THE PUBLIC RADIO WARS : ONE’S MEAT IS ANOTHER’S QUICHE

Comparing National Public Radio to American Public Radio is not the same as comparing apples to oranges, according to former NPR President Frank Mankiewicz.

“It’s like comparing apples to quiche,” he said.

Mankiewicz, now an executive with Washington-based Gray public relations, is publicly far more contemptuous of APR nowadays than he was as NPR president. To Mankiewicz, NPR continues to serve up meat-and-potatoes reporting and analysis to Middle America while APR serves white wine and meringue to the nouveau riche.

The audiences for each network account for their dissimilarity, according to Mankiewicz:

--From its beginning 15 years ago, NPR was designed to be a general-interest network, serving the broadest possible constituency. Its primary funding comes from the federal government. And, according to its original mandate, NPR programming--particularly in news and information--must attempt to reach everyone.

As a result, NPR is still generally recognized as a news service first and foremost, even though it continues to produce some musical and dramatic programs.

--From its inception, APR was created to serve the needs of its member stations, not public radio’s larger audience. In 1982, public stations in New York, San Francisco, St. Paul, Los Angeles and Cincinnati formed American Public Radio Associates Inc. Their reason: to create a national outlet for distribution of each station’s live-performance broadcasts previously aired only to local audiences.

It was through APR that such Southern California institutions as the Sequoia String Quartet and the Los Angeles Philharmonic found national audiences.

Though they don’t embrace all of Mankiewicz’s unvarnished opinions, many of his former public radio cohorts who prefer quiet diplomacy to open disdain say privately that the judgments of the man who shaped public radio throughout the past decade are right on target.

For their part, NPR News Director Robert Siegel and NPR President Douglas Bennet (who replaced Mankiewicz two years ago) hold out hope that NPR will continue to offer classical, jazz and dramatic programming in the coming years, even though the budget has been repeatedly slashed.

Last year, the “NPR Plus” classical music format was lopped from the tightening budget. This year, only a last-minute lobbying effort by member stations saved the remaining musical programs as well as the weekend edition of “All Things Considered” from the accounting ax.

But NPR news seems as sound, witty and well produced as always.

“NPR has always been an information service and it seems better than ever,” Mankiewicz told The Times in a recent interview.

American Public Radio, which has grown to serve more than 300 affiliates nationwide, has offered very little news. According to Mankiewicz, it is an “elitist” syndication service bent on distributing obscure symphony music to classical stations like KUSC and passing itself off as a radio network.

“APR was the marketing arm of Minnesota Public Radio when I left, and that’s what it still is,” he said.

The former Robert Kennedy press secretary was unceremoniously ousted from the helm of NPR two years ago, after the network very nearly went bankrupt. He makes no excuses for the near debacle, explaining only that he attempted to make NPR financially independent of the federal government and only partly succeeded.

He points to a national paging system in which NPR is a partner as an example of his success. The system has yet to yield much revenue to the network, but Mankiewicz emphasizes that it could eventually serve as an example of how NPR can use technology to totally free itself from federal dependence.

It is just such pie-in-the-sky thinking that mired NPR in debt in the first place, say critics such as Wally Smith and many other public radio station officials. Mankiewicz chooses to answer them this way: “When I started, 95% of NPR’s budget came from the federal government. When I left, 50% of the budget came from the feds.”

He simply misjudged how long financial independence would take, he explains. But he has never lost his love for NPR nor his contempt for APR which, he says, basically offers only one widely heard program.

“Let’s face it: American Public Radio is basically ‘A Prairie Home Companion,’ which is a great little weekly program for yuppie listeners who live in the suburbs, enjoy country music and refuse to admit it. It’s safe to listen to, though, because it mocks the values of those who create it.”

The folk and country program is a tongue-in-cheek “Grand Ol’ Opry” that is made fashionable for college crowds and hip young professionals because of the droll spiels of its creator, sometime New Yorker writer Garrison Keillor, according to Mankiewicz.

“If Garrison Keillor ever developed a really bad case of laryngitis, APR would be off the air and out of business in a week,” Mankiewicz said.

In the end, Mankiewicz concedes that APR has taken the lead in performance programming while NPR retains its role as a purveyor of news.

But, beginning this month, all of that could change.

APR’s challenge to NPR’s supremacy as a news and information network begins in earnest with the daily broadcast of “MonitoRadio,” a daily half-hour news magazine not unlike “All Things Considered.”

The program, which has been airing for three weeks now at 5:30 p.m. on KUSC, uses the same kind of headline service at the top of the hour that “All Things Considered” does. After a summary of the major stories of the day, the format calls for offbeat features and mini-documentaries, focusing on one or more issues in the news.

APR President Bill Kling said many stations will use it as a “wraparound” for the three-hour daily block of “All Things Considered” programming. Currently, stations that carry all of “All Things Considered” get virtually the same 90-minute Susan Stamberg-Noah Adams news magazine repeated twice.

NPR listeners on the road for more than an hour between 4 and 7 p.m. daily, for example, find themselves experiencing deja vu as the cycle repeats every hour, on the hour, each weekday afternoon.

With “MonitoRadio,” APR affiliates will have a 30-minute daily alternative.

For its part, NPR is escalating the radio wars in November, when it premieres its weekend version of “Morning Edition.” “Weekend Edition,” hosted by Scott Simon, will be heavy on reviews and analysis rather than breaking news. Among contributors already signed up for the Saturday-morning program (which will air locally over KCRW-FM, KLON-FM, KCSN-FM and KPCC-FM) will be former CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr and current “CBS Morning News” reporter Robert Krulwich.

“MonitoRadio” began as an hourlong weekend newsmagazine a year ago when it was first offered over APR.

Mankiewicz holds to his contention that quiche will never compete with meat and potatoes, despite the success of “MonitoRadio.”

“MonitoRadio” is produced by the Christian Science Monitor, which takes a serious, analytical approach to the news. It’s like reading a very good, scholarly magazine--like reading the Economist as opposed to Newsweek.

“Now, if APR can find 5 million people who want to listen to the Christian Science Monitor a half-hour a day five days a week, I say, God bless them.”

The only other regular news magazine APR has offered its affiliates during the past year was “Business Times”--a kind of Business Week of the air with an appeal to the kind of specialized radio audience that might rush home to catch “Wall $treet Week” on PBS each Friday evening.

“When ‘Business Times’ premiered last year, the business world and listeners nationwide applauded public radio’s only up-to-the-minute business news program,” reads a news release that American Public Radio distributed to its affiliates last spring. “In answer to stations’ requests that a special business-news segment be offered for use during morning programs, and true to their commitment to news and public affairs, American Public Radio announced that they (sic) will begin distribution of a nine-minute ‘Business Times’ edition this summer.”

Last month, on Friday the 13th, two weeks before the end of summer, the producers of “Business Times” abruptly pulled the plug on the show because its underwriters did not think it had a wide enough audience.