The periodic membership drives of Maine Public Broadcasting always assume that listeners and viewers need to be encouraged or shamed into paying for the pleasure of receiving favorite programs. Many of us long-time members, however, have been motivated by quite different considerations.

We once believed that MPBC met the cultural needs of otherwise unserved or underserved Mainers. Whatever our own tastes in music, for example, we believed that there should be opportunities in Maine to hear and to learn about all kinds of music – opera, classical, jazz, folk, etc. And we were willing to support a public broadcasting organization that provided such opportunities to audiences too small to attract the attention of commercial broadcasters.

Now Maine Public Radio has acted once more to reduce the variety, the frequency and the duration of such opportunities. It has become ever more difficult to distinguish between its programming and that of the commercially available stations, and consequently ever more difficult to justify continued charitable contributions.

Hundreds of us have written letters to the editor of the Bangor Daily News, which has also given us handsome editorial support. Hundreds more have written or called MPBC directly. We have voiced our concerns. We have vowed to withhold further support. These actions seem to have had no impact on the situation. Apparently more is required of us.

The MPBC Web site at www.mpbc.org has a link to “Corporate Information” about the Board of Trustees, the current fiscal year revenue and expenditure budgets, the strategic plan, the programming policies, and the public inspection file. Armed with this information, we can better press our case for more responsible programming.

We can bring our concerns and recommendations directly to the trustees, acting to hold them accountable, as they are at law, rather than focusing our displeasure on the staff that implements their decisions. (And indeed, when MPB President Rob Gardiner characterizes his new talk shows as “intelligent, thoughtful, informed discussion,” we must conclude that staff leadership is more to be pitied than blamed.)

Meetings of the trustees are public; we can attend and offer comments or submit petitions. The next three meetings are scheduled for Jan. 16 in Bangor, March 20 in Lewiston and May 15 in Bangor. By the time of the January meeting, the chair of the trustees must appoint a Nominating Committee, which then must solicit from MPBC members suggestions of suitable candidates: we can make use of this opportunity to suggest the candidates we find most suitable.

There are four institutional trustees: the University of Maine System and Colby, Bates and Bowdoin colleges. Those of us who are students, graduates, employees, retirees, governors or benefactors of these institutions can urge their chief executive officers to a more responsible course of trusteeship. Two additional trustees are appointed by the governor, with the approval of the Legislature: we can make our opinions about the necessary qualifications and about suitable candidates known to the governor and to our legislators.

The Public Telecommunications Financing Act of 1978 requires MPBC to have a Community Advisory Board to advise it about whether programming and policies are meeting the specialized educational and cultural needs of the communities served and to make appropriate recommendations. We have heard nothing from or about this board in the course of the recent discussions, which makes it all the more important that we engage its members in similar conversations. (And if it should happen that such a Board has not been constituted or convened or consulted in the recent revisions, we will have additional avenues to pursue).

There are still other courses of action available to us. We can redirect our charitable giving to organizations and institutions that better work to meet the cultural needs of unserved and underserved Mainers: other public media, arts organizations and arts presenters, museums, libraries, and educational institutions, among others. If we use our influence as employees, investors, or clients of MPBC’s underwriters to urge that they also redirect their charity, we can broaden that influence.

Better yet, we can make a case to our legislators that the state appropriation to MPBC is not a worthwhile expenditure of our taxes and suggest that these monies would be more cost-effectively appropriated to such organizations as the Maine State Library, the Maine Humanities Council, and the Maine Arts Commission. If we can redirect as little as 15 percent of the revenues budgeted from these three sources alone (radio memberships, underwriting, and state appropriations), we will have made almost $700,000 available to support the work of worthier organizations.

We can do all of these things more effectively if we organize ourselves under the banner of more responsible public broadcasting. Remembering the time when we were proud to be supporters of MPBC, when we compared public broadcasting in Maine favorably to what we heard elsewhere, we can work together to restore our public radio to its former glory.

Sharon Jackiw lives in Milford and is an associate professor of German and linguistics at the University of Maine.