More Pledges! KLOVE!

I'm probably going to get a lot of flack on this.. but here goes.
NOTE.. if you dont want to read all of it... read the second half... the first half is an overview of klove and my snide remarks along with it..

KLOVE... our favorite, family friendly, Christian music radio station... established in 1982 in California, it soon launched into 440 stations across the U.S. (many thanks to wikipedia for the source)

However, in 2007, Mike Novak (aka, Mr. Krabs from Spongebob) took over as CEO of KLOVE... and from then on, it seems that every other season there seems to an abomination to mankind that is known as the pledge drive. (please don't quote me on this... KLOVE may have had pledge drives before 2007, but I vaguely remember first hearing about pledge drives around 07 or 08 while i was in college...)

the reason KLOVE has a pledge drive is because it is a listener supported radio station.. meaning that money that you donate help pays the bills and it also keeps advertisements off the air as icing on the cake...
While asking for money to help support a ministry of any sort is okay in my books.. Novak has turned this into a complete joke... (Novak might not be the one with the ideas.. but he is the responsible for going through with them)... Instead of doing this in a humble, quaint way... it's turned into a full blown circus... the DJs are acting (terribly) excited about getting to said goal with the sound effects of telephones going off in the background... They all sound stressed, chaotic, etc. and when they finally get a pledge from a sucker supporter, they act like Jesus just came back and Hallelujah He has risen indeed and all that sort..

Then at the end of the week, when the pledge drive is over and they (most likely) missed their goal (i think they actually hit it once or twice in the past).. Scrooge McDuck aka Mike Novak comes on every so often as the "commercial" and announces that they didn't meet the goal and what their plans are going forward... all this is in a disappointed tone with a hint of condescending... in other words... it sounds like he's saying to all the listeners "Hey all of you... you all screwed up" .. and to the chumps people that donated "why didn't you give more? you all are a bunch of screw ups as well"

But these examples aren't even what makes my skin crawl.. Here are 3 points on why the pledge drive is an utter joke

1) Literally begging for money - As I said before, asking for money for a ministry isn't bad... however, how they do it is in bad form... There's a difference between asking and begging; begging is asking over and over again with a sense of desperation while asking is once with a sense of wonder... it is asking if i hear it once in a while... it's begging when i get in my car and they're asking, i get out, get back in after a class and they're asking, get out and go to work, get in and they're asking, get back from bible study when it's nearly midnight and they're asking..

I'm literally writing this at 1:52 am and turned klove on and within 5 seconds i hear the word "pledge drive" ... i mean.. seriously.. are they hoping that somewhere, there's a midnight snacker that's going to his fridge in his underpants and go "huh.. im going to pledge to klove right now"

and here's the biggest kicker .. what happens if a lost person suddenly turns on klove (since that's what they're "biggest goal" seems to be).. they hear christians asking for money.. heyyy... that's a stereotype there... christians are after your money... /lost witness
seriously... chill out with saying pledge drive a gazillion times a day klove...

2) Twisting of Scripture ...this is seriously not a-okay with me... especially if they're doing it for their personal gain of trying to encourage givers...  I don't know if they do it now since I don't listen to them while they're doing their pledge drive.. not cool at all..

3) Song usage ..."After this next song, whoever pledges will win a CD pack" ... after this next song? You mean the song that is a prayer/story of a broken person/a cry out to Jesus... that song? KLOVE.. you're basically making a song that Steve Curtis Chapman wrote after his daughter died into a stopwatch to try to encourage someone to quickly donate money... anyone else see a problem with this??

well how would you propose to fix it then Shane? Well... I'm no expert in these type of things at all.. but I would suggest that you get rid of this whole "listener supported" junk and let some advertisements in... there are plenty of sponsors out there that would give money for some sort of airtime.. churches, Christian speakers... go for it... I don't know about you but when I hear "listener supportive" I don't go oooohhhh ahhhhhh..... I go "k" ... really it's not impressive to me at all and I don't get the hype of it all..

that's all folks