July 8-14, 2004

cover story

The Cost to Know WHYY

For Philadelphia's public broadcaster, the quest for funds has brought both innovative programming and questions about journalistic integrity.

by Amy L. Webb

Put the word "public" in front of something and it sounds less pristine, less desirable than it did before. Housing. Public housing. Restroom. Public restroom. School. Public school.

What about television and radio? No one would argue that Delaware Tonight, this area's local public newscast, is as flashy as NBC 10 or CBS 3. Public broadcasting lacks the long-legged weathergirls and polished anchors who become the local glitterati. And it lacks commercial segments, where distinguished politicians urge a certain vote and famous athletes flog the wares of shoe companies.

But when Fred Rogers died last year, he made national headlines for his work on public television's Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. CNN called him a "cultural icon to generations of American children," and President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's most prestigious civilian honor. After Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun died, it was Nina Totenberg, a reporter for National Public Radio, who first had access to his papers and research on the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights case. And long before David Sedaris was on The New York Times' bestseller list and the toast of literary circles around the world, he was writing commentary for public radio and a guy named Ira Glass.

For some, broadcasting of the public sort may evoke the memories of a bland, no-frills television talk show or nonstop classical music. For others, public broadcasting means a Saturday afternoon of intelligent quiz shows, commentary on the arts and exceptional international news coverage.

Whichever your camp, don't for a second assume that public in this case means discounted or free. For public broadcasters everywhere — and especially for Philadelphia's WHYY — funding has always been a problem. At times, station directors are unable to find enough money to pay for programs. Or they can't get listeners to pay a few dollars to become members. Or they are faced with sources offering to pay for a show — as long as that source can control editorial content.

As WHYY celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, the station and its audience are looking back both on successes and embarrassments. WHYY has, in some sense, been a model for other public radio and television broadcasters. But over the years, WHYY has accepted money from agencies and used their spokespeople as experts or pundits. In at least one case, WHYY took underwriting money to broadcast environmental reporting that favored a state agency. WHYY has generated at least four national shows and catapulted radio host Terry Gross to the status of influential celebrity. Yet, due to funding, it will cancel Been There/Done That, a show that had aired on 30 stations across the country.

"For everybody in public broadcasting right now, funding choices are hard. We're forced to think about money every day," says Paul Gluck, WHYY vice president and station manager. "We've had some problems in the past. But we're bringing stories and content that's not available in any other place. For 50 years, WHYY has been integral to the Philadelphia community."

Now more than ever, the push to find underwriters, new members and long-term funding sources has reached critical mass at WHYY. And for everyone in Philadelphia, it's a matter of public interest.

WHYY started out as a blip on the radio dial back when radios still had dials. In the early 1950s, Dr. W. Laurence LePage, then president of the Franklin Institute, was intent upon finding a venue for educational programming that could be offered to children for free. He struck a deal with Westinghouse Radio Stations Inc., which donated 91 FM, and in the fall of 1954, WHYY aired its first broadcast.

Within the decade, WHYY acquired UHF Channel 35 and Channel 12, a VHF signal out of Delaware. The station was in a unique position as a dual licenser in an era when media conglomerates had yet to rule. The fundamental idea behind WHYY had been to educate its audience. Local schools kept radios in their classrooms for shows about the alphabet and afternoon classical music.

At that time, there were hundreds of nascent public radio stations across the country trying to accomplish the same goals as LePage. In 1970, Philadelphia native William H. Siemering, who later became station manager at WHYY, launched a group to study how all those stations could be brought together to keep the educational programming and at the same time offer arts, culture and hard-news programs. It would be called National Public Radio, would request aid from the government and would help develop radio into a medium free of commercial influence.

"National Public Radio will serve the individual," Siemering wrote in his 1970 NPR mission statement. "It will promote personal growth; it will regard the individual differences among men with respect and joy rather than derision and hate; it will celebrate the human experience as infinitely varied rather than vacuous and banal; it will encourage a sense of active constructive participation, rather than apathetic helplessness. National Public Radio will be the primary national non-commercial program service [and] will investigate and interpret issues of national and international import. The total service should be trustworthy, enhance intellectual development, expand knowledge."

Siemering's purpose was to reach a wide, diverse audience. "Commercial radio at that time really wasn't reflecting any diversity," he says. "It was mostly a white, male voice of authority. I thought that arts and culture were equally as important as politics and government, and that those issues mattered to everybody. We wanted to provide more depth of coverage and context rather than just airing a collection of news confetti."

