>This is not be true, and you offer nothing to back up your assertion
>other than a vague reference to arbitrons. An objective measure of
>listenership is money raised from listeners. This figure has only
>increased over the last two decades.
Increased by how much? Total personal income in the US is up by 192% over the last two decades.
It's funny how the Arbitrons are used. At WBAI, when the went up from one quarter to the next, management bragged like crazy. When they fell by nearly half, as they did from the 1st to the 2nd quarter of this year, managment says nothing, and its apologists say the Arbitrons are irrelevant. In any case, they're the best measure we have, and lots of people with serious money rely on them.
>In any case, arbitrons are a dubios measure of listenership
>especially for public radio since arbitrons were designed primarily
>to measure the commercial radio listenership.
WNYC pulls down big Arbitron numbers, and I bet KQED does too. WBAI was the highest-rated FM station in New York in the mid-1970s; now it's bouncing around near the bottom.
>In terms of programming, people obviously like different things. So
>its okay if you only like Sasha and CS's programming (Against the
>Grain) Some people around Berkeley refer to KPFA as 'KPLO'. However,
>Dennis Bernstein's Flashpoints raises a lot of money for the station
>showing that it is more popular than Against the Grain at least in
>terms of listeners voting with their wallets.
The nutty stuff raises lots of money, sad to say. Like Eric Hufschmid videos. What that says to me is that a lot of Pacifica listeners are also tuning in to Art Bell too (as I heard one say at the WBAI bookfair a couple of weeks ago).
Doug