NPR's radio audience is smaller. All radio listenership is shrinking .
By Curt_Anderson April 12, 2024 5:04 pm Category: Fact Check (0.0 from 0 votes)
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Between 2009 and 2022 of Americans ages 12 and older who listen to terrestrial (AM/FM) radio in a given week has dropped from 92% to 82%. Radio is a technology that's over one hundred years old. It's remarkable that it's still around.
Uri Berliner is making an unsupported correlation. He sees statistics showing that NPR's lost listeners and then concludes it's because there are not Republican NRP reporters. How does he explain the general decline in radio listenership?
I am fairly certain the NPR's audience skews more educated and more affluent than the American public generally. That makes NPR listeners more likely to listen to NPR online, and to NRP podcasts rather than NPR over the air.
Compared to 2009 more people have more alternatives to radio. For example, new cars now are equipped with Sirius XM. NPR programs are carried on Sirius XM but I don't know that they are counted in listenership totals.
Why should broadcast (and all other) journalists reflect their audience as Uri Berliner posits? Journalists should be smarter than and inform their audience.
In 1954 Edward R Murrow heroically rebuked Sen. Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism. Murrow was countering the then public perception and he changed that perception. That was a good thing. For NPR journalist or anybody else to label Trump's claims of a rigged election as false---no matter that many Americans believe it---is a good thing.
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