Current Research
My dissertation considers the decline in government funding for National Public Radio and its consequences for both individual station longevity and public radio programming content. As government funding has declined, individual public radio stations have turned to corporate underwriters and local listeners for support. These corporate underwriters tend to prefer supporting radio shows that offer cultural content, rather than potentially controversial news content. Similarly, local listeners encourage their stations to purchase name brand shows with nationally recognized hosts, such as Car Talk, This American Life, and Fresh Air. Pressures from these two key sources of financial support have led many public radio stations to drop their locally produced shows and offer fewer hours of news programming each day. In this way, particularly since the mid-1980s, the NPR system in the aggregate has been transformed into a less diverse, far more entertainment focused network in much the same way the for-profit media has. Though a tremendous amount of attention -- in the form of books, magazine articles, academic research, and media reform conferences -- has been cast upon the trends of for-profit media toward "infotainment" and "news-you-can-use," this research suggests that similar trends can be observed in public radio. Furthermore, these findings suggest that to protect NPR stations as refuges for diverse local shows and serious news programming, we must invest far more government funding into the entire NPR station network.
My dissertation investigates these issues in two ways. First, I examine the founding patterns of NPR stations, comparing the relative theoretical utility of organizational ecology, station funding patterns, and political party composition in predicting station foundings and mortality. Second, using NPR station profile data, I track the changing patterns of station-by-station programming over time, particularly noting that stations with a greater proportion of their funding drawn from corporate underwriters and listeners are more likely to purchase nationally-produced, cultural shows.
