Wednesday, February 06, 2013

I've Become Everything I Hate

Pictured: Me
I've written before about how I'm ambivalent about giving money to public radio (tl;dr: they say they're ad free, but they have ads all the time, just read by the DJs rather than voice actors). But on the other hand, I've listened to The Current fairly regularly for the better part of 8 years now, and never once contributed anything (other than my ears for the ads they read on air, which is technically paying for it, since that's the entire purpose of radio ads).

Mostly I resolved the situation by remembering I was a broke grad student, and as much as I like the Current, they have plenty of money and I had basically none. So it made the decision easier.

But now that I'm gone away from the Twin Cities, I've been spending a lot of time listening online, both because all the radio stations here suck immensely, and because I'm home sick.

So I became a public radio supporter for the first time in my life. I get a neat-o t-shirt for my troubles (hey! this shirt only costs $120!), and the warm feeling of the self-satisfied liberal...

1 comment:

Andrea said...

lol! I feel the same way! I gave them $5 once, just so I could possibly get into their birthday party concert at first ave like three years ago, and I ended up being at work when the tickets went on sale and totally missed it. Then MPR spent well over $5 over the next year trying to get me to give them more money with mailings and phone calls (essentailly I caused them to spend more money on me than I gave them!). It was so annoying, I vowed to never become a memeber again. But I may someday. :)