Diverging from commercial radio format also meant that advertisers would not have a say in content. "National Public Radio and public broadcasting are the closest that Americans are going to get to journalism in the spirit of being a public trust," says Matthew Felling, Washington D.C.-based media director for the Center for Media and Public Affairs, a nonpartisan organization that studies American media. "The idea is that the journalism is done for the public by the public without preference for commercial interests."

Today, NPR employs more than 700 people worldwide in 21 domestic and 14 foreign bureaus — which is about the same size as The Baltimore Sun's staff. NPR provides 32 programs and counts 773 member stations across the country, according to Jenny Lawhorn, an NPR spokeswoman. About 30 million people listen to NPR at least once a week — an audience which has grown by half in the past decade.

And NPR just received a big gift--a $225 million bequest from Joan B. Kroc, third wife of McDonald's founder Ray Kroc. During a time when massive newspaper companies are cutting back staff due to poor advertising revenue — the Los Angeles Times just announced 160 job cuts and the closure of two suburban editions — NPR plans to add at least 50 employees over the next few years. While major news magazines such as U.S. News and World Report and Newsweek have stripped their foreign bureaus of reporters, NPR actually plans to establish new bureaus throughout the world.

"We provide something that listeners want and can't get anywhere else," Lawhorn says. "Our membership has increased because people have come to rely on what we're offering, and they understand that our services do cost a lot of money."

WHYY is a member station in the NPR network, which means that it pays about $8,000 in yearly dues, according to Lawhorn. As a member station, WHYY can carry Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Marketplace, Car Talk, Talk of the Nation, This American Life, Prairie Home Companion and Weekend Edition. In order for the station to air those shows, it must pay a carriage fee, or money paid to either NPR or to the host station. Lawhorn says the carriage fees are set for each station according to its size and budget. So far, WHYY has managed to continue broadcasting all these shows even when the economy turns sour.

Other stations haven't been as lucky. Louisville, Ky., public radio station WFPL doesn't even carry the national news magazine shows Here and Now or Day to Day.

One national show found in nearly every market is WHYY's Fresh Air, an hourlong program about the arts, books and popular culture. Host Terry Gross occupies a corner office in the WHYY building on Sixth and Arch streets. The hallway outside leads to a storage room and production desk — thousands of books and manuscripts are crammed into every available shelf space. Gross works out of a studio next to her office, where she sits at a chair with a black lumbar-support cushion. Typically, her guests are hundreds of miles away, so many of her interviews take place while she sits alone at her desk.

Siemering helped develop Gross and Fresh Air into a national sensation while he was WHYY's station manager for nine years in the 1980s. Known for gentle probing and a keen ability to listen, Gross' style has become the model for many broadcast journalists. Fresh Air is distributed by NPR and broadcast on more than 400 NPR stations and on the World Radio Network. The show reaches about 4 million people every week.

The fact that Fresh Air broadcasts nationally is a boon to WHYY for a few reasons. To start, other member stations now look to WHYY for more programming of the same caliber. Several locally produced shows, including A Chef's Table and You Bet Your Garden, are available in markets everywhere, from Spokane, Wash., to El Paso, Texas. It's a sign of pride for the station, but it also means potential lucrative sponsorship: Nationally syndicated shows bring national underwriters.

On the other hand, Fresh Air is the only WHYY program that brings in carriage fees to the station. Gluck says that WHYY has opted not to charge NPR member stations to air other locally produced shows. "We don't charge other stations because we're just trying to get our other programs on the air," Gluck says. "We'll ask them to try the show for a month or three months. We're not getting carriage fees back, but we do get national underwriters because they know the show is being broadcast to a wide national audience."

At WHYY, every show relies on a primary underwriter or group of underwriters. A company can offer a substantial amount of money — upward of $50,000 — and in exchange an announcer will say that "this show was underwritten by XYZ company" at the end of the broadcast. The Federal Communications Commission stipulates that, in the case of public broadcasting, the announcement is limited to 15 seconds and cannot advocate for a product or group. For example, you'll never hear a tag line for Crest toothpaste that says, "This show was underwritten by Crest, which gets your teeth 80 percent whiter than Colgate and tastes great."

More often, WHYY television and radio program directors will look at their budgets, their show's content and then seek a funding source. The money can come from a company: Microsoft, Independence Blue Cross and Clear Channel are some of WHYY's underwriters. Funding can also come from a grant or endowment — someone from the station will approach a foundation for a particular show before it's produced.

