BAR HARBOR – The president and CEO of National Public Radio, speaking Wednesday evening at Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory, told a crowd of about 160 people why he thought NPR’s audience has grown significantly in the past decade while those of other major media outlets have declined.

Kevin Klose, former Moscow bureau chief for The Washington Post and head of NPR for the past 10 years, said that in 1971, the year after NPR was founded, it had about half a million listeners nationwide. In 1998, when he arrived at NPR, it had 13 million and now has 30 million. Television broadcast networks and daily newspapers, first with the advent of cable television in the 1970s and then with the growth of the Internet in the 1990s, have seen the numbers of their viewers and readers decline over the same approximate period, he said.

Klose said most major media outlets, especially the television networks, have been caught up in the immediate-gratification ethos of the Internet age, in which cell phones and personal digital assistants make information available at the touch of a button. This has greatly increased competition, which in turn has led to the growth of journalism of “opinion, denouncement, outcry and distortion” as news outlets try to attract an audience in an increasingly fractured media landscape, he said.

The network television program “Desperate Housewives” is a good example of how the new media landscape has shortened our attention spans, he said.

“It’s told in 3 1/2- or four-minute segments, like everything else,” Klose said. “We’re not getting what we need.”

The increased competition has led to increased media consolidation, he said, which despite the greater number of television channels and Internet outlets has led to fewer local, independent media voices. This has been the case especially with radio, he said.

“Pretty soon, the local voices disappear entirely,” Klose said.

NPR, in part because it is funded only by government subsidies, sponsorships, and listener contributions, has been able mostly to steer clear of these pressures and, in the meantime, has discovered that its community-based structure has helped draw listeners, according to Klose.

NPR was founded in 1970 with a nationwide group of nonprofit radio stations that had been run up until then by colleges, universities and boards of education, he said. This organization gave NPR a host of affiliate stations that today provide its listeners with local stories that lead into NPR’s national and international coverage.

“They give us authenticity,” Klose said of local NPR affiliates such as Maine Public Broadcasting Network. “For us in radio, they give us a powerful continuum.”

The network’s continuing nonprofit radio format, which allows it to provide more in-depth coverage and analysis, encourages an introspective style of reporting that enables listeners not only to hear the news but also to process it and to get a sense of how stories affect them and their communities, he said. Unlike most broadcast media, NPR even uses silence sometimes to help highlight the human aspect of its stories, he said.

“What we do allows us to touch the human reality in a different way,” Klose said. “It becomes an expression of who we are in a community.”

This is what has helped NPR’s audience to grow, he said. He also cited two major news stories from earlier this decade that serve to demonstrate the societal demand for the more in-depth kind of news coverage that NPR offers.

One was the 2000 presidential election, in which Election Day actually lasted more than a month before the outcome of the race between George Bush and Al Gore eventually was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, Klose said.

Then came the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Just before they happened, NPR’s national audience was 16 million, he said. Two weeks after the attacks, it was 20 million. This growth in its audience has resulted in NPR expanding its news staff from 250 to 450 and the number of its foreign bureaus from nine to 18 in the past 10 years, he said.

In that same time period, most television networks and major newspapers have cut staff and reduced the number of their foreign bureaus.

“The reason we’ve been able to do that is because people support their local radio station and it becomes part of an act of their civil presence, and their activism in their community,” Klose said. “It’s quite astonishing.”