In Pittsburgh the NPR station is WDUQ, located on Duquesne University’s campus, a Catholic school. That had never been an issue until this week, when the university forced the station to drop underwritting from Planned Parenthood over the religious issues surrounding abortion. The ad made no reference to abortion, but rather discussed it’s “support for “DUQ” and it’s services including lessons on abstinence, teaching teens to make good choices, health-care services to men and cancer screenings. There are significant censorship issues here. This could be the first step in the Church exerting more influence over what gets covered by the station. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial today does a good job putting it into context:
In the mind of Pittsburghers, the NPR segments carried by WDUQ have become the gold standard, one of the sources of record for objective, accurate world and national news. The station also has its own reliable staff for local news-gathering. For the Catholic Church in the form of Duquesne University to intervene in that relationship, by choosing which mainstream groups may or may not contribute financial support, is to damage the radio station’s connection to its listeners. Today it’s no support or messages from Planned Parenthood; tomorrow it may be no reporting on pedophile priests.
That Duquesne’s intervention came during one of WDUQ’s fund drives made it worse. The station is asking for money to sustain its NPR programming and other features, but the check gets written to WDUQ-FM. Lots of people in this area are ready to finance NPR programming, but it’s hard to imagine that many of them want to underwrite local Catholic radio.
I know my folks would be extremely unlikely to underwrite local Catholic radio and they have given to the station in the past. The station must know the demographics of its listenership is significantly liberal and thus pro-choice. They are taking an significant risk of blowback from their listeners. Indeed the P-G suggests that it might make sense to explore another station in Pittsburgh taking over the NPR mantle, if Duquesne does not reverse itself.
There are ways out of this dilemma. One of them is for Duquesne University to lift its ban on WDUQ’s accepting support from Planned Parenthood. If its leadership feels the need to explain, it could say that it removed its objection in the spirit of a university’s fundamental attachment to freedom of thought and expression, in spite of its disagreement with Planned Parenthood positions.
A second alternative is for another Pittsburgh radio station to vie for the NPR affiliation and replace Duquesne as its primary home. That would be a loss for the university, but what’s important is that the people of southwestern Pennsylvania continue to have access to the news, free of religious constraint.
As someone who was a daily listener of WDUQ for 18 years, I wholeheartedly agree.
