to be heard

Well, I finally put my money where my mouth is, and made a membership pledge to my local NPR affiliate.
I'm in the red--not horrifically, but not so's I have money to throw around. When I do charity, it's mostly with my hands and feet and throat, because it's just not been long since I was living on $35 a month for groceries and begging for loans from friends, but here it is:

Public media is vital for a democracy like ours to function. Public, non-corporate-owned, non-advertising-dominated, non-government-censored media. Media that's free to investigate what it can and say what it wants and do things I disagree with and people much bigger than me disagree with, too. "This American Life" could never exist on a corporate station--where's the ad revenue? Where's the hook? Where's the guarantee that the single male 18-34 demographic will tune in? If it's not profitable, it's not worth funding, not viable as an investment--this is what happens with media-as-business-for-profit. Why is Howard Stern the free-speech radio icon, and not Garrison Keillor? Well, what's good for business?
It goes further: if one large company owns both the radio station and the grocery store, you probably won't hear favorable stories about the farm-labor strike, for instance. It's bad for business. Leaving entirely aside the political-party loyalties of the owners of these conglomerates for the moment, biting stories and investigation are just as impossible as meandering, idealistic storytelling in this format. Corporate media outlets can't stomach it because it cuts their revenue. For the sort of animal they are, this is a rational decision. Lots of things are bad for profit margins--political upheaval, too. Competition. So on.

So there's that. Then there's advertisements dressed up as news stories, already a problem, right under our noses. Advertisements for medicines, for politicians, for neighborhoods, for movies, whatever. It's all one branch of the conglomerate feeding another. It's natural for the nature of the beast. And it will never, ever give us cultural nutrition the way we need it, never furnish us the ideas and stories we need to live on and to act as informed members of society and so on. Corporate media profits best by dividing people, making them lonelier, and then selling them things. If public media doesn't build communities, it dies in the crib.

And what are our other options? Indymedia sites? They have their advantages, but they're also flooded with conspiracy theories, bad research, calls to take out "the pigs," every crackpot with a keyboard and no filters. That has its place. I use Indymedia, too. It's just not, in its current form, up to the task.
The rest of the Internet? Great, sure, but sure as hell not free. All you need's a broken clock-radio to get at NPR. No monthly fees. No costly equipment. No variation on download speed based on class or income, and far fewer regional limits to access. Anyone can get at public radio, with very little upfront investment and no subsequent costs.

The US doesn't even have the BBC. We don't have the Beeb--and look what that's meant for quality. With no budget worth speaking of, the BBC has turned out some of the best TV any conoisseur can name. Comedy that actually pushes limits. Science fiction that people still watch, allowed to go on for multiple seasons. And their reporting, while veering now and then into the ridiculous, is much more reliably nonpartisan, these days, than anything you can get out of the Americas.

The US has PBS and NPR. And it's no coincidence that the Bush Administration has tried desperately to cut all funding for those. Educational shows for children that don't prime them as nationalists and consumers? Ballet? Political commentary that's not pre-vetted by stooges? It's either a waste of money, in an industry that these people understand as profit-driven (is there anything they don't understand as profit-driven?) or seditious. And they don't get to control it. So they tried to stomp instead.

Public media is the beginning of what will save us. No other movement, in this day and age, can survive without media coverage. The religious Left, most people I meet have never heard of. And they tell me so. Why? Not an exciting for-ad-revenue news story, and it doesn't make for good cable, either. Not sexy, nothing blowing up, and bad for business. Lot of socialists anyway, right? Any number of movements worth knowing about and fighting for labor in silence. Hell, I'll never forget March of 2003, standing in a sea of tens of thousands of people shutting down my city in protest of the incipient invasion of Iraq, and hearing a man with a cell phone bellow, for the crowd, "The news says there's only eight hundred of us!" The roar was deafening. The folks at home never heard it. More public media would have given us a chance. More public media might also have prevented the police brutality later that night.

I don't have much money, but I sent my donation in, and proudly, and it made me feel like a real adult.

A half hour later, listening to "This American Life," I heard a story so real and human and cutting and true that I had to pull my car over and cry. And I knew, right there, I'd made the right decision.

I hope you will, too.


edit: It's come to my attention that I have a number of non-American readers coming through, which is amazing and exciting, but may call for some clarification of acronyms. NPR is National Public Radio, and I've linked their website below. OPB is Oregon Public Broadcasting, my state's affiliate. You probably know the BBC, I imagine. And while it might not be appropriate for me to pressure you to support American public radio, I urge you to support your local equivalent. Also, drop a comment and say hi, especially if you're a returning reader. I'd love to know who you are.