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I'm a fan of NPR; I think their news service is top notch, if a bit skewed to the left. I listen to their morning show every day, catching up on the news along with traffic and weather. But I can remember the public radio stations of my youth, playing almost exclusively classical music. It would seem that those days may be falling to the wayside.
Posted by Casper at June 7, 2004 11:52 AMWhat 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merely classical but also jazz, folk, blues, and bluegrass, once staples of public radio programming--is slowly being withdrawn from the public airwaves.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."