summarize the data, you realize that they aren’t describing listeners so much as caricaturing them–idealizing the ones they like and slandering the ones they don’t.

“Citizens of the world” is how Giovannoni describes listeners who are drawn to public radio by news-talk. They constitute, he’s written, “a community of listeners that transcends geographic boundaries, a national, now international community of shared interests, values and beliefs . . . a community of interest in which familiarity is measured in mindsets, not miles; a family of relations in which affinity, not genetics, determines kinship. Our listeners want neighbors who hold the attitudes they hold, who seek the information they seek, who enjoy the entertainments they enjoy. . . . Public radio is the place our listeners call home. They rise and return to it daily, their roots most deeply embedded in network news programming, most reliably nourished by rich sources of reporting, writing, and producing.”

Contrast these “citizens of the world” with classical music listeners, whose deficiencies were summarized in a paper published in 2002 by Walrus Research, a popular public radio research firm headed by Giovannoni protégés. Walrus gathered groups of classical music listeners from various markets into a series of focus groups, and the resulting report has been used ever since by program directors eager to eliminate or curtail music programming on their stations.

Classical music listeners, the researchers discovered, “use classical music to escape from the problems of the world.” Not surprisingly, there are similarities in race (white) and income levels (very high) between the average NPR listener and the lover of classical music, yet in fact they represent two very different kinds of people. One group the researchers dubbed “Classical Monks,” the other, more typical of the new NPR listeners, were “NPR Activists.”

For those who have trouble with complete sentences, Walrus Research helpfully broke the findings down into a neat PowerPoint chart (see above). “The portal to NPR news is through the intellect,” said the study. “The portal to classical music is emotional.”

In sum, Walrus said: “Classical listeners use the station for gratification of their private, internal needs.” Sounds kind of yucky, doesn’t it? And certainly not very public. Catering to such people might even be considered an abdication of responsibility for a program director bent on public service.

This is an argument that the newer generation of program directors and station managers is increasingly willing to entertain. Tom Taylor, of the trade magazine Inside Radio, says the new generation is impeccably professional, in contrast to station personnel of 20 or even 10 years ago.

“These are very sophisticated professionals who discovered the kind of programming that generates dollars, and that is news and information,” he says. “They know how to identify themselves with a particular branding profile to attract a very desirable kind of listener with a high level of income. And that listener wants his brand to be about one thing: news talk.”

A public radio veteran who laments the demise of arts and music programming recalls a public radio convention in the early ’90s, just as the new generation of programmers were beginning to redirect their stations away from classical music. One of the public radio researchers hooked up a group of 40 or so program directors and station managers to a “dial machine.” The idea was to play a series of musical snippets, from classical through jazz and pop to hard rock, and the machine would record their reactions in real time on a graph, from high (favorable) to low (unfavorable).

“The graph recorded a perfect slanting line . . . from left to right,” the veteran told me. Classical was at the low end, the least favored. Then the consultant brought out a graph showing the reactions of a group of longtime public radio listeners to the same series of musical snippets.

“The graph of the listeners showed a perfect slanting line again, but from right to left–exactly the opposite. If you overlaid the two lines, you got an x figure. The tastes of the PDs and the listeners were opposite.”

When I mentioned this story to Bob Goldfarb, from KING in Seattle, he laughed.

“I’m not surprised,” he said, “but that would have been a while ago. A friend of mine has an axiom: The single greatest determinant of what a public radio station plays is what the station manager likes to listen to. And nowadays not many of these people have been educated to a taste in classical music. They’re news-talk people. And by now they’ve got a news-talk audience. A lot of classical listeners like NPR news, but a lot have gone elsewhere. Or stopped listening altogether.”

THE IMPERIAL AMBITIONS of talk at NPR grow more insistent all the time. For many individual stations, the commercial track they stepped onto in the 1980s and 1990s has become a treadmill: to draw listeners, they have had to pay expensive fees to NPR for its news programming–fees often topping $1 million a year. These high costs accelerate and, in turn, require ever more listeners to cover them.

Says another NPR veteran: “Some of these public stations have now entered the kind of vicious circle that highly competitive businesses get into. It’s grow or die. Keep paddling faster and faster or drown. But that was never supposed to be the point. The whole idea of having a public radio system was to partition off one part of the market from those kinds of pressures.”

Of the nearly 40 programs produced by NPR, only 7, by my count, are devoted to the arts and music. Joan Kroc, widow of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, recently left a legacy of $235 million for NPR to spend as it pleases. Of the many ideas floated by network officials in the newspapers and trade publications about how to spend Mrs. Kroc’s money, none has involved expanding music or arts programming; the first decision taken–after every employee was given a bonus–was to hire 45 more reporters for the newsmagazines. And NPR has recently attacked the tent-pole problem head-on. The debut this winter of a midday newsmagazine, called Day to Day, offers a boost to stations hoping to attract listeners, other than “Monks,” between 9 A.M. and 3 P.M. An NPR spokesman told me it’s the fastest growing program in public radio history. “The early numbers look very, very good,” she said. Microsoft pays for the show. The triumph of talk is almost complete.

At the end of our long conversation in the diner, I told Giovannoni I had recently been to the AMPPR convention in Florida.

He leaned forward. “What was it like?” he asked. He had experienced unfriendly receptions at past AMPPR conferences, back when he was first spreading the word about the new ways of public service.

I told him the mood seemed kind of gloomy, like a blacksmith convention in 1910.

He laughed. “That’s just about right,” he said. Then he mentioned a few public stations where classical music seemed to be thriving. But he didn’t seem to think much of their prospects for survival. “They’ve been living a charmed life for a long time,” he said.

“The irony is, the economics for a classical music station are very good. It’s very cheap to do classical music programming, and it’s very cheap to do well. You’ve got an installed base of listeners in most communities, and they object very strenuously when you drop a full-service classical station.

“But there are two problems for these guys. There are only 24 hours in a day. And as 24-hour news has become ascendant and dominant, the music is going to feel the squeeze from news and talk. That’s just the way it is.

“The other problem is, a lot of these people are living in the past. They see themselves as educators. They go back to that early tradition of educational radio, when the object was to teach people something about the music. They say they’re the bearers of the flame–the canon and all that.

“But I’m sorry. That’s not the way public radio understands public service today.”

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.