Listening to listeners

At 1 p.m. last Saturday, listeners whose public radio stations carry the live broadcasts of the New York Metropolitan Opera were settling in for a performance of “Manon,” Jules Massenet’s heartbreaking masterpiece about love and betrayal. Listeners to Maine Public Radio were settling in for a two-hour show on pop songs about booze and drugs.

Such a snapshot comparison may not be totally fair, but it does partially illustrate why, more than three months after MPR enacted a package of now-infamous programming changes, thousands of Maine residents remain irate. The persistent ire is due to many factors, the compound failures of MPR management to advise the public of the coming changes during the fund drive that immediately preceded them, to consult beforehand with the Community Advisory Board (CAB) that is supposedly its link to the public it supposedly serves, to react to the objections with anything other than disdain and intimations that the annoying critics would soon tire and go away. Saturday’s little episode makes one more point: Much of the new programming simply is not very good.

To its credit, MPR began at least making an effort to listen to its listeners through a series of seven so-called “listening sessions” that began last week and continue this week at various places around the state. It is an effort, however, deserving of nothing more than faint praise – despite being buried by overwhelmingly negative reaction for months, MPR still offers no indication of under what circumstances at least some of the more objectionable changes might be undone. One need not be an absolute cynic to see a connection between MPR’s decision to hold March listening sessions and the coming April fund drive. It does, after all, bear a resemblance to the connection between MPR’s promise in January to get its 25-member CAB involved and the station’s $2.3-million funding request then before the Legislature’s Appropriations Committee. Incidentally, the CAB has yet to get involved; its meeting this Saturday in Lewiston will be its first since this uproar began.

The uproar began with protests about MPR’s decision to drop the Texaco/Met broadcasts, a 20-week matinee season from December into April that is a 60-year radio tradition. MPR’s reaction, that Southern Maine opera fans had a commercial station to tune to and Northern Maine opera fans could just buy CDs, was exactly wrong. From there, as the listening sessions show, the scope of the resentment has expanded to include the overall trend of replacing of classical music with talk shows, the replacement of locally produced shows with canned syndicated shows and the replacement of programs of culture and taste with two-hour booze and drug songfests. How much of that resentment could have been prevented had MPR management simply talked to the 25 Maine citizens who have volunteered to represent their communities?

The sessions also show that MPR management may be less knowledgeable about its history and its mandate than are the many MPR listeners who pointed out that The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the legislation that created public radio and TV, is quite specific regarding the involvement of community advisory boards at all levels beyond routine day-to-day station operations.

Congress made it clear that that involvement includes being part of planning in advance of changes, not just reacting to objections. Congress also made clear it expected public broadcasters to serve underserved audiences and to offer programming that enlightens and uplifts. And while Jules Massenet is not mentioned specifically, it’s a good bet that Congress was thinking more of him than the Grateful Dead.