But a stagnant economy and the war in Iraq has led to less advertising. "If foundation funding suffers because of economic downturns, public broadcasters are hit hard," says Pete Booker, president and chief executive officer of WDEL, a Delaware-based commercial radio station. "Public broadcasting relies entirely upon the goodwill and largess of contributors. We have a similar situation in commercial radio and television. Advertising revenue is often a direct reflection of retail sales and consumer spending habits. If consumer spending lags, advertising lags. But on our side we don't have it so hard. Advertisers are actually getting to run a campaign on commercial radio and TV. They get more than just a line at the end of a broadcast."

The possibility that a show will be unable to secure an underwriter is always tangible — and this year, one of Philadelphia's well-known shows lost its funding. Been There/Done That, with host Marty Goldensohn, showcased listeners' mistakes in life and offered advice from professionals. According to Bruce Flamm, vice president and chief operating officer at WHYY, the show aired on 30 stations around the country and operated on a $200,000 annual budget. For the 2005 fiscal year, Been There/Done That didn't get an underwriter and will end in the fall, says Flamm.

"We can't just shift dedicated underwriting monies from one show to another, or just fund the entire thing through membership dues," Flamm says. "That's not the way things work."

The pressure to find money has, at times, led to ethical disputes over news coverage. NPR does not regulate individual stations or their coverage — in a sense, the organization is akin to the federal and state government system. There is no direct supervision — NPR has no authority to set content or disallow certain underwriters.

During recent election campaigns, WHYY aired shows underwritten by the Pennsylvania Economy League (PEL), a nonprofit public-policy research and development organization. In the past, the PEL has strongly lobbied for wage- and business-tax cuts, which were hotly debated issues during the 2003 mayoral election. On the night of the election, a special broadcast led by WHYY's Tracey Matisak and Marty Moss-Coane, who hosts Radio Times, included guests Chris Satullo, editorial page editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and David Thornburg, executive director of PEL.

Gluck says that although PEL did voice strong ideas about taxes before the election, efforts were made to balance all programming with conflicting viewpoints.

"That was completely a conflict of interest," says Alan Muller, executive director of Green Delaware, a grass-roots political and environmental organization. "How could they accept money from an organization that is biased to produce a nonpartisan show about politics, then have the leader of that organization give his opinion?"

And in the summer of 2001, the station made national headlines for signing a lucrative deal with a local media company — and indirectly with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) — to report on environmental issues. Former City Paper staff writer Gwen Shaffer was offered a job to cover the environment along with WHYY reporter Brad Linder. The Delaware Valley is rife with environmental degradation, and Shaffer endeavored to investigate stories like the city's recycling program and drilling for oil in the Allegheny National Forest.

The media company, GreenWorks, would fund Shaffer's position. Linder's pay would come from the WHYY budget. But the two would work in tandem for then-WHYY news director Bill Fantini and package their stories under a WHYY byline. In a November-December 2002 article in the trade magazine Columbia Journalism Review, Shaffer said she was told several times to report on environmental stories that offered a positive spin for the DEP. One story suggestion concerned Pittsburgh Voyager, a nonprofit educational river cruise organization. But it turned out that the DEP had given Pittsburgh Voyager grants totaling $92,960, and it was also the DEP funding GreenWorks. Indirectly, the DEP had funded Shaffer's position and WHYY's reporting on the environment.

Fantini and Gluck said at the time that there were ample firewalls established to protect the integrity of reporting. But shortly after Shaffer went public, Fantini resigned over the scandal. Shaffer was eventually fired for what GreenWorks called "poor voicing." WHYY ended its relationship with GreenWorks and the company closed its doors. Shaffer declined an interview for this story.

Today, some still wonder about the station's funding sources. "If you watch or listen to WHYY, they're not fully disclosing where the money's coming from," Muller says. "You'd think that they would learn from past mistakes. WHYY should be an independent voice, explaining and investigating important civic issues. It's impossible to do that when a station depends on money from the state legislature or groups or industries with certain ideas."

WHYY funding is very transparent — as long as you know where to look. Because it is an official nonprofit, WHYY must make its 990 tax forms available to the public.

A review of WHYY financial-disclosure forms over the past five years shows funding from various agencies: the state Department of Health and Human Services, National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities, and various Pennsylvania state agencies and colleges. The Philadelphia-based Pew Foundation funds a position for arts reporting at WHYY. In December 2003, arts reporter Joel Rose broadcast a story on NPR about the contested Barnes collection, which Pew offered to help move into Center City. During his story, which did not include disclosure about his job's funder, Rose interviewed Rebecca Rimel, CEO of Pew Charitable Trusts. And while the Daily News, City Paper, Philadelphia Inquirer and several arts organizations questioned the foundation's plans, WHYY did not.

