Requiem for the Radio

From National Public Radio this week comes the disquieting news that it is no longer National Public Radio.

According to the Washington Post, the organization “has quietly changed its name to its familiar initials. Much like the corporate names KFC or AT&T, the initials now stand for – the initials.”

The first problem with this gesture is its pointlessness. Like any corporate entity, National Public Radio is free to trademark its initials, its logo, its logo containing its initials, and any other previously unclaimed identity under which it wishes to do business. The network need not formally change its name to take such steps.

A bigger problem, of course, is that the change represents a kind of official surrender to the glib superficiality that suffuses every aspect of National Public Radio’s competition. Has CNN been so wildly successful since shedding the Cable News Network moniker that its corporate branding strategy is worth emulating? Which is more profitable, and more conducive to the greater good: the CBS of Katie Couric or the Columbia Broadcasting System of Edward R. Murrow?

The president of National Public Radio, Vivian Schiller, makes the point that her network is no longer truly a radio network – its journalism, and its cultural offerings, are now available in a variety of media. For example, a truly full appreciation of the recent Fresh Air program about the nation’s electricity grid would involve a visit to the network’s web site to check out the interactive, layered map of the grid. If the venerable Susan Stamberg does a story about contemporary architecture, thanks to podcast downloads you needn’t be at your radio for the broadcast and, of course, visuals of the building will be available on the web.

All the more reason, given these leaps forward, for the network that Stamberg helped build to celebrate, to cultivate, and to communicate its historical roots in radio broadcasting. Radio has a romance, and a rich history, that other forms of communication simply lack – Roosevelt’s fireside chats . . . kids on farms hiding their transistor radios at bedtime to catch a few innings of their favorite baseball team a thousand miles away via a static-y clear channel AM station . . . even Neil Armstrong’s untelevised “one small step for a man – one giant leap for mankind.”

Chuck all of that in the interest of making National Public Radio, in the words of its president, more “modern” and “streamlined”? I respectfully dissent.

Radio and its history are not the only things the network is deleting from its hard drive. There’s that middle word, too – public. It means something.

Commercial radio died for all intents and purposes in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan and his congressional enablers deregulated the medium, eliminated ownership limitations, and trashed what were once legally binding public service obligations. This led inexorably to Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and the death of alternative formats and full-service commercial stations.

If that pitch seems too ideological to you, forget radio for a second and consider how non-public entities – i.e., investor-owned businesses – have fared as news and information providers in other media. The nation’s great newspapers are in the toilet swirl, victims of their own comfort with short-term profit that allowed them to stop thinking about the future and the changes it would bring.

Arguably, it is National Public Radio that stepped forward, boldly and creatively, as the empires of the commercial broadcasters and newspapers have crumbled. Public radio did this not necessarily because its people are smarter or more virtuous than their for-profit counterparts, but because they were liberated by their public mission. Consigning the “public” in National Public Radio to oblivion is even less defensible than the blithe abandonment of “radio.”

According to the Washington Post – oops, make that the WP – television’s Public Broadcasting Service will not follow the example of its radio counterpart. The irony is that, unlike National Public Radio, PBS would do well to shed its ponderous name. “Broadcasting” has always seemed so much snootier than “radio.” PBS stations still felt like elitist cultural medicine long after public radio got interesting and cool. Bob Edwards joined National Public Radio ten years before Elmo showed up on PBS in 1984.

National Public Radio fired Bob Edwards in 2004 – looking to freshen up Morning Edition, they said – and so one never hears the words “Bob Edwards” on public radio anymore. That’s understandable in the circumstances. But consigning the very phrase “public radio” to the same fate? It a full-throated surrender to the morals of the marketplace – to the pernicious principles of . . . well, of PR.