New York

Last month, New York's public-radio station, WNYC, stabbed classical music right in the heart. Or that's what many people think.
What happened, more precisely, was that WNYC cut out 25 hours each week of classical-music broadcasts -- nearly its entire daytime classical-music schedule on weekdays -- and replaced it with news and talk.
Not that this took the station out of the classical business. It kept its nighttime classical-music broadcasts, and most importantly, still features contemporary classical music, which hardly anyone else in radio is willing to do. And even as it made the cuts, it started a new live classical show, which airs for an hour every weekday afternoon, and in fact costs more than all the broadcasts that were cut, because live music is more expensive than playing CDs.

But people are upset, because classical music has been vanishing from radio all over the country. When news leaked of the impending cuts, David Finckel, the cellist of the very fine Emerson String Quartet, and his wife, the pianist Wu Han, circulated a petition that was signed by many top musicians -- among them Itzhak Perlman and Wynton Marsalis -- along with nonmusic celebrities and even a couple of Nobel Prize-winners. An angry Web site, www.savewnyc.org, sprang up, many pages deep and with a splash of fancy graphics: "No music? No money!" it roared, urging listeners not to contribute during WNYC's recent fund-raising campaign, but instead to flood the phones with protests. And at an April 10 meeting of WNYC's Community Advisory Board -- a body with a voice, but no real power -- I could taste the anger that lay behind all this. "This is our FM station!" a woman cried, as if it had been stolen from her. Who, others wondered, will listen to classical music in the future, if no one is exposed to it in the present?

The problem WNYC faces, though, is precisely that not enough people are currently listening. "What we've learned over the past four or five years," says Laura Walker, the station's president, "is that WNYC serves two distinct audiences. Our news audience has increased significantly, but our music audience has been flat or decreased." In any given week, she says, just over a million listeners tune into WNYC, but only 12% of them do so for its music. Worse yet, those people -- vocal as they are -- don't even carry their financial weight; they give less money, in proportion to their numbers, than the news listeners do.
These statistics aren't controversial. They come in part from Arbitron, radio's version of Nielsen's ratings, and are supplemented by special studies and anecdotal sources, such as phone conversations with donors during fund drives. Two weeks ago, WNYC told me that it had surveyed 600 people, 400 of them listeners, 200 demographically similar to listeners. These people ranked classical music last, among 15 things WNYC might offer -- and dramatically last, because they disliked classical-music broadcasts more strongly than they liked the news-related choices that they rated at the top.

So really, now -- whose station is it? Why don't news listeners have the same rights as people who listen to WNYC for classical music? They're not much more a mass-market audience than music listeners are. They turn to public stations because they can't find the news programs they want on commercial radio. Why should they be given less than music listeners, whom they far outnumber?
The protesters object that WNYC now plays classical music mainly in the evenings -- and, even worse, in the middle of the night -- when fewer people listen. But that's because the larger daytime audience quite literally tuned away. Naively (or so it seems to me), the protesters say this shouldn't matter, because public radio exists to offer things that aren't popular. But what does that mean? Should it broadcast programs all day long about asparagus? Why should classical music have special privileges? Why don't news shows qualify as noncommercial enough to fulfill the mission?

But here, I think, we get to what makes the protesters so angry. They argue that too many of the talk programs, created to appeal to listeners, aren't really good or serious, and that by trying to get more people listening, the station's management reveals itself as greedy, or even power-mad. In one way, they have a point. Some of the newer shows are clearly lifestyle stuff, not as serious as Beethoven. They reflect a culture shift, the same one that years ago brought Tina Brown to the The New Yorker magazine, and made it shallower and trendier. But the culture really has been changing, and WNYC has hardly any choice unless it wants to downsize. To survive as any kind of even mildly large-scale operation, it has to play in the corporate arena, just as museums do, or orchestras or opera companies.
Understandably, that's hard for the protesters to accept. But their complaints about WNYC -- which also include the style of the station's management -- are in a way unfair, and in the end irrelevant. They're unfair because the station still devotes one-third of all its broadcast hours to classical music and says it will address one of the trickiest problems classical music faces, which is how to attract a new audience. Studies show, the station says, that its news listeners do like classical music. They just don't like to hear it on the radio, and, like many people the classical-music world would like to reach, they also don't seek out classical concerts or classical CDs. Can their interest be awakened? WNYC thinks it can help, by running news items -- features, interviews, evocative vignettes -- about classical music, and especially about classical events it plans to broadcast live.

Will that drive these listeners to take a greater interest? Nobody knows. But one classical figure who signed the petition, the composer John Corigliano, told me that he's now willing to give WNYC a chance. In part, he says, that's because the problems classical music faces are much deeper than WNYC.
And certainly he's right. What's happening at WNYC is just a symptom, and so the real question the protesters should address is how to make classical music more popular, so WNYC will have to broadcast more of it.
To its credit, the Community Advisory Board held a discussion of just that subject at the meeting I attended. Two speakers -- Bill McLaughlin, the host of a much-loved classical-music radio show, "St. Paul Sunday," and Richard Bell, the national executive director of young audiences, which brings classical music to younger people -- made a crucial point. Both warned protesters not to speak as if they somehow were entitled to hear classical music on the air. In Mr. Bell's words, "We paint ourselves into a corner that way."
And we're in trouble, I'd add, if we start, as even Mr. Finckel and Ms. Wu's petition did, from the assumption that classical music deserves a special place, that it's not just good to have around, but necessary. Not everyone agrees with us -- and that's the problem we'd better learn how to address.

Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2002