Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Who Rules NPR?

If you weren't one of the 10,000 folk music fans who could afford the ticket price for the 50th anniversary Newport Folk Festival event, you can still listen to the kind of music that was performed there by checking out the National Public Radio [NPR] website at the following link at:

http://www.npr.org/music/newportfolk/index2.html

Ironically, NPR's board of directors apparently includes some of the same corporate folks who have been profiting in recent years from the Pentagon's endless war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Wall Street banking industry's financially reckless business practices which helped drive the global economy into a world-wide depression during the last year. NPR Chairman of the Board Howard Stevenson, for example, is also a director of the Camp Dresser & McKee firm that was given some lucrative Pentagon Iraq and Afghanistan war contracts a few years ago, according to the Center for Public Integrity's website.

Other profit-oriented corporations to which members of NPR's board of directors have been affiliated with in recent years include the Baupost LLC investment company, Landmark Communications, Sheffield Steel, The Northern Trust Company/Northern Trust Global Investment, Lincoln International, JP Morgan Securities, the DailyMc In. media firm, AOL Latin America, the Cisneros Group media companies, First Energy Corporation of Akron, the Key Corp and NYTimes.Com.

So don't expect NPR to start allowing many of its NPR affiliated stations to begin airing too many anti-war and anti-corporate protest folk songs on a daily basis (especially all the anti-war and anti-corporate protest folk songs written by folk musicians since 1970), even though we're all still stuck in the current 21st-century historical era of "permanent war abroad and global economic depression" under the current undemocratic political set-up of Big Corporate Media Monopolization of the U.S. radio airwaves.