NPR Radio Ratings Collapse As Pandemic Ends Listeners' Commutes

NPR ^ | July 15, 2020 | David Folkenflik

[CheshireTheCat]

Broadcast ratings for nearly all of NPR's radio shows took a steep dive in major markets this spring, as the coronavirus pandemic kept many Americans from commuting to work and school. The network's shows lost roughly a quarter of their audience between the second quarter of 2019 and the same months in 2020.

People who listened to NPR shows on the radio at home before the pandemic by and large still do. But many of those who listened on their commute have not rejoined from home. And that threatens to alter the terrain for NPR for years to come, said Lori Kaplan, the network's senior director of audience insights.

"We anticipated these changes," Kaplan said. "This kind of change was going to take place over the next decade. But the pandemic has shown us what our future is now."

Commercial radio is experiencing, if anything, worse declines. But audience research commissioned by Kaplan indicates that NPR's audience is disproportionately made up of professionals who are able to work from home and who are interested in doing so even after the pandemic subsides....

[puppypusher]

I guess NPR had No or very few listeners from the start. What do they have to speak about anyway?

I can listen to any Liberal Network and get the same tripe without having to hear or see my tax dollars going into the toilet.

[Beowulf9]

Maybe off NPR but NPR’s music is annoying. Pretentious pseudo-intellectual crap.

[DeFault User]

Even Car Talk started to go downhill the last few years when Click and Clack couldn’t insult the Big Three due to threat of lawsuits.

But I still got a kick out of the puzzlers and the assistants: Otaka Showa, Pickup N. Droofov and Toolouse Tosteer.

[DeFault User]

make that Touloose Totrack.

[Candor7]

TAN NPR, tank! This commie retard intelligentsia will one day face the firing squads of the proletariat Comintern. OMDB!

[DivineMomentsOfTruth]

Yep.. I don’t listen to NPR, so I don’t know what music they play, but in general the bands I like tend to be Liberals.

[Beowulf9]

Yes. Disappointing isn’t it. Dang, the artworld not much different.

[MV=PY]

"National PINKO Radio is so far left I am usually pissed off after just 2 minutes listening immediately flip the station."

Agreed.

They are so pretentious it's nauseating.

[The Westerner]

I tuned in this week during a short drive. On the one story covered during that 5 minute segment, just about every fact about the case was backwards which helps me understand the stray comments I've heard from liberal friends and family. There's no point discussing with them if they've only heard the NPR drive time fiction. And like our adolescent selves during the Free Speech Movement, they sneer at those the left skewers. Substitute Tricky Dick for Orange Bad Man, the "thinking" is based on disinformation and lies.