No Pledge (Again)

Once again, it's pledge drive time at our public radio station, and once again I will not be pledging.

I do like NPR; I must listen to it more than I thought, because the other day I caught Princess humming the "Morning Edition" theme song. But they already have my money, since they're supported by tax dollars. And their claim that they are accepting private donations is bunk; maybe small individual donations are private, but they're essentially selling advertising space to ADM and all those other firms that get their names announced regularly. If they're gonna sell advertising like everyone else, that's fine; but they ought not pretend they're just being really grateful for donations when they announce the names and slogans of their donors over and over and over.

During pledge week, they spend half their time begging for money, so the news programs I like to listen to have only a limited amount of time to present their stories. So I was surprised when the first fifteen minutes or so of the news tonight was entirely devoted to how "town hall" meetings like the one President Bush did are staged events and the people there were "not a random sample" (like they're supposed to generate a random sample from voter rolls and then compel attendance of everyone selected?). They gave the everything-but-the-pap-smear-results treatment to every single person who was selected to ask the President a question. This is what they wasted their limited news time on?? Hello, everyone with half a brain knows these things are staged. They were staged when President Clinton did them too, but NPR didn't pull the credit reports of everyone who spoke up.

I know I shouldn't be surprised; I roll my eyes at liberal idiocy that I hear on NPR almost as often as I roll my eyes at conservative idiocy on Rush Limbaugh.