WHYY has faced criticism that both the television and radio broadcasts are too soft on news. "When I was [at WHYY] we had 91 Report [a now defunct news show] from 6:30 to 7 p.m. with a staff of seven reporters who had different beats," Siemering says. "There has been criticism that WHYY has cut back on hard news and local reporting. In the past, the community truly informed our decisions, our investigating, our documentaries and our oral histories. It was important to be connected as much as possible to the community."

Gluck acknowledges that the GreenWorks project was an embarrassment for WHYY, but he scoffs at the suggestion that the station isn't serving its purpose. "We adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics," Gluck says. "We use the NPR standard as our standard. I think that we are doing an exceptional job of covering local news with context and depth. We have firewalls up, so there is never an instance where an underwriter or someone from a grant would have any say in editorial content. That absolutely does not happen."

WHYY operates on a total budget of roughly $16 million annually, which is about the same amount that CNN spent on the first day of its Iraq war coverage. According to financial records, about 88 percent of the station's funding comes from the listening public through donations and membership fees. If that percentage were to fall below 66 percent, that is, if grants or underwriters contributed more than a third of WHYY's income, the station would no longer be considered a "public" broadcaster.

Ironically, few Philadelphians have become members of WHYY compared with other stations. According to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a quasi-government body charged with monitoring and funding public stations, Philadelphia ranks among the lowest member-supported stations in terms of revenue. Because anyone can listen to public radio without paying for it, CPB looks at the total amount generated by membership dues verses the number of estimated listeners. WHA-AM in Madison, Wis., has one of the highest membership and individual donation rates in the country: an average of $22 per listener. WGBH-FM in Boston, Mass. also receives strong community support: $13.75 per listener. So does WBEZ-FM in Chicago: $10 per listener.

But Philadelphia receives only $5 on average. Membership dues are typically collected during WHYY's three yearly pledge drives. Both the television and radio stations participate in seven to 10 days of what some listeners call a "begathon." Announcers will interrupt regular programming to say that, without individual contributions, a certain show may not continue. For all their effort, WHYY raised $331,000 during the May 2004 drive and about $1.5 million in memberships alone over the last fiscal year. Gluck says that WHYY met its goals for the pledge drive. Even so, the station is still asking for money — during morning broadcasts, an announcer says that, to meet WHYY's end of the year fiscal needs, everyone who can should contribute. They've also launched an online auction and online store, which sells everything from coffee mugs to copies of old programs about Jewish life in the Delaware Valley.

"Philadelphia's listener membership is really low," Siemering says. "At the beginning of NPR, we were reaching a wide, diverse audience of people who were curious about the world regardless of their income or education levels. I'm sure there are other factors, but to a large extent, the level of education seems to correlate with the number of paid members. That's not to say that Philadelphia is undereducated, but other cities are very educated so they have higher membership rates."

Some listeners say that WHYY is important to them but that they refuse to become members. During a recent afternoon in Rittenhouse Square, Robert Wods was reading a paperback and explained why he listens to WHYY but will not give the station money. "The pledge drives are so annoying, I just turn off the radio for a week," says Wods, a Philadelphia-based accountant. "Those whiny voices, that whimpering about needing so much money, it grates on me. Honestly, if they would just pop on once a day or something and said, "Give us money or we'll start annoying you with those obnoxious pledge drives,' it'd be better, and I bet more people would give."

At the same time, people do pay significant attention to WHYY. Toward the end of the summer, the station plans to launch several parties to celebrate its 50th anniversary — many of which will be members-only, paid events. And the station is already talking about the new directions it will take over the next few decades.

To help generate revenue, WHYY leases out its studios to other commercial media outlets such as CNN and CNBC. If there's a local story with national significance, network reporters will use a studio to interview Philadelphia sources. WHYY has also invested in satellite equipment that networks can use to broadcast their signal.

And 50 years after it began, WHYY continues to support educational programming. The station has developed online and televised courses with local colleges, which pay for the service. WHYY is also developing more feature-length documentaries that involve radio, television and the Internet combined. The station recently secured a grant from the state to add on a wing to its building, which will provide more studio and office space, and will continue to expand its town-hall-style broadcasts during election time — right in the studio.

"I think we have been considered a model for other stations in terms of what we produce nationally," says Nessa Forman, vice president for corporate communications at WHYY. "We're looking more to incorporating radio, television and the Internet into everything that we do and that may become the next model. The citizens in this community should be proud because many people may never have been to the city, but they know WHYY. That makes me feel good."

Whatever direction the station takes, it will depend on public support. And while all Philadelphians may not like public broadcasting, WHYY remains part of the city's public trust.