Public extortion

I mentioned a while ago that, KQED-TV, the local PBS station has pledge breaks on average about every six to 12 weeks. Their sister radio station has fewer fundraising drives, but they engage in a practice that I find really unsettling.

Every time—every time—they have a fund drive, they run over their stated time limit. By that I mean that they say they’re going to end on Day X, but if they haven’t reached their dollar goal by then, they just keep on rollin’ until they do. It’s like demanding money with menaces: pledge, sucker, or you’re never—and we mean never—going to hear Click and Clack again.

Every time (meaning, every drive I’ve listened to since moving to the Bay Area two years ago), they swear that “we end at XX”, but it goes beyond that date/time.

I felt a sense of dread this past week when “Friday is the last day of the drive” changed to “Friday is the last weekday of the drive.” And sure enough…yesterday they announced they’re $200K short of their goal (although they never tell you what the actual total goal is), And they’re still on the beg.

(I give them credit for not doing this every five weeks, the way KQED-TV does; but still.)

Thing is, whenever  they do this—keep on rousting us for money—I can’t help but think of the Winterhilfe campaigns of Nazi Germany. (When someone in a Hitlerjugend or SS uniform is standing there, rattling his box, it’s hard to slither past without dropping a coin in.) I have this image of Michelle Hennigan and her jolly cohort just going on forever until everyone listening has emptied his pockets into their tins.

This drive appears to be rogue: KQED alone, not every other NPR station in the country. (I’ve noticed that they all seem to conspire to run their campaigns simultaneously and to have breaks in the same time slot so you can’t escape by punching up another NPR station.) They’ve also cleverly scheduled their breaks at different slots in the hour, so you don’t know when they’re going to hijack you. And it’s 33% of the air time, so you miss 20 minutes out of the hour of nationally-produced content.

I know I shouldn’t crab—I support NPR and I support KQED. I just don’t like them turning to time extortion, and then sounding surprised and regretful when they do it. Every. Single. Time.