Terry Green Blogs About KUSP

On his way to becoming one of public radio’s most talked about producers, Jesse Thorn brought his weekly program to KUSP. Admittedly, not all that many people talk about public radio producers, but anyway…

Bullseye, previously known as The Sound of Young America, arrived at KUSP in 2006, and it’s still here — Sunday nights at 8:00. It had started across town at KZSC and, after a short gestation period here, moved into national distribution via PRI, Public Radio International.

At the time Jesse’s show hit KUSP it already had a large following as a podcast — iTunes regularly featured it as one of their top picks. Jesse methodically built the audience for his show and introduced more podcasts about people and things that are awesome.

As part of “Transom,” a web site devoted to the making of radio (particularly public radio), Jesse has revealed his “12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success.” It’s a great insight into how independent media works (or doesn’t work) — and it does describe some of the qualities that have enabled Jesse to accomplish things in his profession in ways almost none of his contemporaries have.

And it’s a fun read.

Today the White House released the President’s budget proposal for the fiscal year that starts on October 1, 2012.

The budget keeps the annual appropriation to support public radio and television (through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting) at $445 million, which is the same amount as was passed into law for the fiscal year we are in now.

Public broadcasting supporters are generally very happy to see an initial proposal that does not cut federal funding to public broadcasting below present levels. That said, the appropriations process is very long and sometimes convoluted, so it will take some time to see how this all turns out.

Federal funding is only one of the tax-based parts of public broadcasting’s economy. Historically, many states (though not California) have also budgeted support for their local stations — though that support has eroded greatly in the past two years. This story in Current, a trade publication for public media, reports on the latest developments.

On Monday 1/30/2012 Marketplace ran an installment of their series, “My Life Is True.” The series presents personal narratives of people struggling to make things work in today’s economy. The story was about Leo Webb, who told about being an Iraq war veteran and coming home with little in the way of marketable job skills.

Listeners wrote and called in expressing their skepticism about the commentary. On Wednesday Marketplace announced that the facts in the story could not be verified, and concluded that it probably had been fabricated. The web version of the story has been pulled off their site and they’ve issued apologies to the listeners, and to us.

We regret it any time a KUSP producing partner or contributor makes this kind of error — but we’re happy that Marketplace followed up when listeners contacted them questioning the veracity of the commentary, and took action based on what they found (or in this case, didn’t find).

Accountability does matter.